You’re Free to Speak Until A Cop Says You’re Not

Fri 09/28/07 at 10:09 am

Jim Scarantino writes a moving account of his personal experience with the heavy-handed, repressive assault of APD on free-speaking citizens opposed to a senseless, unnecessary war. A war which at least a few of those same cops must agree now was a mistake. The spirit of the nation — thirsty for blood and brooking no dissent — was alive and on horseback just a few weeks ago. If we’re fighting ourselves on the streets of America, what exactly did fighting “them over there” accomplish? mjh

Note: Photos are from 2003 issues of the Alibi.

alibi . september 27 - october 3, 2007

The Real Side: Déjà Vu Not All Over Again City Hall tackles police misconduct against peace protesters By Jim Scarantino

I’d come from work, still dressed in a business suit. I didn’t know then that undercover police officers had slipped in among us. But I did sense trouble coming when suddenly the cars disappeared. To prevent motorists from reading our signs, police blocked traffic on Central. Down the street I saw troops of police assembling and what looked like a SWAT van. I decided it was time to go. I headed for my car with sign in hand.

I didn’t get very far before a young police officer stepped across my path and pointed a shotgun in my face. He was terrified and shaking. I’ve always wondered what had been planted in his brain to make him view a man in a suit displaying a plea for peace sign as a threat justifying leveling his gun at my head.

After what seemed a very long time, the officer let me go. When I got home, television news was showing children inside the Frontier washing tear gas from their eyes. Out in the street police in riot gear waded into the group of people who didn’t want Americans dying in Iraq. It didn’t look like my Albuquerque. It didn’t look like America out there on Central that night.

When I learned how this month Albuquerque police harassed and intimidated peace protestors outside Kirtland Air Force Base, I thought, “Here we go again.” Mounted officers in battle gear forced their way through fragile women leaning on walkers, mothers with strollers, even people in wheelchairs. An officer ticketed only cars with pro-peace bumper stickers. Another officer drove down Gibson shouting over his speaker “Go Bush!” Police hurled insults at the group. A protester was handcuffed and locked in a patrol car, windows closed, in full sun, for more than an hour. His offense, committed only after he had been seized, seems to be kicking out a window so he could breathe.

Jeanne Pahls of Stop the War Machine, a sponsor of the event, says the organization has conducted more than 30 other protests since 2002 without a single act of violence or criminal conduct by protesters. So why the show of force by APD against grandmothers, children and the disabled?

Once again, it didn’t look like America on the streets of Albuquerque.

- - - - -

mjh’s Weblog Entry - 03/25/2003: “Operation Slackened-jaw”
Regarding the encounter between police and demonstrators that turned violent on Thursday, 3/20/03, city councilor Sally Mayer said, “I think we need to thank the police for behaving as well as they did.”

See also mjh’s Weblog Entry - 03/29/2003: “alibi on APD” for more links on this topic.


Hear! Hear!

Thu 09/27/07 at 9:23 am

ABQjournal Opinion: Letters to the Editor

Look Back to 2002 For Vile Advertising

    EXCUSE ME all you politicians objecting to the Gen. David Petraeus ad. Did any of you object to one of the most vile ads of all time— Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, a triple amputee Vietnam veteran, whose opponent in a 2002 campaign ad placed his photo between images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein?

    PEG BRINEY
    Roswell
   
It’s Not Unpatriotic To Oppose the War

    WHILE I personally don’t agree with the “betray us” ad, I find it laughable that the Republicans are so outraged and injured by it. This is the exact same tactic that was used to smear one of their own in 2000, Sen. John McCain— a Vietnam POW— and also Sen. John Kerry in 2004— both decorated veterans!

    Calling into question the patriotism of good, decent, patriotic Americans simply because they want to end the slaughter of our young men and women is reprehensible. Yet the Republicans continue to self-righteously accuse anyone who does not blindly and mindlessly agree with this president’s hysteria of being unpatriotic. I think their outrage comes more from the fact that this extreme left organization has taken a page straight from the Republican National Committee’s play book of dirty politics and used it brilliantly. Getting a taste of their own bitter medicine has left Republicans reeling. They don’t like it, but since they perfected the art, perhaps they should get used to it. …

    But with organizations like MoveOn.org now willing to mix-it-up with them, this election cycle promises to leave no mud pie left unthrown.

    YVONNE HAWPE
    Albuquerque


This Week’s WTF?!

