Weed for Votes in San Jose, but don't tell Maureen Dowd

On Tuesday in San Jose, California, local marijuana dispensaries gave away weed to anyone who voted in the primary and brought in their "I voted" sticker to prove it:

San Jose voters who brought their “I Voted” sticker – along with their medical marijuana ID card -- to about a dozen participating dispensaries received free or discounted weed on Tuesday, primary Election Day.

Amsterdam's Garden, a San Jose medicinal marijuana dispensary, was busier than most polling places on Tuesday. It’s not a voting precinct, but if you already voted and were a member, you got a reward: a free, pre-rolled marijuana cigarette.

[...]Juan Lopez got his, a little extra product to say “thanks for voting.”

"It's definitely a good idea to get people to vote,” Lopez said, sticking the joint behind his ear. “Offers like this don't happen all the time.”

No doubt Lopez is correct. But, if the so-called “weed for votes” plan works, expect to see it on future election days.

California Medical Marijuana Association Vice President Xak Puckett said says the incentive idea was part brainstorm, part social media campaign.

The San Jose City Council is considering a proposed ordinance to closely oversee medicinal marijuana collectives and cultivation in a city with 78 collectives operating illegally.

The unlawful pot businesses continue to exist since the repeal of a law governing them in 2012. The city did not have enough funds for enforcement to close them down, Mayor Chuck Reed's spokeswoman Michelle McGurk said.

The Silicon Valley Cannabis Coalition posted a list of their recommendations for candidates in San Jose who they believe "will take a reasonable approach to regulating cannabis clubs," founder of the All American Cannabis Club and SVCC member Dave Hodges said in a statement.

A list of clubs participating in the "Weed for Votes" program was posted on SVCannabis.org.

And here I am, in the most conservative county in the USA. (sigh)

If this "weed-for-votes" scheme was at all possible here in South Carolina, I know several people who would have been elected to the Senate by now.

Since that obviously isn't going to happen for awhile, please enjoy the story of Henry, a man who similarly tried to bring happiness to the people.

~*~

Instantly recognizable by the catchy refrain, rolling down the mountain going fast fast fast, this song has also been covered by the Grateful Dead and numerous other jam bands. (It was years before I learned the title was "Henry.")

Delightful steel guitar by Jerry Garcia.

Henry - New Riders of the Purple Sage



~*~

For you young folks who missed that wonderful movie classic REEFER MADNESS (1936) , you can get a modern update from the New York Times' Maureen Dowd, who ate PART (!) of a pot-candy-bar in Colorado and flipped out.

Yes, that's the story, and she's sticking to it.

At least one of my friends believes her column is alarmist, invented bullshit, but I've often heard tales of certain neurotic newbies who were "wound too tight" and their paranoid first-experience with marijuana. (This describes uptight, prim Maureen to a T.) However, her purple prose is amazing, which is why I thought of New Riders of the Purple Sage.

And then, the Guardian got in on the act and Paul Krugman linked it. Maureen is now the subject of much mirth on Twitter and beyond.

Rolling down the mountain going fast fast fast...

James Patterson tries to save bookstores

At left: The Open Book, the first place I ever worked here in South Carolina, closed its doors permanently four years ago.










Mega-successful author James Patterson is on a mission to save the beleaguered, independent bookstore. Good luck, James!

As I have written here before, I looove bookstores. And so many bookstores are closing; Amazon and e-books and the net have threatened the book industry. (In fact, my photo in that last link, Carolina Book Rack? Like the Open Book, it is now long gone.)

Patterson is giving away $1 million to bookstores, in what he calls a "bookstore bailout":

The best-selling author James Patterson has started a program to give away $1 million of his personal fortune to dozens of bookstores, allowing them to invest in improvements, dole out bonuses to employees and expand literacy outreach programs.

More than 50 stores across the country will begin receiving cash grants this week, from Percy’s Burrow in Topsham, Me., to Page & Palette in Fairhope, Ala., to A Whale of a Tale in Irvine, Calif.

“I just want to get people more aware and involved in what’s going on here, which is that, with the advent of e-books, we either have a great opportunity or a great problem,” he said. “Our bookstores in America are at risk. Publishing and publishers as we’ve known them are at stake. To some extent the future of American literature is at stake.”

The current health of independent bookstores is mixed. While some have benefited from the disappearance of the Borders chain in 2011 and a shrinking Barnes & Noble, the stores have been hit especially hard with consumers switching from paper copies to e-books.

And though many communities remain loyal to their shops, and the American Booksellers Association says its membership has recently grown, the online discounters have wreaked havoc on the independent bookseller’s business model.

Patterson began complaining last year, that the book industry needed a bailout from the feds, just like Wall Street got a bailout. Not surprisingly, nobody paid any attention, so he took matters into his own hands:

Last year, Mr. Patterson placed full-page ads in The New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly arguing that the federal government’s financial support of troubled industries like Wall Street and the automobile sector should extend to the bookstore business. Since that appears to be a pipe dream, Mr. Patterson decided to create his own bailout fund as part of his mission to promote literature, especially for children.

“I’m rich; I don’t need to sell more books,” Mr. Patterson said. “But I do think it’s essential for kids to read more broadly. And people just need to go into bookstores more. It’s not top of mind as much as it used to be.”

He began his project last year by getting the word to store owners that he was willing to begin writing them checks, which will range from $2,000 to $15,000, according to a spokeswoman for Mr. Patterson.

Bookstores responded with informal mini-proposals, explaining what they might do with some extra money. Bank Street Bookstore in Manhattan said it would use the funds to post and stream online video of in-store events. Hicklebee’s in San Jose, Calif., said it wanted to buy a new computer system, replacing its “small, ancient screens with green print” and perhaps bestow a bonus on its hardworking manager, Ann Seaton.

