Bill's Big Diamond Blog

More Jobs

Hey, maybe I'm being too tough about the need for a jobs program, incentives, and more. Maybe people out of work just aren't looking hard enough.

According to McClatchy, Mickey D's is hiring...at Guantamamo Bay. All you need is some restaurant management experience, a valid passport, a willingness to relocate to Cuba (er, or the 45 square miles you'll be living and working in on the island nation), and a love of grease.

Link here for more application info...

(A hat tip to Allen McDuffee for this catch.)

The Bottom of a Shoe to Two Tyrants

In the Poetic Justice Department:

Two events.

 First, from Bill Richardson’s Esquire interview about an encounter with Saddam Hussein during the Clinton years:

 Saddam had these small, black eyes. I started giving him my spiel, which was, “I want you to release these Americans as a humanitarian gesture, Mr. President.” I was very respectful. Then I made a terrible mistake: I was so tired, I crossed my legs and showed him the sole of my shoe. Saddam got up and left. I thought I was toast. "Is he coming back?" I asked. "He'll be back, but you must apologize for insulting an Arab with the supreme insult." I decided not to apologize — maybe he was playing a psychological game with me. He came back and I just continued making my point. His eyes got bigger and then his mouth started moving into a smile.

 Second, regarding the video below, my friend David Martin pointed out this excerpt to me  (in frustration with the lead graphs of the NY Times coverage of Bush's own shoe encounter) this morning:

"Hitting someone with a shoe is considered the supreme insult in Iraq. It means that the target is even lower than the shoe, which is always on the ground and dirty. Crowds hurled their shoes at the giant statue of Mr. Hussein that stood in Baghdad’s Firdos Square before helping American marines pull it down on April 9, 2003, the day the capital fell. More recently in the same square, a far bigger crowd composed of Iraqis who had opposed the security agreement flung their shoes at an effigy of Mr. Bush before burning it."

UPDATE- Apparently, the entire Arab world agrees with the journalist, who is facing seven years for the insult to the nation's occupier-in-chief.  Thousands of Iraqis took to the streets to support him.

Palin-tology

OK, so here’s a magazine cover you wouldn’t expect to see featuring a Vice Presidential nominee… “Alaska’s Hottest Governor”

It runs above a piece entitled, “Homing in on Halibut.”

I’m not kidding…

A Real Estate Guide to John McCain's World

Well, you had to know it was going to be a little like “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” A tour through John McCain’s properties has made it onto Ezra Klein’s blog— and it’s quite the portfolio. Hard to say exactly how to categorize them all, what with the holding companies, trusts, and limited liability corporations that own them. But there are at least eight and counting.

But if you haven’t got time to read about all his real estate, take Ezra's aerial tour, courtesy of Google Maps (and McCain vs. Minnesota)… zoom in on the satellite views to see how the other half lives outside virtual reality.

UPDATE— Another must-stop-in is over at Lindsay Beyerstein's place, where "All the Pretty Houses" luxuriates in the McCain splendor, with lots of lovely photos!

Colonel Klink Visits San Francisco

Since we are usually critical of our own politicians here, it’s only fair to occasionally let other countries share the heat. Here’s a story to top most junket disgraces, excepting the best Jack Abramoff/Tom Delay trips, of course— witness the German Bundestag health delegation in San Francisco last month:

…Beside apparently wanting the official trip to leave
plenty of free time for sightseeing and shopping, the
MPs cancelled a meeting with US officials in the
Californian capital Sacramento at the last minute
because they felt they had better things to do. Der
Spiegel reported that the consulate was forced to lie
to the Americans to save face…

Oh, and it gets worse… read about the service requests. Guess who's supposed to be driving Miss Daisy...

Returning to Job 1

I’m just back from a week on the road at film festivals, promoting Brick by Brick: A Civil Rights Story. Getting away from the day-to-day of American politics sometimes helps a person gain perspective on what really matters, even what matters politically.

What comes to mind as I return to the blog, aside from imagining some of the other things I might do with all the hours I spend thinking about politics, is that we need to concentrate some serious grey matter on dealing with climate change.

Recently, the President of a small Pacific island nation, Kiribati, delivered a message that sounds like the opening of a ‘B’ science fiction film of the 1950’s. His plaintive call to an international conference is to protect his nation, which might soon cease to exist, unless something radical is done to stop the rise of the sea level over the 33 coral atolls that make up Kiribati.

President Anote Tong told the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that, “It's not an issue of economic growth, it's an issue of human survival.”

"Villages that have been there over the decades, maybe a century, and now they have to be relocated. Where they have been living over the past few decades is no longer there, it is being eroded."