Thu 09/27/07 at 9:21 am

ABQjournal Business: Letters to Outlook

Of course, we’re not taxed enough

    Further proof that people in government have lost their minds is the unapologetic call for a plastics tax by a Santa Fe city councilor.

    Yeah, like we’re not being taxed enough as it is.

    I don’t when it happened, but there’s been a complete takeover of government in this state by a bunch of bossy, busybody, (and to use the old Saturday Night Live term) anal-retentive environmentalists who worry over what we eat, what we wear, what we drive, what we smoke, and what we think.

    Using the phony crisis of environmental warming and the new green idiocy, we’re being forced to jump through every conceivable hoop these fools dream up. Couldn’t they get together and buy a life so they could get out of ours?

    About the only solution I see is a state law that demands that for every tax anybody raises, an equal amount be cut from government spending and from taxes to curtail this continually growing socialist monster that’s eating its way into our lives.

    Either that or the people in New Mexico are so stupid they deserve to have every dollar and every freedom they have taken away from them.

    Clyde J. Aragon
    Albuquerque


Speechless [updated]

Mon 09/24/07 at 12:29 pm

Faculty works toward preserving languages by Jeremy Hunt, Daily Lobo [update]

Every two weeks, one of the world’s 7,000 languages becomes extinct.

UNM faculty is working to keep American Indian languages alive in New Mexico and trying to establish a center to help preserve them.

“The issue of language maintenance is not just some academic exercise,” said Christine Sims, a professor in the language literacy and sociocultural department. “These indigenous languages are spoken nowhere else in the world.” …

Sims said there are about 20 indigenous languages still spoken in New Mexico, and they are in danger of extinction.

Of those languages, there are three spoken only by older adults in the communities, including the Mescalero and Jicarilla pueblos, Sims said.

When a language dies, so does the culture and identity of the people who speak it, she said.

“The challenge, for the rest of us, is how do we make sure that doesn’t
happen?” she said. “These languages can’t be revitalized from any one
other source except within their community.”

The only way to
keep the languages alive is to have older generations encourage and
teach the youth to speak it, said Melissa Axelrod, a linguistics
professor who works with the Nambé tribe.

“A lot of people think
all pueblo languages are the same, but they’re completely different,”
she said. “We have this incredible, exciting diversity in New Mexico.”
- - - - -

AP: Saving endangered languages - News by Randolph E. Schmid

While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world
today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to
linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.

Five
hotspots where languages are most endangered were listed Tuesday in a
briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and
the National Geographic Society.

In addition to northern
Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the U.S. Southwest, many
native languages are endangered in South America - Ecuador, Colombia,
Peru, Brazil and Bolivia - as well as the area including British
Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon.

Losing languages means losing knowledge, says K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

“When
we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time,
seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics,
landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday.”

As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he estimated.

That
means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the
language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature,
no text of any kind, he said. …

Harrison said that the 83 most widely spoken languages account for
about 80 percent of the world’s population while the 3,500 smallest
languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world’s people. Languages
are more endangered than plant and animal species, he said.

Vanishing Languages Identified - washingtonpost.com By Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer

While previous analyses have focused on individual languages that have just one or a few surviving speakers, Harrison and his colleagues took a geographic approach, identifying where in the world languages are disappearing fastest. Oklahoma
and nearby areas of the American Southwest, it turns out, have an
extremely rich linguistic fabric because of the many Native American
tribes that were corralled there in the 1800s.

Today those
languages are disappearing by the month, and with them a treasure trove
of ecological insights, culinary and medicinal secrets and complex
cultural histories, including mythologies that can teach a lot about
universal human fears and aspirations, Harrison said.

“It may
seem frivolous, but mythological traditions are attempts to make sense
of the universe, and the different ways that the human mind has tried
to grapple with the unknown and the unknowable are of scientific
interest,” he said. …

Language can reveal a lot about how a culture organizes information.
In the Paraguayan Lengua language, for example, the word “11″ means
literally “arrived at the foot, one,” meaning “counted 10 fingers plus
one toe.” The word for “20″ means “finished the feet.”

In Siberia’s Nivkh language, each number can be said 26 ways, depending on what is being counted.


