Headspace

“We're so busy watching out for what's just ahead of us that we don't take time to enjoy where we are.”

2008-03-10T03:45:00.004-04:00

When was the last time you took a moment to yourself? I mean completely shut out the world long enough to let your mind relax?

I've been doing a lot of that lately, so prepare yourself, dear reader, for a bit of scattershot introspection.

I've never felt like I was very good at this personal-blogging thing, mostly because it feels a little odd to write up the inner workings of my mind and my feelings out where anyone can see them. Even for someone like me, who generally wears his heart on his sleeve, it's not easy. Then again, maybe I'm the only one who reads this thing, so perhaps this is just mental masturbation. I hope not. I have some idea of who my readership may or may not be, though I'm still like a kid on Christmas morning anytime anyone leaves a comment, because if anyone's reading this, they're sure as hell not telling me about it.

Anyway, it's well past 4AM on a Sunday night and I'm on spring break. I'm fighting off the last throes of a cold, so I can't sleep even though I feel fine right now. Basically, I'm in that time of night and frame of mind where I have absolutely nothing to do and nobody to talk to, so all I have are my own thoughts for company.

Around this time last week, I was - oddly - really happy and really upset at the same time. We Soundbytes had just come back from another fantastic New York trip and everyone was finding ways to keep glowing from that while buckling down for the last week of classes before spring break. But at the same time, I spent the first couple of days last week in a massive funk. Looking back, I chalk it up mostly to a general lack of human contact, which, to an extrovert like me, is kryptonite. There are a couple of other things going on that contributed to this too, but for the moment I won't go into any of that in so public a setting, though most of my close friends probably know most of what I'm talking about anyway.

The reason I bring up even this amount of dirty laundry is that I was pleasantly surprised by the reactions of the people around me once I happened to passively mention (mostly via Twitter and IM away messages) how I was feeling. The situations that made me feel underestimated, unappreciated, and marginalized haven't gone away or changed much, if at all, nor do they frustrate me any less, but I don't feel so alone anymore. Instead, my friends crept out of the woodwork, one by one, for me to lean on and talk to. Whether we talked for seconds, or for hours, it helped me immensely, and I'll do my best never to underestimate my friends again.

Starting over

2008-03-03T12:13:00.003-05:00

So it's been an awfully long time since I posted anything here - I've offloaded all the political rantings and such to Awesome Time, the collaborative blog I set up with my high school buddies. But that left me with no real place to do any sort of core-dump of my own thoughts. And since I have a few friends whose blogs I check all the time, I figured it was only fair. L,R,A, this is for you guys.

Olbermann - Sept. 4, 2007

2007-10-09T17:31:00.000-04:00

Many apologies to my reader(s?) for not posting for two months. I'm working on some things to put up soon, but for now, Keith says it better than I ever could. I meant to post this when it aired, but forgive me for waiting a few weeks.

Six Years Asleep at the Wheel

2007-08-06T23:45:00.000-04:00

Today, August 6, 2007, is the sixth anniversary of the President's receipt of his daily intelligence briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike In U.S." - the distillation of a bunch of CIA reports of building al-Qaeda activity that had many in the Agency with their "hair on fire." The President's Daily Briefing from the CIA is usually a mild piece of paper, no more than a few sentences. This one was a page and a half, with that title chosen to grab his attention.

President Bush was (as he has been for roughly 20% of his entire time in office, or more than a year) on vacation. When he received the memo, he calmly told the CIA agent - who had rushed all the way to Texas because something this big couldn't wait - "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

I'm not naive enough to think 9/11 could necessarily have been prevented if we had acted on this intelligence. But it is pretty plain to see that the CIA knew that some shit was up, and took extra pains to try and communicate the severity of the threat to the President, at which point - assuming he understood the message at all - he appears to have flippantly dismissed it as an entire agency crying wolf.

The rest, as they say, is history.

UPDATE: Lid's Off the Cookie Jar

2007-08-05T19:17:00.000-04:00

So the FISA bill I mentioned two posts ago has passed the Senate and the House. The administration now has the legal authority to spy on any of us without a warrant, not even one issued in secret. In case you didn't read that previous post, or prefer a more multi-media explanation of what's been going on over the past few days regarding this, Keith (and the always-excellent Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley) can fill you in:

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, was not pleased. Her remarks below came before the vote on this bill, which (unlike one the House had just passed previously) ignores that pesky bit in the 4th Amendment which says that you need a warrant issued by a court of law to search someone in this country.

So now what? Congress is enjoying their summer recess, but when they get back, Speaker Pelosi has already asked Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers to work on drawing up some amendments when Congress comes back into session.

Good move on her part, although if Democrats in both houses had had the stones to stand up and refuse to give the President this ridiculous and unconstitutional authority in the first place, we could be spending the time after the recess working on more worthwhile things.

Not to mention the fact that all this legislation chipping away at our civil liberties always seems to be done in a rush, because the wolf is at our doorstep NOW. I don't care what, if anything at all, is about to happen. Any piece of legislation that messes around with our basic rights needs to be taken seriously and examined slowly, soberly, and thoughtfully. Intimidation and fear-mongering in these situations is despicable and, in my mind, threatens to destroy what this country stands for in the first place.

