I have been interviewing scientists and other experts for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Visionary Speaker Series. The pieces run online for NRDC’s magazine OnEarth. Each interview has been an education. My most recent one is with sustainability expert Jim Merkel.

The piece is online here.

The BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is a perfect Republican Party trap: Watch as a Democratic administration and Congress drown in the oil disaster while they clean up at the polls. Then Republicans return to office and begin the cycle by laying the bombs that’ll detonate under the next Democratic administration.

Does anyone remember Dick Cheney’s behind-the-door meetings with energy executives in W.’s maladministration? Or the two wars they bequeathed Americans?

For those who have forgotten, Brian Conners has written a recap at Associated Content that I think is worth reading. His earlier piece pointed fingers also.

Sure, President Barack Obama has been feckless in dealing with a disaster-not-of-his-making.

How difficult can it be to say that British Petroleum, besides paying for every penny that it costs to clean up the Gulf and other regions affected by this disaster, should have all of its officers brought to account for this disaster.

Yet, the president has  not been able to summon the passion to condemn this crime. Fine, set up a commission, if you must. But, first, BP executives should be wearing prison jumpsuits.

Cheney has some explaining to do. Before Congress.

A final question: Why is it that Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s employer) is always around looking guilty whenever something is hurting our nation?

Wyclef Jean–”If I Was President

Election time is coming

If I was president,
I’d get elected on Friday, assasinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president…
If I was president

An old man told me, instead of spending billions on the war,
we can use some of that money, in the ghetto.
I know some so poor,when it rains that when they shower,
screaming “fight the power”.
That’s when the vulture devoured

[chorus]
If I was president,
I’d get elected on Friday, assasinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president…
If I was president…
If I was president…
If I was president

But the radio won’t play this.
They call it rebel music.
How can you refuse it, children of moses?

[chorus]
If I was president,
I’d get elected on Friday, assasinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president…
If i was president

Tell the children the truth, the truth.
Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America.
Tell them the truth.
The truth
YEAH! Tell them about Marcus Garvey.
The the children the truth YEAH! The truth.
Tell them about Martin Luther King.
Tell them the truth.
The Truth.
Tell them about JFK

If I was President
[chorus]
If I was president,
I’d get elected on Friday, assasinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president…
If I was president

Perchance to dream

Alright, there’s no reason for this post other than that I am at the Apple Store in Tice’s Corner in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey and I am writing this post on the iPad. It’s a pretty sweet and magical device! I am just saying, ya know!

Anyway, I am home now and my attempt at doing a post on the magic device, which Apple said it sold 300,000 of on the first day on Saturday, was not so successful because I could not, ultimately, navigate my way through the machine. It’s not the fault of the machine. I already figured out what I was doing wrong.

I went to the store because my son, 12, and his friend, 13, wanted to see the iPad. I gladly took them because I wanted to see it too. This blog looks fantastic on the iPad. Everything looks fantastic on the iPad.

I cannot afford the device, having not worked since July, but, oh sweet, a person could dream, right? Hopefully, by the time I’m able to afford it, it’ll probably be the second or third generation of the iPad, which is not such a bad thing.

The Guardian of London is reporting the violent death of one Eugene Terre’Blanche in Rustenberg, South Africa:

A notorious white supremacist who once threatened to wage war rather than allow black rule in South Africa was hacked to death at his farm yesterday following an argument with two employees. Eugene Terre’Blanche’s mutilated body was found on his bed along with a broad-blade knife and a wooden club, police said.

“He was hacked to death while he was taking a nap,” one family friend, who did not wish to be named, told Reuters.

Local media quoted a member of Terre’Blanche’s Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging party (Afrikaner Resistance Movement, or AWB) as saying that the 69-year-old had been beaten with pipes and machetes. Police said two males, thought to be workers on the farm, have been arrested and will appear in court on Tuesday.

Terre’Blanche, with striking blue eyes and white beard, was the voice of hardline opposition to the end of racial apartheid in the early 1990s, and the AWB was infamous for its swastika-like symbols and neo-Nazi anthems. But he had been in relative obscurity since his release in 2004 after a prison sentence for beating a black man nearly to death.