Iraq Is Good Business for Friends of Duhbya

Mon 09/24/07 at 10:50 am

Michael A. Fletcher - Iraq Oil Deal Gets Everybody’s Attention - washingtonpost.com

By Michael A. Fletcher
Monday, September 24, 2007; Page A17

The oil deal signed between Hunt Oil and the government in Iraq’s Kurdish region earlier this month has raised eyebrows, in no small part because it appears to undercut President Bush’s hope that Iraq could draft national legislation to share revenue from the country’s vast oil reserves. Making the deal more curious is that it was crafted by one of the administration’s staunchest supporters, Ray Hunt.

Hunt, chief executive of the Dallas-based company, has been a major fundraiser and contributor to Bush’s presidential campaigns. He also serves on the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, putting him close to the latest information developed by the nation’s intelligence agencies. [mjh: Why the hell is an oil man and Bush buddy on the FIAB, except for his own profit?]

If Hunt is signing regional oil deals in Iraq, critics ask, what does
he know about the prospects for a long-stalled national oil law that
others don’t?


Cost of War

Sat 09/22/07 at 10:14 am

War Costing $720 Million Each Day, Group Says - washingtonpost.com

War Costing $720 Million Each Day, Group Says
By Kari Lydersen, Washington Post Staff Writer

CHICAGO, Sept. 21 — The money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity, according to the American Friends Service Committee, which displayed those statistics on large banners in cities nationwide Thursday and Friday.

The war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000 a minute, according to the group’s analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.


The Party of Honor

Sat 09/22/07 at 10:11 am

GOP Congressman From Illinois Won’t Run in 2008
By Carla K. Johnson
Associated Press

JOLIET, Ill., Sept. 21 — Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Ill.), facing questions about his ethics, announced Friday that he will not seek an eighth term.

“I need to give my family the time needed to be a full-time dad and full-time husband,” Weller said during a Joliet Region Chamber of Commerce luncheon. “I’m 50 years old; I’ve given half of my life to public service.” …

Weller is among 13 congressmen who were recently served subpoenas to testify for the defense in a case against a contractor accused of bribing imprisoned former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.).

Seven other House Republicans have announced that they will step down at the end of this Congress’s term.


the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life

Thu 09/20/07 at 6:33 pm

Mexico’s Fox, in Book, Chides and Praises Bush - washingtonpost.com

Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 19, 2007; Page A19

ANTIGUA, Guatemala, Sept. 18 — President Bush and Vicente Fox
once portrayed themselves as diplomatic allies and close friends, but
the former Mexican president takes some jabs at Bush in a new
autobiography, calling him “the cockiest guy I have ever met in my
life” and a “windshield cowboy” afraid to ride a powerful horse.


Revolt! “It’s visually obscene.”

Thu 09/20/07 at 12:07 pm

Revolt Over Cellphone Tower - washingtonpost.com

Philomont Residents Protest Plan for Structure Like Silo

By Bill Brubaker
Washington Post Staff Writer

The structure [a 106-foot cellular tower] would not look like a cell tower, however. It would look like a silo. [Sprint Nextel has three silo towers in Fauquier County, three in Rappahannock County and one in Prince William County. The towers are 80 to 108 feet tall.]

In a push to expand their networks and appease some jurisdictions,
cellphone companies are disguising towers as trees, flagpoles and — in
rural communities — silos. …

“It’ll be a monster,” Purcellville resident Richard Corrigan said
before the hearing. “I mean, most silos in Loudoun County are in the
40- to 50-foot range. This one is more like the huge silos you see in
the Midwest where they store a huge amount of grain.” …

“It’s visually obscene,” said Ken Rothschild, who lives near the proposed site.


CONSERVATIVE FILIBUSTER BLOCKS DC VOTING RIGHTS BILL

Wed 09/19/07 at 2:21 pm

Administration: Watchdogs Gone Wild

ELECTORAL JUSTICE — CONSERVATIVE FILIBUSTER BLOCKS DC VOTING RIGHTS BILL: Yesterday, a majority of senators
voted to give Washington, DC residents a full member of Congress for
the first time in its 206-year-history. Yet the 52-42 vote was not
enough to overcome Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) filibuster. The bill, which was passed by the House on April 19, would also have granted a fourth representative to Utah. “It’s time to end the injustice,
the national embarrassment that citizens of this great capital city
don’t have voting representation in Congress,” said Sen. Joseph
Lieberman (I-CT), a co-sponsor of the bill, before yesterday’s vote.
The Senate’s actions marked the first time the full chamber “had
considered the D.C. voting rights issue since 1978, when it passed a
constitutional amendment that would have given the city voting
representatives in the House and Senate. The amendment died seven years
later after getting approval from only 16 of the 38 states required for
ratification.” Ilir Zherka of DC vote,
an organization that supports DC residents’ right to representation,
stated, ”For the first time in 30 years, we secured the vote of a strong majority of Senators in favor of DC voting rights.
We are outraged that a minority of Senators, led by Senators Mitch
McConnell and Trent Lott, prevented the majority from voting on our
bill.”