“I think it’s going to have a huge impact,” said Linda Marie Barrett, the general manager of Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville, N.C., which successfully applied for a grant to replace badly worn carpeting and a damaged parquet floor. “He seems to be keenly aware that bookstores operate on small budgets.”

And I love seeing the name of MALAPROPS, one of my favorite places in the world, in the New York Times. I am SO PLEASED they are getting some of the bailout money... and believe me, their carpet sorely needs replacing!

I am wishing all the best to James Patterson and the bookstores... and wouldn't it be nice if other rich people took this kind of initiative, to help others in their field? Millionaire musicians should be helping music stores; millionaire athletes ought to be helping small-town teams; millionaire chefs should be teaching young folks to cook, etc etc etc. Let's see some civic responsibility, rich peeps!

As it is, it makes international news whenever Bill and Melinda Gates or James Patterson or Bruce Springsteen or Dolly Parton or Oprah or someone like that, spends money altruistically and helps regular people.

That should be the norm, not the exception.

No to the Keystone XL Pipeline

I totally forgot to post photos of our anti-Keystone XL Pipeline demonstration, here in Greenville on Saturday. This might be because it actually started to snow (a big crisis in South Carolina!) and I quickly hightailed it home after we ate lunch.



Our small but hardy troupe included Green Party members, 350.org and Occupy Greenville. This was staged in front of the downtown TD Bank, which is funding the Keystone XL Pipeline. Local actions were on Saturday, while the larger, national demonstration in Washington (on the National Mall) was scheduled for Sunday.

I helped pass out leaflets to curious onlookers, which outlined some of the following points (this particular excerpt is from Friends of the Earth):

The Canadian oil and gas company TransCanada hopes to begin building a new oil pipeline that would trek close to 2,000 miles from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast of Texas. If constructed, the pipeline, known as the Keystone XL, will carry one of the world’s dirtiest fuels: tar sands oil. Along its route from Alberta to Texas, this pipeline could devastate ecosystems and pollute water sources, and would jeopardize public health.

Giant oil corporations invested in Canada's tar sands are counting on the Keystone XL pipeline to make the expansion of oil extraction operations profitable: The pipeline would double imports of dirty tar sands oil into the United States and transport it to refineries on the Gulf Coast and ports for international export.

Before TransCanada can begin construction, however, the company needs a presidential permit from the Obama administration

...

Environmental concerns

Pollution from tar sands oil greatly eclipses that of conventional oil. During tar sands oil production alone, levels of carbon dioxide emissions are three times higher than those of conventional oil, due to more energy-intensive extraction and refining processes. The Keystone XL pipeline would carry 900,000 barrels of dirty tar sands oil into the United States daily, doubling our country's reliance on it and resulting in climate-damaging emissions equal to adding more than six million new cars to U.S. roads.

During the tar sands oil extraction process, vast amounts of water are needed to separate the extracted product, bitumen, from sand, silt, and clay. It takes three barrels of water to extract each single barrel of oil. At this rate, tar sands operations use roughly 400 million gallons of water a day. Ninety percent of this polluted water is dumped into large human-made pools, known as tailing ponds, after it’s used. These ponds are home to toxic sludge, full of harmful substances like cyanide and ammonia, which has worked its way into neighboring clean water supplies.

Northern Alberta, the region where tar sands oil is extracted, is home to many indigenous populations. Important parts of their cultural traditions and livelihood are coming under attack because of tar sands operations. Communities living downstream from tailing ponds have seen spikes in rates of rare cancers, renal failure, lupus, and hyperthyroidism. In the lakeside village of Fort Chipewyan, for example, 100 of the town’s 1,200 residents have died from cancer.

It also appears that there will be minimal (if any) increases in American employment for the Pipeline, despite copious Republican propaganda that it will provide more jobs.

Notice that their "more jobs!" claims are always very nonspecific and vague. There's a reason for that.



~*~

Sunday's action in Washington featured a whopping 40,000 demonstrators. 350.org reports:

The speakers up on stage today represented the full diversity of our movement, from indigenous leaders across the United States and Canada, to clean energy investors like Tom Steyer, to environmental leaders like Mike Brune and Bill McKibben, to civil and voting rights activists like Rosario Dawson and Rev. Lennox Yearwood.

The march today looked like the movement that elected President Obama. Now, it’s time for him to join us in standing up to Big Oil and saying no to Keystone XL. Because this movement isn’t going anywhere. We’re, to borrow a phrase, fired up and ready to go. And we’re not stopping until the President takes action.

Here is the NPR report on the demonstration.

I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see the New York Times cave to Big Oil on this one. (not linking)

I strongly urge people to investigate and study the issue on their own, because the mainstream media seems determined NOT to provide the whole story.

Paul Krugman on the election

In a piece boldly titled SOCIALISM! in the New York Times, Paul Krugman writes:

I have to say, the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments on the right comes as a surprise. We knew that they would be upset; but the extent to which they were really, truly unprepared for the obvious possibility that Obama would be reelected is remarkable.

...

One thing that caught my eye, in particular, has been the wailing that Americans have turned socialist. (Conservatives haven’t failed America — America has failed conservatives!) Thus John Hinderaker of 'Bush is a genius' fame declares--

To me, the most telling incident of the campaign season was a poll that found that among young Americans, socialism enjoys a higher favorability rating than free enterprise. How can this possibly be, given the catastrophic failure of socialism, and the corresponding success of free enterprise, throughout history? The answer is that conservatives have entirely lost control over the culture.

Oddly, he doesn’t even seem to consider the more obvious possibility: after decades in which right-wingers have attacked long-established institutions — Social Security, progressive taxation, unemployment insurance — as “socialism”, a lot of young people now believe them, and think that this “socialism” thing really isn’t so bad.

