Bill's Big Diamond Blog

Lend a Hand

I came across Christy Hardin Smith’s “Lend a Hand” post from Memorial Day and think it’s worth linking to. Her frustration with the fix we are in with the President’s “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” dedication to his failed war plan is combined with some great ideas and experience to support the troops anyway.

I especially like the resources in her post for anyone who wants to help out soldiers and their families with care packages, childcare, volunteer efforts, and the like. AnySoldier is great. I’ve used their program to send needed items to troops in Iraq and I recommend the organization highly.

William Meredith (1919-2007)

We’re taking a moment to remember the life and passing of poet William Meredith, who wrote Love Letter From An Impossible Land.

Combed by the cold seas, Bering and Pacific,
These are the exile islands of the mind.
All the charts and history you can muster
Will not make them real as the fog is real
Or crystal as a certain hour is clear
if you can wait.

Write to me often, darling.

(Read the rest)

Meredith was a professor at Connecticut College for years as well as the founder of a program for summer opportunities for urban high school students. Oh, yeah… He was also a Pulitzer Prize -winning poet.

"I Haven't had the Opportunity..."

It’s this sort of thing that makes a person doubt the veracity of Dick Cheney on most subjects of a more serious nature. Why lie (or, to be generous, split hairs with the truth) about even the little things?

NYPD Civil Rights Investigation Urged

Legal counsel for Sean Bell, who was killed in a hail of NYPD gunfire last November, has asked the US Attorney’s office to open a civil rights investigation into a police “pattern and practice of continuous and systemic violations that have, at minimum, a disparate impact in black and Hispanic communities.”

Across the Pond, A Slap from WSJ at Kidnapped Journalist and His Network

One of the best daily peeks inside the working press is available at Romenesko, the journo-blog. Today’s edition contains a revealing back and forth across the pond and across the political spectrum. The story picks up on one journalist’s plight and the gulf between what most of the world’s press has covered relentlessly and the reaction of one of the US’s most rightward editorial boards.

The continuing drama of BBC reporter Alan Johnston’s kidnapping in Gaza over the last several weeks roused Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal to comment recently in an editorial piece about the journalist’s plight and that of the BBC. After running down the Beeb as a biased network and paying left-handed compliments to Johnston himself, Stephens closed with a zinger aimed at blaming Johnston’s employers for keeping him in place as other organizations, presumably including the WSJ, pulled their correspondents.

Stephens postulates that the BBC is an unabashed advocate for the Palestinians against the state of Israel and ends with the following:

For now, one can only pray for Mr. Johnston's
safe release. Later, the BBC might ask itself
whether its own failures of prudence and
judgment put its reporter's life in jeopardy. The
BBC's Paul Adams has said of his colleague that
it was "his job to bring us day after day reports
of the Palestinian predicament." For that act of
solidarity one hopes a terrible price will not be
paid.

Fran Unsworth of the BBC was prompted to respond to the Stephens piece with her own closing blast:

I am surprised that one of the US’s leading
newspapers with a great tradition appears to
think that a desire to provide first hand reporting
for our audiences, on a key news story of major
significance, was an enterprise to be regarded as
foolish and complacent, rather than what
journalism is supposed to be for.

Luke Skywalker Would Have Called It Something Else...

Today, check out Tom Engelhardt on the new American Embassy in Baghdad. This colossus, built on 108 acres in the Green Zone as a blast-resistant headquarters for 1,000 officials and supporting staff, looks less like an embassy and more like, well:

As an outpost, this vast compound reeks of
one thing: imperial impunity. It was never
meant to be an embassy from a democracy
that had liberated an oppressed land. From
the first thought, the first sketch, it was to be
the sort of imperial control center suitable for
the planet's sole "hyperpower," dropped into
the middle of the oil heartlands of the globe. It
was to be Washington's dream and Kansas
City's idea of a palace fit for an embattled
American proconsul -- or a khan.