Tong’s problem isn’t theoretical, nor is it inconsequential, but it does offer a harbinger of things to come if we don’t act now and with vigor.

Tong’s most poignant quote wasn’t data-packed, but it reflects the feelings many people carry about the global increase in extreme weather and the various unmistakable signs in the environment that something is amiss.

He told the gathering, “I am not a scientist but what I know is that things are happening we did not experience in the past."

Riverbend in Syria

Recently, I was going through my list of linked blogs here on the big diamond. The left field area, which lies a bit down from the top, on the left side of the page, lists blogs which are particularly important to me for one reason or another. The list is an eclectic one, ranging from subject expert blogs like Juan Cole's Informed Comment to citizen commentary by local NYC diarists like Rob Ellman.

I like to scan a hefty sample of what’s out there on the political scene, as well as to read blogs that explore personal life, art, and culture, like a young writer, Aja, who posts the Middletown Expat, or an environmentally savvy grandfather and photographer, Jonathan at Past Peak. Somewhere in the midst of all these categories has been Baghdad Burning, a blog by a bright young Iraqi woman, written throughout the American invasion and subsequent occupation. Her nom d’blog is Riverbend and her weblog has gradually become a detailed, aching cry about the catastrophe that has befallen her country since ours invaded it.

Or at least Riverbend’s blog used to be such a diary, of observed life in Baghdad…until April, when her family finally decided they'd better join the millions of Iraqis who’ve already fled their country in search of a safe haven, away from the random shootings and the bombs, far from the American occupation and the ethnic cleansing that has become their reality in Iraq’s capital city today. It was a long period of months since River posted her last piece from home, sadly announcing her family’s imminent departure.

Like all her readers, I wondered what had become of River and her beloved E., their parents, her aunt and her aunt’s children, as they made their way across the border and into their new lives as refugees. I worried that no news might be bad news. Many of the people leaving Baghdad have met with violence on the road. Some never even made it out of the city, past the checkpoints the local militias had set up.

But finally, as I looked through my left field this morning, here she was, writing from Syria.

Some excerpts:

The last few hours in the house were a blur. It
was time to go and I went from room to room
saying goodbye to everything. I said goodbye to
my desk- the one I’d used all through high school
and college. I said goodbye to the curtains and the
bed and the couch. I said goodbye to the armchair
E. and I broke when we were younger. I said
goodbye to the big table over which we’d gathered
for meals and to do homework. I said goodbye to
the ghosts of the framed pictures that once hung
on the walls, because the pictures have long
since been taken down and stored away- but I
knew just what hung where. I said goodbye to the
silly board games we inevitably fought over- the
Arabic Monopoly with the missing cards and
money that no one had the heart to throw away.

I knew then as I know now that these were all just
items- people are so much more important. Still, a
house is like a museum in that it tells a certain
history. You look at a cup or stuffed toy and a
chapter of memories opens up before your very
eyes. It suddenly hit me that I wanted to leave so
much less than I thought I did.

…As we crossed the border and saw the last of
the Iraqi flags, the tears began again. The car was
silent except for the prattling of the driver who was
telling us stories of escapades he had while
crossing the border. I sneaked a look at my
mother sitting beside me and her tears were
flowing as well. There was simply nothing to say
as we left Iraq. I wanted to sob, but I didn’t want to
seem like a baby. I didn’t want the driver to think I
was ungrateful for the chance to leave what had
become a hellish place over the last four and a
half years.
The Syrian border was almost equally packed, but
the environment was more relaxed. People were
getting out of their cars and stretching. Some of
them recognized each other and waved or shared
woeful stories or comments through the windows
of the cars. Most importantly, we were all equal.
Sunnis and Shia, Arabs and Kurds… we were all
equal in front of the Syrian border personnel.

We were all refugees- rich or poor. And refugees
all look the same- there’s a unique expression
you’ll find on their faces- relief, mixed with sorrow,
tinged with apprehension. The faces almost all
look the same.

I'm glad you're still with us, River. I hope someday you'll be able to go home to Baghdad and breathe the air of your city again. Till then, thanks for letting us share a bit of your world and for keeping us all honest about what our leaders and our fearful politics have wrought for you and your people. I'm glad you're safe, for the moment.

Touching Down in Tupelo

I’m a bit exhausted and wired, traveling in the dead of night yesterday to arrive in Tupelo, Mississippi for the film festival here— and then experiencing a whirlwind of films, people, hospitality, and yet more films. It’s been a great start, but my biological clock is severely off. There’s little prospect of it settling back down until the end of the upcoming weekend. Our film, Brick by Brick: A Civil Rights Story, is entered in the festival, among the many good documentaries we’re seeing here already.