Sigh. At least my Rep voted against it...you other readers may not be so lucky.

Genocide

2007-08-02T09:54:00.000-04:00

Ron Rosenbaum wrote yesterday in Slate about the dangers of "defining genocide down" - the troubling recent tendency to lessen the impact of that word by using it to describe, more generally, killing people on a massive scale. Not that that is necessarily any less horrible an event, but the term "genocide" carries the extra weight of being coined - and used - to describe the deliberate mass killing of defenseless civilians because of their ethnic or religious background, and with the objective of eliminating that race.

My great-grandparents were survivors of the event for which the term "genocide" was first coined to describe: the attempt by the Ottoman Empire to exterminate the Armenians during the First World War. They very nearly succeeded, and the carnage was so new and terrifying that Raphael Lemkin needed to invent a new word to describe it. Since the Armenian Genocide, the world has seen the Holocaust (a genocide partially inspired and enabled by the Turks' "getting away with" the Armenian Genocide, and so vast and horrifying in scope that it required yet another word), as well as genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, the Congo, and now Darfur. Still, even though those events are clearly genocides in the proper sense, the term seems in danger of being overused.

So, as a descendant of genocide survivors, I support Rosenbaum's contention that genocide is perhaps the worst crime against humanity, and we should remain vigilant against it ever happening again (not to mention doing something about Darfur) - but at the same time we should never let the meaning of that word diminish.

Under the Radar

2007-08-02T07:03:00.000-04:00

When there's a story as big as the White House's defiance of Congress (and the Constitution) over the US Attorneys scandal, it more or less drowns out any coverage of other things that go on in government. But some things really ought not to be overlooked. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the White House is pushing Congress hard to revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, aiming to get something passed before the August recess.

This is the law that this administration so flagrantly violated when they were eavesdropping on American citizens' communications without warrants or oversight from even the secret courts that FISA allows for. The revisions that the White House wants would essentially allow them to legally do what they were caught illegally doing before.

Here's a simple analogy: The kid got caught with his hands in the cookie jar, and now, with crumbs falling from his lips, he's screaming angrily that he should be allowed to take more.

The ACLU has put together a sort of new-FISA FAQ to better understand how dangerous this is, and there's a good post up on DKos about it too.

It's ridiculous that things like this keep happening. Behind the bigger stories, buried below the fold on page 12, usually passed before we even knew it was an issue. Hopefully this time it will be different.

"Going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world."

2007-07-16T10:15:00.000-04:00

The August issue of Vanity Fair has an excellent article written by the late David Halberstam, just before he died, on the Bush administration and their preoccupation with a particularly simplistic and dangerously misguided version of history.

There are few better than Halberstam to tell this story. One wonders if this whole business in Iraq might have been avoided if those involved in the planning had been paying attention when they read The Best and the Brightest (if they read it at all). Probably not...considering that when the President was once asked (during a trip to Vietnam) what he thought the lessons were to be had from our experience there, he said "We'll succeed unless we quit."

Yes, Mr. President. Our problem was clearly that we didn't try hard enough to win in Vietnam. You might want to express that to the 58,000+ dead, plus six times that number wounded American soldiers, and the millions more Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who died because we couldn't figure out that all we were doing was making their thousand-year war for independence twenty years longer and orders of magnitude more destructive than it needed to be.

More on that topic later. For now, be sure and read the article. Like all of Halberstam's work, it's well worth reading.

Sen. Leahy catches a Freudian slip

2007-07-12T08:44:00.000-04:00

Check out this clip from former White House Director of Political Affairs Sara Taylor's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) catches her in a telling mistake - when she says she took an oath "to the President" as opposed to the Constitution.

Most people are likely to say that that was just a simple slip of the tongue, but people don't make mistakes like that, even subconsciously, when they really understand and care about what they're saying. Furthermore, her stumbling attempt to clarify her understanding of the gravity of her oath to the Constitution shows again that she doesn't understand what it meant and how serious her error was.

This woman worked in the White House, at the highest levels of government, and she does not seem to grasp the fact that the Constitution, and not any human being or other authority, is the only thing anybody in this government takes an oath to serve. That distinction might not be properly understood by everyone in this country, but I would expect someone working in the White House to have it chiseled into the darkest reaches of their brains. Upholding the Constitution is the most basic and serious duty of any government job; the oath is therefore not just a bunch of arcane words. The last person in the world who can afford not to take this seriously is a government employee.

If those in whom we entrust our government and our freedoms are more loyal to some person than to the basic structure of our Republic, then the entire system will collapse, and fast enough to surprise everyone.

This misplaced loyalty is further (and more thoroughly) corroborated by her adherence to the President's claim of executive privilege with regards to the US Attorneys affair, yet another instance in which this President purports to be above the document he swore to uphold. Dahlia Lithwick at Slate has a good article breaking down Taylor's testimony. It appears at times as if any information that might help to exonerate the White House in this scandal is freely available, but anything that might implicate anybody in anything is somehow protected. However shaky the legal grounds for the claim, it doesn't look good when the White House at every level behaves as if it has something - many things - to hide.