When completed, it will indeed be the perfect
folly, as well as the perfect embassy, for a
country that finds it absolutely normal to build
vast base-worlds across the planet…

To recognize such imperial impunity and its
symbols for what they are, all you really need
to do is try to reverse any of these examples.
In most cases, that's essentially
inconceivable. Imagine any country building
the equivalent Mother Ship "embassy" on the
equivalent of two-thirds of the Washington
Mall…

New Talks with Iran

The Christian Science Monitor reports on talks yesterday in Baghdad between the US and Iran:

"[President Bush] is to the point where he will try
anything," he (Juan Cole) adds, but "it also points to the
increased influence of Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice" and the administration's new Iraq team: Secretary
of Defense Robert Gates and his man in Iraq, Gen. David
Petraeus, and Crocker, who recently arrived from
Pakistan.

…No subsequent meeting of the two parties was set
after Monday's session, which took place in the offices
of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad's
fortified Green Zone. The Iraqi government indicated it
would extend an invitation to the US and Iran for
another discussion in the near future, and Crocker said
the US "will entertain it when we receive it."

…"The US-Iran talks are deeply unpopular among some
elements in Washington and Tehran," says Mr. Cole.
"The Cheney camp is reported to be opposed to them,
and the arrests [in Iran] of Iranian-American academics
in recent days may well be an attempt by some in the
camp of [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad to
sabotage these talks."

One hopes that Cheney's influence is on the wane still, having cost the Administration so much already. There's not much of a record yet of the President breaking from the Veep's bidding, however.

Memorial Day

On this Memorial Day weekend, visiting my parents, one thing I thought my Dad might like would be to go to the parade. So, we took a drive up to the town common, walked over to a bench, and Dad greeted a woman his age whom he knows, pulled up his side of the bench, and settled down to watch the ceremonies. They compared notes on joints that ached and on how long it had been since they'd seen each other.

The local vets set the memorial agenda and interspersed anthems, speeches, and multiple flag ceremonies, as kids from the community sang and dropped roses onto the helmeted rifles of the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. I didn’t see an Iraq-era helmet. Maybe my hometown hasn’t lost a soldier there yet. I was surprised by a few things. The crowd was a lot smaller than I remembered it being in my childhood and the number of vets who marched behind the high school band numbered only about a dozen, followed by a few Boy Scouts and the Massachusetts State Troopers who formed the honor guard. The occasion wasn't the shared community experience it had been to us as kids; it was now more of a meeting of military families and local pols.

Being there yesterday made me think about how isolated the military families of today are probably feeling, bearing the brunt of the war without the country as a whole knowing their pain and loneliness, their worry, and the long stints apart. Since we’ve all been told that the war can be waged without a draft, without special taxes to pay for the war, and that the enlistees and National Guard members who do all the fighting and dying can continue to have their tours extended endlessly, there’s not much that most of us know of the life of military families.

The commitment made by a country and the price a nation pays for that commitment ought to be shared at large. The soldiers who are deployed overseas too often feel that their experience is not only not shared by us, but not cared about by Americans, the people for whom they serve.

Whether one opposes the continued occupation of Iraq or supports it, we owe it to the soldiers who carry out our nation’s policies and to their families to be involved in their struggle, in our struggle as a nation. They carry out their mission and their families support them. Our respect for what they give ought to extend at least as far as an active involvement in their fate and ours. When a country loses sight of what happens to our defenders, we risk more than their lives. We risk our future and our security.

Free Speech Lives in NYC

This from the International Herald Tribune:

Filmmakers and photographers using handheld equipment on New York City streets no longer will be required to obtain permits, a civil rights group said.

The deal settles a lawsuit brought on behalf of an award-winning Indian filmmaker who was detained by police, the civil rights group said Wednesday.

Rakesh Sharma said he felt humiliated when he was detained in May 2005 by police who saw him use a handheld video camera in midtown Manhattan as he shot footage for a Sept. 11, 2001-related documentary.

The New York Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit against the city in January 2006....

...As the Secret Service Wrestled the Bird to the Ground...

Ann Compton reports on an editorial comment made by a passing sparrow as the President expressed faith in Alberto Gonzales yesterday. There’s video at the link, too…