It’s a bit of a trip to be in the Deep South with a contemporary desegregation story from the North. Our film is a bit of a curiosity, I imagine. Hopefully, that will translate into folks turning out for our screening on Saturday afternoon. I’ve tried to spread the word in advance among the civil rights community here and among folks who seemed, from the great distance of the internets, to be likely to be interested.

There is a great group of people here for the festival, including my good friend Joe Cultrera, whose film, Hand of God, won the feature documentary competition in Tupelo last year. Joe’s the reason I’m here, actually. He mentioned how it might be a good fit to bring Brick by Brick to Tupelo— and raved about the warmth and genuine interest in film here that the festival celebrates.

It also seemed to Joe that Southerners might appreciate the subject of a civil rights story being located to the north of it, where whites so often treat the struggle as a regional issue, relegated to the past and exclusively confined to the South. Those of us who have experienced the struggle up close know that the North also has its own very tough institutional barriers to opportunity and to integrated communities, barriers which still hold people back, even today.

Yesterday, it was hard to process all the good filmmaking on display. An excellent and visually innovative film, Mississippi Son, took a look at the devastation wreaked on the state’s Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina and at the hardy and yet still tender people who survived it. Another documentary, Hard Times, celebrated the life and music of Big George Brock, a bluesman in his seventies who still makes music like a Young Turk on his harmonica. The evening brought us a beautiful new film from experienced documentarian Roger Sherman, Rhythm of My Soul: Kentucky Roots, a broad contemplation of the history and locales of several of the musical forms that still grow and thrive in Kentucky today.

…and those films were just the feature docs playing among the many worthwhile short films here, both narrative and documentary. I’m not expecting the next couple of days to be any less fascinating, or to get any more rest in the process.

Admin to Scientists: "Remain Cool About the Heat"

Administration gag policies on climate change still seem to be in place.

Government scientists traveling to countries such as Canada, Norway, or Russia are warned by their boss to, "understand(s) the administration's position on climate change, polar bears and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues."

See no evil, speak no evil, right? (h/t to Reidblog)

(If you soon see less white stuff in this picture, please don't mention it to foreigners.)

Jet Blue Blues Considered

Having been one of thousands of stranded passengers last week cooling my heels in America’s airports while a low-cost airline dealt with a rolling disaster of flight cancellations, this piece by Alec Dubro at Tom Paine.com was of interest when sent to me:

...When I started flying, airline fares were heavily regulated.
Tickets were like legal tender and could usually be switched
from one airline to another, since the cost was almost always
the same. Were Americans less happy because air fares
were somewhat higher than they are now? Did businesses
complain because last-minute trips cost no more than ones
booked three weeks in advance? Were pilots, crew and air
traffic controllers more stressed because they brought home
a living wage and worked limited hours?

Business will not take the first step in halting our dash
toward a low-wage economy. David Neeleman and his peers
would rather pay out $30 million than lose his “competitive
advantage” by treating workers as equals.

Unless we re-regulate our major industries and back our
unions, we will pay the price of breakdowns, plunging
morale, more turnover. We are building more and more
fragility into our society at a time when we will be tested by
the rise of the developing world and by climate change. This
is not security. This is pending disaster.

And the next time, it may not be an excruciating wait on a
marooned plane. It could easily be a multi-plane pileup. And
that’s not competitive.

David Martin sent the above Dubro piece to me to follow up on a conversation we had about how the industry has devolved. Air travel has come to the point where margins are so thin that a company (Jet Blue), which seems to do well by the public most of the time, runs the risk of blowing up their franchise by making some bad calls during a major storm. They also avoid unionization like it was the plague.

Since President Reagan broke the PATCO strike in the early 80’s, I’ve been amazed that we’ve not seen a major increase in air disasters. Martin pointed out that we’ve been dodging that particular bullet due to progress in on-board crash avoidance technology rather than as a result of reasonable air traffic control conditions. But the continuing stress on the system, caused by deregulation and increasing economic pressures on all air transportation, point to a future shock of one kind or another.

Dubro’s inclusion of climate change as a factor to consider in the pressures on the air transport industry is another reason to think seriously about some kind of re-regulation of air travel. The artificial level of air travel prices is a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. If we hope to slow global warming, the cost of combating greenhouse gases will have to be factored into future air travel costs somehow.

As one of those inconvenienced and mishandled during the recent storms, I’m glad Jet Blue has admitted it’s fault and is attempting to make it up to us. On a personal level, my issue is with the company. On a national scale, however, the recent Jet Blue debacle shouldn’t just highlight one airline's issues, or simply indicate need for a Passengers’ Bill of Rights, but should spur a larger debate on the merits and demerits of airline deregulation over the last quarter-century.