As for me, I am glad I didn't scrub off those OBAMA 08 bumper stickers from days gone by.

I rather enjoy the dirty looks and grim countenances I see this week in my rear-view mirror.

Peter Bergman 1939-2012

I really wanted to title this obituary, "Waiting for Peter Bergman, or someone like him," which I think he would have appreciated.




Instead, decided to be properly respectful and just reprint the New York Times obit:

Peter Bergman, Satirist With the Firesign Theater, Dies at 72
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: March 9, 2012

Peter Bergman, a founding member of the surrealist comedy troupe Firesign Theater, whose albums became cult favorites among college students in the late 1960s and ’70s for a brand of sly, multilayered satire so dense it seemed riddled with non sequiturs until the second, third or 30th listening, died on Friday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 72.

The cause was complications of leukemia, said Jeff Abraham, a spokesman for the group.

Mr. Bergman hosted an all-night radio call-in show on KPFK in Los Angeles beginning in 1966, “Radio Free Oz,” which served as the testing ground for the high-spirited Firesign sensibility. Phil Austin and David Ossman, two other founders of the four-man group, were the producer and director of the show; the fourth founder, Phil Proctor, was a frequent guest.

“We started out as four friends, up all night, taking calls from people on bad acid trips and having the time of our lives,” Mr. Austin said in a phone interview Friday. “And that’s what we always were: four friends talking.”

Mr. Bergman and his friends recorded their first album, “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” in 1968, followed the next year by “How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All?”

By 1970, their mordant humor and their mastery of stereophonic recording techniques had made them to their generation of 20-somethings what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are to today’s (if Mr. Colbert and Mr. Stewart had a weakness for literary wordplay, psychedelic references and jokes about the Counter-Reformation).

Their records employed sound effects in ways considered pioneering in audio comedy at the time. More generally, they were considered important forerunners of comedy shows like “Saturday Night Live.”

Ed Ward, writing in The New York Times in 1972, described the third Firesign album, “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,” as “a mind-boggling sound drama” and a “work of almost Joycean complexity.”

“It’s almost impossible to summarize any Firesign album,” Mr. Ward wrote, because most of their albums were so filled with “intricate wordplay, stunning engineering and use of sound effects, breakneck pacing and, of course, a terribly complex story line.”

When the Library of Congress placed “Don’t Crush That Dwarf” in its National Recording Registry in 2005, The Los Angeles Times described Firesign Theater as “the Beatles of comedy.”

Mr. Bergman told people the ensemble’s albums, unlike most comedy records, were never made to be listened to just once or twice. “He said our records were made to be heard about 80 times,” Mr. Austin said.

While the ensemble continued making albums for three decades, Mr. Bergman also wrote and produced several one-man shows, including “Help Me Out of This Head,” a 1986 monologue-memoir that drew on his childhood in Cleveland. He also wrote interactive games, including a CD-ROM parody of the popular adventure video game Myst.

Mr. Bergman was born on Nov. 29, 1939, in Cleveland, one of two children of Oscar and Rita Bergman. His parents hosted a radio show in Cleveland when he was growing up, “Breakfast With the Bergmans.” His father also worked as a reporter for The Plain Dealer.

Mr. Bergman graduated from Yale and taught economics there as a Carnegie Fellow. He later attended the Yale School of Drama as a Eugene O’Neill playwriting fellow. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s to pursue a writing career.

He is survived by a daughter, Lily Oscar Bergman, and his sister, Wendy Kleckner.

Mr. Bergman got a taste of radio work when he was in high school, according to a biography on Firesign Theater’s official Web site. But he lost his job as an announcer on the school radio system, it said, “after his unauthorized announcement that the Chinese Communists had taken over the school and that a ‘mandatory voluntary assembly was to take place immediately.’ Russell Rupp, the school principal, promptly relieved Peter of his announcing gig. Rupp was the inspiration for the Principal Poop character on ‘Don’t Crush That Dwarf.’ ”

For good or ill, I hold Bergman and Company responsible for much of my rather bizarre sense of humor.

My consigliere posted the following quote from Bergman on Facebook (originally posted on the Firesign website), and I certainly can't improve on it... could any of us improve on Peter Bergman?:

Take heart, dear friends. We are passing through the darkening of the light. We're gonna make it and we're going to make it together. Don't get ground down by cynicism. Don't let depression darken the glass through which you look. This is a garden we live in. A garden seeded with unconditional love. And the tears of the oppressed, and the tears of the frustrated, and the tears of the good will spring those seeds. The flag has been waived. It says occupy. Occupy Wall Street. Occupy the banks. Occupy the nursing homes. Occupy Congress. Occupy the big law offices. Occupy the lobbyists. Occupy...yourself. Because that's where it all comes together. I pledge to you, from this moment on, whatever it means, I'm going to occupy myself.

I love you. See ya tomorrow.

Ah, he's no fun. He fell right over!

Goodbye old friend. We shall not see your like again.

Jeanne van den Hurk for 3rd Congressional District

Jeanne van den Hurk for Congress! GOOD LUCK, JEANNE!



~*~

Also see New York Times piece: Occupy Movement Regroups, Preparing for Its Next Phase

And our podcast is up. Yall have a listen.

Charlie Sheen: Hero of the hour?

As you have undoubtedly heard, Charlie Sheen's live shows didn't go over so well over the weekend. Practicing alcoholics are never as funny as they think they are, in the long haul. With editing, yes. For a whole show, no. From ABC:

After all but getting booed off stage at the Detroit, Mich. debut of his live show, "My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat Is Not an Option," it's unclear if or how Sheen's month-long tour will proceed.

Anticipation ran high for the event. Ticket holders milled about the Fox Theater in downtown Detroit before the 8 p.m. start time, sometimes yelling Sheen catchphrases like "tiger blood" and "winning" to rev up fellow attendees. As of Saturday afternoon, all 4,700 seats at the theater had been sold.