I guess we can only hope that we find out the truth as Congress and the President seemingly inch closer to a Constitutional showdown in court, though to be honest I don't have high hopes for a favorable outcome from the current, very conservative, Supreme Court. We shall see.

Olbermann, July 3 2007

2007-07-12T06:20:00.000-04:00

Keith Olbermann has been one of my favorite TV personalities since he was a SportsCenter anchor, and his show Countdown on MSNBC now outdraws O'Reilly (thank God). He's often been pigeonholed because of his origins doing only sports, but the truth is he's always been a journalist first, looking up to Murrow himself with his "Good night and good luck" signoff every night.

Anyway, in case you, dear reader, are the last person on the Internet to know this, he occasionally sets aside a portion of his show for a "Special Comment" when he gets fired up enough about a particular story. They are what vaulted his viewership into the stratosphere, and every time there's a new one it's eagerly devoured by the blogosphere and the YouTube crowd. This was his most recent - and most strident - of them, coming on the heels of President Bush's ridiculous commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence. Enjoy.

It was watching these, and wanting to add my voice, even if nobody was listening, that inspired me to start writing this blog. I'm glad I finally got around to it.

"...some things must be said, whatever the risk."

2007-07-11T10:55:00.000-04:00

Well put, Mr, Koppel. This 26-year veteran of the Justice Department, a career civil servant, last week wrote an excellent op-ed in the Denver Post, which I post here because I want to make sure it gets as much exposure as possible. It's a pretty scathing criticism - nothing new, really - but unique in that it isn't someone who resigned and then told all - this guy is still in there and has seen the Justice Department under four Presidents, so I respect his opinion immensely. He closes with a direct shout out to the character-assassination squad that is sure to follow:

I realize that this constitutionally protected statement subjects me to a substantial risk of unlawful reprisal from extremely ruthless people who have repeatedly taken such action in the past. But I am confident that I am speaking on behalf of countless thousands of honorable public servants, at Justice and elsewhere, who take their responsibilities seriously and share these views. And some things must be said, whatever the risk.

Maybe this will inspire more people to speak up. The more this kind of stuff keeps piling up, the better to educate people about the nature of this administration and its methods.

In fact, just this morning the first news on this front is a former Surgeon General talking about - surprise, surprise - the administration putting political posturing ahead of serious policy discussion with his office as well.

The Beginning

2007-07-11T09:14:00.000-04:00

So, here goes...

I don't know how frequently I'll update, but hopefully relatively often. Lately I've felt like weighing in on what's going on in the world more than usual, and not just to friends and family. So here goes.

Some would say it's the height of arrogance to suppose that the rest of the world wants to hear every opinion that one has, and maybe so. Nevertheless, here I am. I intend the 'flavor' of this blog to be mostly political, since that's what gets me the most fired up to rant about things, but as a devoted follower of several major sports and a huge nerd in general, who knows what else will show up here. I also admit in advance that I'll probably be late to the party on a lot of things that sweep the blogosphere - I don't really intend to comb the news feeds and try to be the first to break something (though that did good things for a lot of other sites out there - Matt Drudge wouldn't have the mainstream media by the balls if he hadn't scooped them all on the story that the President was fooling around with an intern)

The title is taken from President Dwight Eisenhower's famous farewell speech in 1961 - famous mostly for its coining of the term "military-industrial complex." Besides coming up with the phrase, I don't think most people know or really take to heart the point of the speech and the phrase - the fact that the government, especially the military, and the private economic institutions that support it, were necessarily intertwined in order to protect the nation against the threats of the future.

In the early years of the Cold War, Eisenhower bleakly acknowledged the necessity of this union, but his reason for making it the focus of his speech was to warn us of what it could - and has - become. "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" could hope to keep its advances in check, by watching for the "disastrous rise of misplaced power" that could turn our own necessary institution into a Sword of Damocles hanging over the basic structure of the Republic itself.

I am not so shortsighted or naive as to believe that the military-industrial complex, even though what the President warned us about has come true, likely beyond even his own imagination, is responsible for all that is wrong with the present state of affairs. But I have always believed that my duty as a citizen is to remain alert and knowledgeable, to learn as much as I can of how the world works. Only then can I use my voice and my vote wisely to help my country fix its problems and guard against any threats to its continued existence.

This post, and I suppose the creation of this blog with it, was inspired by my recent re-watching of three films I consider almost ironclad requirements for being "alert and knowledgeable:"

- Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight
- Errol Morris's The Fog of War
- PBS's three-part Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy

I won't spend any time explaining those films - you have to watch them for yourself. All I will say right now is that they had a profound influence on my understanding of nearly everything I'm likely to discuss on this blog, and I'm likely to refer to them or restate concepts from them quite a bit.

So begins Alert and Knowledgeable. I'm glad you took the time to read this far and I hope you'll return to read more as this continues.