Last year he attempted a comeback, announcing plans to rally far-right groups and to apply to the United Nations for a breakaway Afrikaner republic.

I made Mr. Terre’Blanche’s acquaintance in Rustenberg almost 16 years ago. That I barely survived that encounter was because a member of his group thought that if I had to die it should not be that day and not at their rally. So he saved me by pulling me out of the scrum of angry whites attacking me and expelling from their compound.

SA The Freedom Vote_Outrage

I don’t rejoice in his death, especially since it comes at a rather sad time for South Africa. Much of the hope and joy of that spring miracle 16 years ago have dissipated and South Africa is today suffering.

Martin Schilde, my friend in the Northwest, sent the following passage in an e-mail. I guess it’s making the round but I don’t know what to make of it, other than it is charming:

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her
altitude and spotted a man in a boat below on a lake. She shouted to
him, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him
an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, “You’re in a hot air
balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 1,346 feet
above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and
100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

She rolled her eyes and said, “You must be an Obama Democrat.”

“I am,” replied the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically
correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m
still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help to me.”

The man smiled and responded, “You must be a Republican.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” said the man, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re
going. You’ve risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air.
You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to
solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in
before we met, but somehow, now it’s my fault.”

Remember, at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in December no less, President Barack Obama spelled out the conditions under which and reserved for himself the right to wage “Just Wars.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Has Iran, by its nuclear recalcitrance, tripped a condition?

This story out of Scotland said some very big munitions are on their way to a place not too far from where they could be delivered to Iran at a moment’s notice:

Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.

The Sunday Herald can reveal that the US government signed a contract in January to transport 10 ammunition containers to the island. According to a cargo manifest from the US navy, this included 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures.

Experts say that they are being put in place for an assault on Iran’s controversial nuclear facilities. There has long been speculation that the US military is preparing for such an attack, should diplomacy fail to persuade Iran not to make nuclear weapons.

The story continued here.

In Oslo, Norway, on December 10, President Obama said this:

War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease — the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.

And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a “just war” emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.

With Iran’s continuing nuclear folly, are we about to see the terrible things Obama talked about just a few months ago when he declared himself a man of peace who would wage war if he had to?

In this Sunday’s Washington Post Op-Ed, he asks questions that have long needed to be asked.

Take this one, his first:

Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

It is not enough to ignore Fox News anymore because, clearly some people are watching and they are forming their opinions of what is happening in the world based on what that outlet tells them. The question that Raines asks is this: In the face of silence from all known authorities, when every credible voice is silent, who will tell the people the truth?

Of course, much of Raines’ cherished media is either in dire straits and/or too compromised to do much of anything about any issue of importance facing the nation. A case in point being Raines’ old shop, the New York Times.

Why has our profession, through its general silence — or only spasmodic protest — helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt? The standard answer is economics, as represented by the collapse of print newspapers and of audience share at CBS, NBC and ABC. Some prominent print journalists are now cheering Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp. (which owns the Fox network) for his alleged commitment to print, as evidenced by his willingness to lose money on the New York Post and gamble the overall profitability of his company on the survival of the Wall Street Journal. This is like congratulating museums for preserving antique masterpieces while ignoring their predatory methods of collecting.

Why can’t American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team? His importation of the loose rules of British tabloid journalism, including blatant political alliances, started our slide to quasi-news. His British papers famously promoted Margaret Thatcher’s political career, with the expectation that she would open the nation’s airwaves to Murdoch’s cable channels. Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post.

The rest of the piece, which continues here, is just as sharp and on point, despite Bill O’Reilly’s protestations.

Write It Long, But Well By Michael O. Allen

It’s about newspapers and news writing: By all means, get rid of slipshod, encrusted and encumbered conventional political writing (even as I needlessly encumber my sentence). Does doing this necessarily lead to shorter news stories? Shorn of the “conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news,” you could, conceivably, write newspaper articles twice or three times as long as the offending New York Times and Washington Post pieces that Mr. Kinsley cited. Would they then be the right length? Or, must news stories be short at all cost? How short?