...

Sheen managed to up the crowd's enthusiasm for the start of his act. Before his official debut, he played a montage of video clips including scenes from "Apocalypse Now," the film starring Sheen's father that Sheen claims to be obsessed with. He then strutted on stage with his "goddesses," Bree Olsen and Natalie Kenly, who proceeded to engage in a passionate kiss, much to the delight of the crowd.

They then went backstage to burn a bowling shirt similar to the one Sheen wore on "Two and a Half Men." While footage of the shirt on fire in a garbage can played on the big screen behind him, Sheen urged the crowd to hold up their lighters, asking, "Doesn't anyone smoke cigarettes anymore?"

The spectacle mirrored the ranting and raving Sheen's done online and in interviews over the past few weeks. But after that, things took a turn for the weird.

Sheen stood at a podium in front of a pseudo-presidential looking seal saying "Warlock States of Sheen" and launched into a nonsensical speech seemingly directed at his critics.

He started, "Tonight I am delivered by cyber cloud, with the stomp and glisten of heaven's produce section." He then talked about burning something "down from the mount of olive" and "gasoline rainbows." He frequently damned "trolls" -- presumably, "Two and a Half Men" creator Chuck Lorre and his former bosses at CBS and Warner Brothers. He called Sarah Palin a "whore" for no apparent reason.

No apparent reason? Of course there is an apparent reason, that you media-swine refuse to take seriously: He's a misogynist pig.

The fact that so many people find his woman-hating amusing and worth celebrating, lets us know exactly how far we have to go.

Anna Holmes' piece in the New York Times, linked above, details all the woman-pounding Charlie has humorously engaged in over the years. And as a rich, privileged white man, he gets by with all of it (paging Chris Brown! Chris Brown, call your office)... and of course, since so many of the women getting pounded are mere actresses, models and sex workers, they 'deserve' it:

A woman’s active embrace of the fame monster or participation in the sex industry, we seem to say, means that she compromises her right not to be assaulted, let alone humiliated, insulted or degraded; it’s part of the deal. The promise of a modern Cinderella ending — attention, fame, the love and savings account of a rich man — is always the assumed goal.

Objectification and abuse, it follows, is not only an accepted occupational hazard for certain women, but something that men like Mr. Sheen have earned the right to indulge in. (Mr. Sheen reportedly once said that he didn’t pay prostitutes for the sex; he paid them “to leave.”)

Haha, ain't that funny? Is he serious or joking?--go the predictable onlooker-comments... ohhh, he's just being funny. Actually, I think he means everything he says, and he has repeatedly proven that he is willing to back it up with a nice right to the jaw, if any nearby female should argue.

Indeed, it’s difficult for many to discern any difference between Mr. Sheen’s real-life, round-the-clock, recorded outbursts and the sexist narratives devised by reality television producers, in which women are routinely portrayed as backstabbing floozies, and dreadful behavior by males is explained away as a side effect of unbridled passion or too much pilsner.

And so, a pricey live show-tour by a woman-hater, or should I say ANOTHER woman-hater (there are oodles of rock stars and hip-hop stars and country-and-western stars who have gotten plenty rich off of women-hating... paging Eminem! paging Ted Nugent! etc) ... and then I see Phyllis Schlafly (barfs for emphasis) on C-Span over the weekend, telling us that feminism is over with and no longer necessary, and what are these harridans and harpies still so pissed off about?

One wonders if she has flipped her channels lately, over to ABC (live video of Charlie at above link) or to the millions of other outlets that have advertised Charlie's zealously-sexist antics over recent months. Hello? What planet is Schlafly on?

They deserve each other, most assuredly.

Haley Watch 3-31-11

At left: Nikki Haley's recent photo in the New York Times magazine.

~*~

Our governor, GOP rising star, continues to bedazzle the nationwide press. Lots of local jabs about the widely-discussed NYT-magazine story (including several from your humble narrator), asking why she won't talk to South Carolina media, but prefers to go national, where she is gushed-over nonstop.

It's a little hard to take.

On the local front, Haley's interesting former gig at Lexington Medical Hospital inspires some impressive old-style investigative sleuthing by Robert Kittle of WSPA in Spartanburg:

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Gov. Nikki Haley says she was only doing the same thing every other member of the Lexington County legislative delegation was doing in pushing for a heart center at Lexington Medical Center, not doing something special for her employer.

While Haley was a state representative, she was hired as a fundraiser for the Lexington Medical Center Foundation. The hospital was trying to get state approval from the Department of Health and Environmental Control to start a heart center.

Emails between Haley and her boss, Lexington Medical CEO Mike Biediger, raise the question of whether Haley was using her position as a lawmaker to try to influence the DHEC vote.

And specifically, Haley's 2008 online job application has raised all kinds of red flags.

She also addressed questions about her application and pay for that job. Her application lists her salary at her parents' clothing store as $125,000 a year, but her tax return for that year shows she made only $22,000.

She says she never put $125,000 on the application and never told anyone that she made that much. While another part of the application has her signature, the part that has her salary history has only her typed name.

But the hospital says it would be difficult for someone else to have added that because they would have to know her work and salary history, Social Security number and other personal information to be able to access the online application. There would also be a password or security question.

Gov. Haley said Monday, "There was no password. The password was where I graduated from high school."

Lexington Medical Center's heart center was eventually approved in 2010.

Hmmmmmm.

From FitsNews, the conservative blog that still isn't having any:

Haley – or a mysterious job application “phantom” – listed her 2007 income at Exotica International (the clothing store run by her parents) at $125,000 and requested that the hospital pay her this same amount. The only problem with Haley’s alleged income declaration? According to federal tax returns – which the Republican candidate belatedly released during the 2010 gubernatorial race – she only reported earning $22,000 from Exotica in 2007.