Buried Treasure

Tue 09/18/07 at 11:41 am

I’ve written before about the scrub jays that eat the peanuts we put out for them. They eat some and they hide some. A couple of nights ago, Merri pulled up a weed along the sidewalk and discovered a stashed peanut.

This morning, we were both looking out the kitchen window when a jay grabbed a peanut and flew straight towards us. I thought he was saying thanks or showing off, but he carefully tucked the nut under some broad leaves in the windowbox. Then he picked up a nearby scrap and laid it over his hidden treasure. Blew my mind, that brilliant bird-brain. mjh

www.flickr.com/photos/mjhinton/tags/scrubjay/


Michael Mukasey to replace Alberto Gonzales

Mon 09/17/07 at 1:43 pm

Ex-Judge Is Said to Be Pick At Justice - washingtonpost.com

Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 17, 2007; Page A01

President Bush has selected retired federal judge Michael B. Mukasey as his new attorney general, sources said yesterday, moving to install a law-and-order conservative at the Justice Department while hoping to avoid a confirmation fight with Senate Democrats. …

“While he is certainly conservative, Judge Mukasey seems to be the kind
of nominee who would put rule of law first and show independence from
the White House, our most important criteria,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a frequent critic of the Gonzales Justice Department, said in a statement. …

The view from Democrats and their allies yesterday seemed to be that
Mukasey was about the best they could hope for from Bush. Ralph Neas,
president of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way,
predicted Mukasey’s confirmation, assuming he is willing to answer
“legitimate questions” from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“He seems like a bona fide conservative Republican, not a right-wing
ideologue,” Neas said. “He seems like someone who would attract strong
bipartisan support and who could help restore public confidence in the
Department of Justice.”
- - - - -

Justice: Who Is Michael Mukasey?
PROGRESS REPORT
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/progressreport/2007/09/mukasey.html


<sarcasm> I never would have guessed. </sarcasm>

Wed 09/12/07 at 10:42 am

Forget the ridiculous study on liberal vs conservative brains — biology is only part of determinism and we can all be so much better or worse than we were born to be. This study is much more important, albeit not surprising: Conservatives dominate opinion pages and use that platform to decry the dominance of liberals. Snicker. Nice work, if you can get it.

Never fear. I’ve always felt the easiest way to discredit conservatives is to let them talk. mjh

Media Matters - Black and White and Re(a)d All Over: The Conservative Advantage in Syndicated Op-Ed Columns

The results show that in paper after paper, state after state, and region after region, conservative syndicated columnists get more space than their progressive counterparts. As Editor & Publisher paraphrased one syndicate executive noting, “U.S. dailies run more conservative than liberal columns, but some are willing to consider liberal voices.”

Though papers may be “willing to consider” progressive syndicated columnists, this unprecedented study reveals the true extent of the dominance of conservatives:

# Sixty percent of the nation’s daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists. Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced.” …

# In 38 states, the conservative voice is greater than the progressive voice — in other words, conservative columns reach more readers in total than progressive columns. In only 12 states is the progressive voice greater than the conservative voice.

# In three out of the four broad regions of the country — the West, the South, and the Midwest — conservative syndicated columnists reach more readers than progressive syndicated columnists. Only in the Northeast do progressives reach more readers, and only by a margin of 2 percent.

# In eight of the nine divisions into which the U.S. Census Bureau divides the country, conservative syndicated columnists reach more readers than progressive syndicated columnists in any given week. Only in the Middle Atlantic division do progressive columnists reach more readers each week.

Though they have suffered slow but steady declines in readership over the last couple of decades, newspapers remain in many ways the most important of all news media. The Newspaper Association of America estimates that each copy of a weekday paper is read by an average of 2.1 adults, while each Sunday paper is read by an average of 2.5 adults,3 pushing total newspaper readership for daily papers to more than 116 million and Sunday papers to more than 134 million. This means that some columnists reach tens of millions of readers, and one, conservative George Will, actually reaches more than 50 million.