Roger Simon of the Politico asks some pertinent questions of Elizabeth Edwards.

A friend of mine, Martin, sent me an e-mail with three pictures attached. I have not asked his permission to post this but this is the subject line of his e-mail: “Three pictures one of slang, the other of a little box, and the message from Obama to his people, apparently the world, not the armed forces”

Here’s his e-mail, which I took the liberty of chopping into paragraphs:

The first picture:

Hi Guys!

I always interpreted the term “guys” instead of more respectful custom as the totalitarian modality of work and consumption of higher-based custom after Hitler took over Europe.

These are fast paced times, good to know that.

I have a hard time waking up in the morning if it wasn’t for my cat, Jasper.

I have no reverence for the activities I pursue on a day/to/day perspective but have little faith in anything other than god, the government is out of control and we are living here in the United States in a personal holocaust for the mentally ill, and if that includes for you Foucault’s jail population, then you are on par with me at the end of the links.

Someone has to save these people and they are dying.

The Second picture:
They took the sixties and they put them either to forced work by owning their materialist homes where they found vagrancy of comfort after the likes of Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Martin Luther King, Janis Joplin and John Lennon, JFK and all the others slaughtered for the right of passage to the end of the world.

I’m sick I have you know that each e-mail, but who is going to take care of the people in my family whom need help when they need it, like always, evermore. ???

I hope that sometimes when people think of me they will think of the concept of survivor, not akin at all to the retro-demand of Hitler from all corners and walks and likes of the Earth just to make yourself busy and survive for the Establishment to come stomping on the ground you walk on soon as you’re able to look down outside of your watch.

The third picture:
I never read the Harvard Classics, most of my education came from the school of hard knocks, but I do know this:

we’re doomed, unless someone or something can listen and learn and listen as they act, which takes a lot of tightrope wakling and a lot of zen buddhism while I’m only a buddhist I am not the zen variety that sort of practise is doomed unless you combine it with a healthy job which pays enough money to clean the sheets on the mattress once you “just go” and “let it be”.

We need more people to act as the great Sacha Baron Cohen and his message of love peace and tolerance as he smashes all the dim-witted ideologues to hell incarnate when they are so embarrassed as to lose their job at the catholic church due to embarrassment, after so much hatred.

I’m beginning to think not only a dog doesn’t learn new tricks also God doesn’t, spelled backwards or forwards, dog/god is out to get each and every last goddamn fascist in the book and I know from checking, or like the back of my hand that every person on this dang list of e-mails is a good person. Don’t worry.

A diplomat is a man who says you have an open mind, instead of telling you that you have a hole in the head – Unknown

The Fakers

John Edwards had the right message both times when he ran for the presidency. The problem was that he himself seemed fake. The harder he sold himself, the less I was willing to buy.

One of the things he sold hardest was this idea that he had a wholesome family. And when it turned that his loathsome wife was sick, they pushed that too as reason to vote for him for president. It turned out that the biggest betrayal of all and, perhaps, the reason Edwards appeared so fake, was that it was all a lie.

Edwards had left his wife in mind and spirit and could not wait for her to die so he could be with his true love.

John Edwards did not even think this transgression was enough to keep him from running for president. He showed in New Orleans with his fake jeans, fake pompadour, fake teeth, fake smile and asked that we make him president because only he cared about black people, only he cared about poor people, oh, The Two Americas, he prattled on.

And Elizabeth Edwards was a handmaiden to all this deception.

I don’t wish ill on anyone. But I want Elizabeth Edwards to shut up. I want John Edwards to shut up. Please don’t prosecute him for his deceptions and chicanery with campaign cash to hide his affair. I want all these people to crawl into a cave and never be heard from ever again.

UPDATE: Kathleen Parker makes the case against the Edwards more intelligently than I tried to above.

No School For You, Girl

For girls, attending school in Pakistan’s northwestern region has become a life threatening prospect. Since 2007, at least 168 schools have been blown up by local Taliban militia in their campaign to enforce their extremist interpretation of Sharia law which forbids girls from going to school.