Haley has repeatedly denied that she filled out the application or provided the $125,000 figure – which she insists is inaccurate. However, the hospital has said it did not alter the submission. In fact, the online resume service that the hospital uses only permits its staff members to view, print or forward the application information.

A hospital spokesperson also told to The (Columbia, S.C.) State newspaper that anyone fraudulently filling out the application “would have had to know (Haley’s) social security number, address, job history, past supervisors, job duties, education and other details.”

The plot thickens.

Will any of this lying duplicity catch up with our popular Tea Party heroine? Will that fawning national press finally turn on her when it is discovered she has never had a real job? Or will that just make her more incredibly wonderful in their eyes: Wow, she was elected governor without ever having a REAL JOB! Is that awesome or what?

As always, stay tuned, sports fans.

Haley the Comet

Nikki Haley photo is from the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE. (Too bad she won't talk to any press in the state where she is actually the GOVERNOR, huh?)

~*~

The New York Times magazine has just named our governor Nikki Haley, "The Comet"--now is that cute or what?

The State newspaper in Columbia writes:

Haley, South Carolina’s Republican governor of one month and a GOP rising star, is the interview subject in today’s New York Times Magazine. (Last week, ABC’s “This Week.” This week, the NYT. Who knows, maybe after she runs out of national mainstream media, which she loves to rip, the governor might speak to the S.C. press that serves her constituents.)

I guess me and Michael Ulmer aren't the only people who have noticed that.

Since everyone is so bedazzled by her on a national scale, maybe she will do a Palin... serve a scant couple of years and GO AWAY. Certainly, I wouldn't argue.

Here is the NYT-mag softball-interview. My favorite quotes:

NYT: You’re said to be incredibly competitive. Outside politics, how does this manifest itself?

Haley: Ask my kids. When we have basketball tournaments, I am the basketball queen. When we play the Wii, I am the bowling queen. And I will forever say that I am the Putt-Putt queen.

NYT: How do you react when you lose?

Haley: I don’t lose, so I don’t have to worry about that.



Them big-city slickers can hardly contain themselves, people. ((rolls eyes)))

Does Arianna really need the money?

Another great one via Yellowdog Granny!



NPR asks a question I am also asked from time to time: Is Writing Online Without Pay Worth It? I usually answer, well, is listening to music worth it? Is TV worth it? Are movies worth it? Is any form of entertainment "worth it"? Obviously, the intrinsic "worth" of these activities depends on who you are and what you enjoy. And let's face it, if one enjoys writing, we are basically entertaining ourselves by blogging. It's very nice to have readers and to feel appreciated, but many of us would do it even if we didn't have any (and have gone for long periods with negligible numbers of readers/feedback).

My late mother, a singer, used to tell me that the world was filled with good singers and good writers, so get used to it. She was right, and I have.

But the NPR piece pointedly reminds us who benefits from our work, for whatever reasons we decide to do it (hint: not us):

Last week, AOL agreed to buy The Huffington Post for $315 million. The sale will undoubtedly make some people rich.

But David Carr, the media columnist for The New York Times, posed this observation in his column on Monday: "The funny thing about all these frothy millions and billions piling up? Most of the value was created by people working free."

Thousands of unpaid writers' work fills the Internet — on websites and social networking platforms.

"As we all twitter away and type away and update our Facebooks, we're creating the coal that sort of fires this oven," Carr tells NPR host Renee Montagne. "And they continue to own the land."

Aye, that's kinda brutal.

What to do?

Sree Sreenivasan tells Renee Montagne of NPR that the important thing in the ongoing media-upheaval is to "stand out":

In a very crowded Internet space where there's so many voices, I think the voices that have some specific point of view, as well as, you know, a reputation that they've built online or elsewhere are going to stand out. And this is - can be a development seen for better or for worse, but that's the situation. So you're seeing that the importance of being able to standout among many, many voices, commentary is one way to go.

I suppose so, but as many of you already realize (since you are on the net reading blogs, and you are here reading mine)--any fool can "stand out"--and some online folks have sold their souls to "stand out" as surely as any rock star ever did. Bloggers traffic in eyeball-time and numbers of page-views/hits, and if an ugly brawl or something dirty brings the traffic? Well, who cares, it's still traffic and it still translates into popularity.

My question is, who is going to do the "real" journalism? Meaning, who will "pound the pavement" and do all that is necessary (and time-consuming) to bring us FACTS and news stories from "on the scene"? Many bloggers try hard and perform splendidly, but simply don't have the resources and/or connections to follow stories around as a paid journalist can.

And why IS mainstream journalism on the skids? What is it about commentary that is so intoxicating to us, vs those boring old 'facts'? Are 'facts' in jeopardy, as a result?

Is it going to be harder and harder to find out what is REALLY going on? Will there be more and more words (from bloggers and TV-busybodies) spilled over fewer and fewer available facts?

What do you think?

Wikileaks tells the truth at last

If you haven't read the Wikileaks Iraq war documents, at least read the NYT synopsis:

According to the synopsis of the WikiLeaks documents by The New York Times, the death toll in 2006 reached beyond 3,000 one month.

Late last year, [Ellen Knickmeyer] sat in on a seminar at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government led by a former Bush official in Iraq and heard her say matter-of-factly that more than 1,000 people died in one day in the immediate killing after the Samarra bombing.

But as the WikiLeaks documents show, Casey and Rumsfeld must have known that all along, owing to the accounts from their forces. Despite the statements of the top U.S. commanders at the time, it wasn’t the journalists in Baghdad who were lying.

Butchers knowingly lying.

Is there anyone left who will defend this war? (John McCain? Sarah Palin?)