Furthermore, newspapers are the preferred news medium of those most interested in the news. According to a 2006 Pew Research Center study, 66 percent of those who say they follow political news closely regularly read newspapers, far more than the number who cite any other medium.4 And an almost identical proportion of those who say they “enjoy keeping up with the news” — more than half the population — turn to newspapers more than any other medium. These more aware citizens are in turn more likely to influence the opinions of their families, friends, and associates.

Syndicated newspaper columnists have a unique ability to influence public opinion and the national debate. And whether examining only the top columnists or the entire group, large papers or small, the data presented in this report make clear that conservative syndicated columnists enjoy a clear advantage over their progressive counterparts.

mediamatters.org/reports/oped/
- - - - -

From Center for American Progress Progress Report

“This study serves as a conclusive counter to the claims of conservatives voices like Bill O’Reilly, who asserted that “there’s no question the media in America is heavily liberal — every study shows that,” and Michelle Malkin, who wrote off the “liberal media” when some newscasters refused to wear Iraq ribbons on their lapels.”

www.americanprogressaction.org/progressreport/2007/09/loyal_bushies.html


Mission Accomplished - Not!

Tue 09/11/07 at 9:11 am

As we remember this day, think about what might have been accomplished world-wide, especially in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine, if we hadn’t pissed away our blood, time, money and respect on Iraq. mjh

The New Al-Qaeda Central
Far From Declining, the Network Has Rebuilt, With Fresh Faces and a Vigorous Media Arm
By Craig Whitlock,Washington Post Foreign Service

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — When Osama bin Laden resurfaced Friday in a 26-minute videotaped speech, his most important message was one left unsaid: We have survived.

The last time bin Laden showed his face to the world was three years ago, in October 2004. Since then, al-Qaeda’s core leadership — dubbed al-Qaeda Central by intelligence analysts — has grown stronger, rebuilding the organizational framework that was badly damaged after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, according to counterterrorism officials in Pakistan, the United States and Europe.

It has accomplished this revival, the officials said in interviews, by drawing on lessons learned during 15 years of failed campaigns to destroy it. In that period, bin Laden and his followers have outfoxed powerful enemies from the Soviet army to the Saudi royal family to the CIA. …

On June 24, 2003, President Bush declared al-Qaeda’s leadership largely defunct. At a Camp David summit, Bush praised Pakistan’s Gen. Pervez Musharraf, crediting his country with apprehending more than 500 members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

“Thanks to President Musharraf’s leadership, on the al-Qaeda front we’ve dismantled the chief operators,” Bush said. Although bin Laden was still at large, his lieutenants were “no longer a threat to the United States or Pakistan,” Bush added. …

Many U.S., Pakistani and European intelligence officials now agree that al-Qaeda’s ability to launch operations around the globe didn’t diminish after the invasion of Afghanistan as much as previously thought. …

- - - - -
Al-Qaeda’s Return - washingtonpost.com
The terrorists have a sanctuary once again.

MANY FACTORS contributed to the awful success that al-Qaeda achieved six years ago today: tactical and policy mistakes by the United States, the diabolical skill of the terrorists, even the clear, cobalt-blue sky on that initially beautiful morning. But probably nothing was more important than the haven in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that gave al-Qaeda the time and space it needed to train, recruit and plan for highly complex operations. Accordingly, the greatest victory the United States and its allies have yet recorded against the terrorist network was the ouster of the Taliban from Kabul and the scattering of al-Qaeda’s depleted ranks across Southwest Asia.

Yet as the United States mourns and commemorates the worst act of terrorism ever carried out on U.S. soil, and reflects thankfully on the fact that it has not been repeated, there are ominous signs that al-Qaeda is back as a coherent, global force capable of inflicting damage on the United States. Al-Qaeda never really went away, of course, as grieving families of its victims from London to Baghdad can attest. But the emergence of the first authentic Osama bin Laden video in three years, the arrest of German-based al-Qaeda operatives near Frankfurt, and the reinfiltration of hundreds of al-Qaeda-aligned Taliban fighters and intended suicide bombers into Afghanistan point toward one alarming conclusion: Al-Qaeda is once again able to operate from a consistent haven. According to the latest National Intelligence Estimate on al-Qaeda, the organization “has protected or regenerated key elements of its homeland attack capability” inside Pakistan.


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