In 1960, Rockwell painted a picture called “The Problem We All Live With,” showing kindergartner Ruby Bridges, the first African-American child to attend an all-white school in the South, being escorted to school by US Marshals. In Pakistan, if the Taliban gets its way, girls will be marched away from school.

Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari and the Taliban

Last week the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, signed off on a truce made in February with the Taliban in the Swat valley, which appears to have only emboldened them and increased their threat in the region.

On PBS NewsHour last night, Margaret Warner moderated a short segment about the Taliban in Pakistan. She interviewed Wendy Chamberlain, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and Husain Haqqani, the current Pakstani ambassador in Washington.

Ms. Chamberlain was a career foreign service officer who now heads the Middle East Institute, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to teach America about the Middle East and vice versa. Neither she nor her organization seems partial to hysterical rants, but her description of the Taliban in Pakistan is frightening: “Their goal is to topple the democratic government of Pakistan and they have a strategy that’s proved to be working, a strategy where they go into a district, go into a town, terrorize the local authorities, the civil society, the aid workers, women, barbers, and impose their law …”

To read the transcript of the NewsHour segment, go here.

The United States Supreme Court illegitimately installed George W. Bush as president of the United States after the 2000 elections. Boy George was going to while away his time in office, rewarding friends in politics and the oil and defense industries with rich contracts.

That was why Dick Cheney held those meetings with energy interests behind closed doors. It was as evil a cabal as you could get. They were corrupt and lazy, to boot.

Then, history intervened.

Whatever you believed about the origins and the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States, the events propelled our nation on a path that altered the course of our history. Every step along the way, when our nation’s leaders had opportunities to chose paths that would strengthen or imperil our nation, they chose wrong.

They chose torture, rather than follow the rule of law. They belittled and denigrated international laws and institutions, rather than harness the goodwill of the community of nations.

The new administration, a legitimately elected president, Barack Obama, bearing a mandate from the people of this country, has begun trying to repair the damage wrought by the last administration. They won’t always make the right decisions. Their steps might be, at times, unsure. But they have one thing George W. Bush never had. Legitimacy.

UPDATE: A special prosecutor should decide the fates of John Yoo, Jay C. Bybee and other memo writers. They should suffer the consequences for violations of international laws that their memos aided and abetted.

All lower level soldiers punished for following orders should have their punishment reduced (because we now know they did not torture on a whim but were, in fact, following orders).

Gen. Geoffrey Miller should be tried for War Crimes.

A Truth & Reconciliation Commission (senior members of the judiciary and the U.S. Congress; governed by strictures of Congressional testimony) should get sworn testimonies of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, and Colin Powell. Their testimonies will be immunized if they tell the truth. Liars should be prosecuted for the wholesale violations of international laws (conventions against torture and the Geneva conventions) that occurred.

All will be consigned to history’s judgment.

Langston Hughes

A Facebook friend, John Burroughs, posted this searing Langston Hughes poem today:

Song for a Dark Girl

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.

Way Down South in Dixie
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.

Which brings to mind Billie Holiday’s hearbreaking song:

Billie Holiday, 1949

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

I would put a Youtube video of the song up except those links, over time, are not that reliable.

UPDATE: Alright, here’s the Youtube video. If it doesn’t play, doubleclick on the video to go to Youtube, then refresh until it plays:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Zina Saunders‘ illustration for “Guantanamo at Home” in The Nation magazine in which Jeanne Theoharis, with the proposed closing of Guantanamo, takes a hard look at the harsh treatment of terror suspects in prisons on American soil.

Read the article here.

Zina Saunders did this piece to accompany an article in The Nation magazine. Ordinarily, it would carry her byline but I do not want attribute to her my own thoughts on this issue. My thoughts, such as they are, are unformed and unsophisticated, incoherent even. Try this:

Isn’t it time we men stop manifesting our anxieties about our mothers’, daughters’, wives’, and sisters’ sexuality by passing laws to govern what they can and cannot do with their own bodies, their own lives?

I don’t have an answer. I just know that man’s laws and decrees, especially when they try to govern what women do with their bodies, wreck lives instead.