Meanwhile, Wikileaks Superhero Julian Assange walked out on a CNN interview when the subject turned to his personal life. People are currently discussing whether that was the right thing for him to do.

And what do you all think?

Going Rogue

The cover of Sarah Palin's book, GOING ROGUE, shows her looking angelically up to heaven. Love the dreamy clouds and the little flag pin. (Iconography ain't just for Catholics anymore!)








How to write about awful Sarah Palin without sounding sexist? It's difficult. As a FEMINIST, it is difficult.

So I'll admit, in this matter, I kinda feel sorry for the guys, trying to come up with new terms for stone-ignorance that sound gender-neutral. Matt Taibbi's "IQ of a celery stalk" is my favorite so far.

Mr Daisy has been watching the Sarah Palin-crowds on YouTube, and that shit is depressing. Celery stalk-level IQs are attracted to Palin, since she is (as she tirelessly reminds us) one of them. Well, you'll certainly get no argument about that from me.

On Bill O'Reilly's show, Palin pluckily responded to David Brooks condescendingly tagging her as "a joke"... and I instantly winced, knowing that a New York Times writer, ANY New York Times writer, is instant hate-material out here in the heartland. In fact, David Brooks will likely be prominently featured in Palin's upcoming, inevitable campaign ads: DAVID BROOKS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES SAID I WAS A JOKE! Pure gold; some people will vote for her for that reason alone.

Matt Taibbi believes political discourse has descended to talk-radio, uber-Twitter level, suitable for the celery stalk-heads:

It doesn’t matter what the argument is about. What’s important is that once the argument starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce around the various instant-cocoa talking points and scream at each other until they’re blue in the face, or until the next argument starts.

And while some of us are old enough to remember that once upon a time, these arguments always had at least some sort of ideological flavor to them, i.e. the throwdowns were at least rooted in some sort of real political issue (war, taxes, immigration, etc.) we’ve now got a whole generation that is accustomed to screaming at cultural enemies as an end in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it. Start fighting first, figure out the reasons later.

Indeed, I have noticed this in Mr Daisy's endless videos of tea-baggers and Sarah Palin groupies. One man insists that Barack Obama translates (!) into "antichrist" in some ancient language; another woman claims she doesn't have health insurance and doesn't need any, by God. One shakes one's head in amazement. Palin would never disown a single one of these people, as Glenn Beck also wouldn't. They openly embrace the fringe, which is the notable new thing. This turns the wacko right-wing fringe into the mainstream, which is their whole goal. It moves the political discourse (one strongly feels the need to write "political discourse" in quotes) to the far right, and makes one unwillingly more comfortable with the Black Helicopter faction.

Taibbi continues:

Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming’s sake generation. The people who dismiss her book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk completely miss the book’s significance, because in some ways it’s really a revolutionary and innovative piece of literature.

Palin — and there’s just no way to deny this — is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust.

The reason for that is that poor Rush is an anachronism, in the sense that his whole schtick revolves around talking about real political issues. And real political issues are boring.

And this might be why Rush infuriates many progressives on a level that Palin can't quite reach. He brings "facts" that sound real enough, and only when one thoroughly investigates, do you see how he bends those pseudo-facts (truthiness!) to suit the conservative agenda.

He works, in short, and to argue with Rush, you have to work, too.

Palin is 100% entertainment, and there is no work involved. As Taibbi points out, Rush makes you think too hard, by comparison:

Listen to Rush any day of the week and you’ll hear him playing the old-fashioned pundit game: he goes about the dreary business of picking through the policies and positions and public statements of Democrats and poking holes in them, arguing with them, attacking them with numbers and facts and pseudo-facts and non-facts and whatever else he can get his hands on, honest or not, but at least he tries. The poor guy nearly killed himself this summer trying to find enough horseshit to arm himself with against the health care bill, coming up with various fairy tales about how state health agencies used death panels to try to kill cancer patients who just wanted to live a little longer, how section 1233 is Auschwitz all over again, yada yada yada.

Rush is no Einstein, but the man does research. It may be fallacious and completely dishonest research, but he does it all the same. His battlefield is world politics and most of the time the relevant action is taking place in Washington. As good as he is at what he does, he still has to travel to the action; he himself isn’t the action.

Sarah Palin’s battlefield, on the other hand, is whatever is happening five feet in front of her face. She is building a political career around the little interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding her sawdust-filled head. And in the process she connects with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America on a plane that’s far more elemental than the mega-ditto schtick.

Most normal people cannot connect on an emotional level with Rush’s meanderings on how Harry Reid is buying off Mary Landrieu with pork in the health care bill. They can, however, connect with stories about how top McCain strategist and Karl Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt told poor Sarah to shut her pie-hole on election day, or how her supposed allies in the McCain campaign stabbed her in the back by leaking gossip about her to reporters, how Schmidt used the word “fuck” in front of her daughter, or even with the strange tales about Schmidt ordering Sarah to consult with a nutritionist to improve her campaign endurance when she herself knew she just needed to get out in the fresh air and run (If there’s one thing Sarah Palin knows, it’s herself!).

Grudge politics, perverted populism in these difficult economic times... tempered by just the right notes, such as having a prayerful dinner with Billy Graham.

Meanwhile, the left is bringing up the rear on the entertainment front. The left is sounding like wonky Rush and talking about, you know, solutions.

In this atmosphere, the only thing left to do is have at her. Eat her for dinner, engage in the same hateful nastiness that she engages is. Ridicule. But be careful. Do not be sexist, do not be ableist (concerning her disabled son Trig, although I think making fun of his name and calling him Twig is okay), do not be anti-large-family, anti-Christian, anti-Pentecostal or anti-rural. Got that? Because most lefties don't get it. Every time you engage in that behavior? She sees your anti-progressive hypocrisy and successfully uses it against us. "See?" she says to the rural hockey moms, "they really are making fun of us." And she's right.

Then again, I admit it is often too much to resist. I laughed my ass off at the Village Voice's fake "excerpts" from Palin's book:

If I wasn't so gosh-darned busy raising all my kids, I would have paid better attention to all that entrepreneural jazz. But you mothers know how that goes: you buy a car wash, and then little Plug has a loose tooth and little Geezer lost his mittens and before you know it, guess what -- the darned cars aren't getting washed, and you have to sell the thing off for a profit! And there was Todd so busy building our house out of sticks he found while he was snowmobiling, I couldn't go off playing with businesses. So I said, "Doggone-it, I'm gonna stay right here, mend socks, wipe noses, and such like." But then one day I was clipping coupons for Sunny D and I saw the ad in the paper that said they were looking for a new Mayor for Wasilla, and I guess I just got a wild hair in me.

On David Letterman:

We get to bed early in Alaska, as we have to be up before dawn to catch and skin moose, so I never saw his show. But when we heard those awful things he said about Willow, I looked up some pictures of him, and sure enough, he was the spitting image of that gap-toothed man I saw years ago when I was shopping with Willow at Out of the Closet, who offered her a Mars Bar and then reached down and rubbed her little butt. I still remember how he ran and jumped into a helicopter while I screamed and several good citizens came at him with sticks. Also, a friend played me the theme music from the show and I would swear to you it was the same music that helicopter was playing as it flew away. Folks, this is the kind of thing we're up against!

Okay, funny! But one has to walk a fine line in that kind of satire, and I think Roy Edroso (author of those pieces) managed to succeed in doing that.

As popular as she is right now, I don't have a clue how to stop her. Let's hope she's a phase, like this year's fashion or Reality-TV show... which I guess is what she really is.

"We're all birthers now": The Capricorn One faction of the GOP

While chatting with a Republican friend yesterday, I asked him jokingly if he was a birther now.

I was thinking of Dwight MacDonald's well-known quote from the 50s, often repeated: "We're all anti-communists now," which was a reaction to Stalin. It meant that one could readily admit the obvious truth, regardless of how zealously socialist one had been in one's youth (as Macdonald, former Trotskyist, had been).

My usually-reasonable friend shocked me, "I wish he [Obama] would just answer questions," he answered.

Oh dear God.

Answer questions about WHAT? My temper flared unexpectedly; I could hardly believe my well-mannered friend had been hanging out in the Area 51 of American talk-radio politics. What the hell is going on? ...John McCain, I sputtered, was born in PANAMA and nobody even mentioned it!

"John McCain isn't president now, or maybe they would," he replied, evenly.

Does anyone believe that?

Has any other president been expected to answer questions about whether they were born in the USA?

What are we going to do with these people?

The only thing that will totally satisfy them would be a Polaroid snapshot of a Hawaiian pediatric nurse holding up a baby Barack in a neonatal unit, under a sign that says "Welcome to Honolulu!" and a 1961 wall calendar.

Even then, I can imagine the birthers enlarging the Polaroid and deciding with various computer-aging technology: it isn't really him. Wrong biracial Hawaiian-born baby boy! (Lou Dobbs pointedly asks: Who is it really?)

The New York Times calls them fringe, but having once been on the (lefty) fringe, I know how fringe works. You just keep repeating the fringe-wisdom, until the people closer to the center pick up on it. Finally, the center-left or center-right latches on to it, and what is fringe is suddenly conventional wisdom and is treated seriously on "60 Minutes."

Or in the New York Times.

Well, maybe that's good, you say. A thorough investigation could put the matter to rest.

HA HA HA - are you kidding? Have you never seen Capricorn One? Do you know who the Sedevacantists are? Does anyone really believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?

We are talking about FAITH, people, not facts. Faith transcends facts. Faith is about the need to believe.

From Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times (which is undoubtedly part of the liberal conspiracy):

There are no living family members to testify to the events of Aug. 4, 1961, at the Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu. The president’s parents are both deceased, as are his grandparents, who played a significant role in raising him.

But Mr. Abercrombie, who has represented Hawaii for nearly two decades in Congress, was a close friend of Mr. Obama’s parents, who were students at the University of Hawaii in 1961. The president’s father, Barack H. Obama Sr., was from Kenya, but Mr. Abercrombie said the suggestion that the Obama baby was born in Africa is an absurd impossibility.

“He was born in Kapiolani Hospital, right down the street from where I lived,” Mr. Abercrombie said. “They had no money. I can’t imagine how they would get to Kenya. It makes no sense at all. It’s an insult to his mother.”

Questions have been swirling around about Mr. Obama’s biography — largely on the internet and on conservative radio and television broadcasts — since shortly after he announced his presidential bid in early 2007. They were researched by his Democratic and Republican opponents alike, all of whom determined there was no legitimacy to the speculation that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya.

To satisfy the doubters, the Obama campaign released a copy of his Hawaiian birth certificate during the presidential race. But the fact that it was a copy and not the original, which according to Hawaii law cannot be released publicly, did not quell the furor. So the director of the Department of Health in Hawaii, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, released a statement last fall, and again last month, attesting to the authenticity of the president’s birth.

And this hasn't mattered a whit to the birthers. They remain unconvinced. Of course they are. As I said, this is about FAITH.

Zeleny mentions the recent skirmishes on MSNBC, which have given the birthers a platform--ostensibly to make them look like conspiracy-theory-wackos. Unfortunately, any time you give fringe-folks a platform, you increase their respectability and influence.

The number of birthers increases every time they get press and media.

Orly Taitz, a California dentist and lawyer who is among the leading voices in the anti-Obama movement, made her case in a combative interview on MSNBC.

“Obama is completely illegitimate as a U.S. president for two reasons — not only because he did not provide the place of his birth, but also because both parents have to be U.S. citizens,” Ms. Taitz said. “His father was never a U.S. citizen. He was in the United States on a student visa.”

The White House, awash in several real political challenges, has largely ignored the noise. Last week, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was asked by a liberal talk radio host, Bill Press, whether there was anything the White House could do to satisfy the critics and make the issue go away.

“No, the God’s honest truth is no,” Mr. Gibbs said, calling it “made-up fictional nonsense.”

“If I had some DNA, it wouldn’t assuage those who don’t believe he was born here,” Mr. Gibbs said as anger welled in his voice. “The president was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, the 50th state of the greatest country on the face of the earth.”

I suggest the Capricorn One strategy: reduce these people to buffoons and laugh-a-minute conspiracy-theorists. Giving them a "fair hearing" has been completely wrong. Can we start talking about how the moon landing was faked, too? (And how about the Holocaust?) Will people be allowed on mainstream cable TV news-shows to discuss those views? And why not? I've heard those theories my whole life, why can't they get some exposure to the masses?

Because they are CRACKPOT BULLSHIT, is why. Leave the search for Erich von Däniken's alien ancestors to the Scientologists and the goofier cable channels, okay? There is no reason to litter up REAL NEWS STATIONS with stories of why the moon landing was faked.

Please stop fueling this. Stop the insanity!

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Mr President. Truly, you are Leo personified. Have a wonderful 48th year.

...


More on what I have decided to label the Capricorn One faction of the GOP:

Elected Birthers on the Hill (Huffington Post)

Anti-Obama 'birther' movement gathers steam (UK Guardian)

Obama Citizenship Poll: Things Get Weird In The GOP Base (The Atlantic)

How fact-free claims about Obama's citizenship gained mainstream currency (KansasCity.com)

Low-Calorie Diet May Extend Life in Primates

I am still a fan of calorie restriction, even though I am personally rather slack at it.

The New York Times has some exciting news for us CRONies:


Low-Calorie Diet May Extend Life in Primates

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: July 9, 2009

A long-awaited study of aging in rhesus monkeys suggests, with some reservations, that people could in principle fend off the usual diseases of old age and considerably extend their life span by following a special diet.

Known as caloric restriction, the diet has all the normal healthy ingredients but contains 30 percent fewer calories than usual. Mice kept on such a diet from birth have long been known to live up to 40 percent longer than comparison mice fed normally.

Would the same be true in people? More than 20 years ago, two studies of rhesus monkeys were started to see if primates respond to caloric restriction the same way that rodents do. Since rhesus monkeys live an average of 27 years and a maximum of 40, these are experiments that require patience.

The results from one of the two studies, conducted by a team led by Ricki J. Colman and Richard Weindruch at the University of Wisconsin, were reported on Thursday in Science. The researchers say that now, 20 years after the experiment began, the monkeys are showing many beneficial signs of caloric resistance, including significantly less diabetes, cancer, and heart and brain disease. “These data demonstrate that caloric restriction slows aging in a primate species,” they conclude.

Some critics say this conclusion is premature. But in an interview, Dr. Weindruch called it “very good news.”

“It says much of the biology of caloric restriction is translatable into primates,” he said, “which makes it more likely it would apply to humans.”

In terms of deaths, 37 percent of the comparison monkeys have so far died in ways judged due to old age, compared with 13 percent of the dieting group, a difference that is statistically significant.

Dr. Weindruch and his statistician, David Allison of the University of Alabama, said the dieting monkeys are expected to enjoy a life span extension of 10 to 20 percent, based on equivalent studies started in mice at the same age.

Most normal people cannot in fact keep to a diet with 30 percent fewer calories than usual. So biologists have been looking for drugs that might mimic the effects of caloric restriction, conferring the gain without the pain. One of these drugs is resveratrol, a substance found in red wine, though in quantities too small to have any effect.

Dr. Weindruch said the study data offered “very encouraging” signs that resveratrol could duplicate in people some of the effects of caloric restriction.

Critics, however, are not yet ready to accept that the rhesus study proves caloric restriction works in primates.

If caloric restriction can delay aging, then there should have been significantly fewer deaths in the dieting group of monkeys than in the normally fed comparison group. But this is not the case. Though a fewer number of dieting monkeys have died, the difference is not statistically significant, the Wisconsin team reports.

The Wisconsin researchers say that some of the monkey deaths were not related to age and can properly be excluded. Some monkeys died under the anesthesia given while taking blood samples. Some died from gastric bloat, a disease that can strike at any age, others from endometriosis. When the deaths judged not due to aging are excluded, the dieting monkeys lived significantly longer.

Some biologists think it is reasonable to exclude these deaths, but others do not. Steven Austad, an expert on aging at the University of Texas Health Science Center, said that some deaths could be due to caloric restriction, even if they did not seem to be related to aging. “Ultimately the results seem pretty inconclusive at this point,” he said. “I don’t know why they didn’t wait longer to publish.”

Leonard Guarente, a biologist who studies aging at M.I.T., also had reservations about the findings. “The survival data needs to be fleshed out a little bit more before we can say that caloric restriction extends life in primates,” he said. In mouse studies, people just count the number of dead animals without asking which deaths might be unrelated to aging, he said.

The second rhesus monkey study, being conducted by the National Institute on Aging, is not as far advanced as the Wisconsin study. The researchers have not yet reported on the number of deaths in the dieting and normal monkey groups. But there are signs that the immune system is holding up better in the dieting group, said Julie Mattison, the leader of the N.I.H. study.

The outcome of the rhesus monkey studies bears strongly on the prospects of finding drugs that might postpone the aging process in people. Although people are unexpectedly similar to mice in many ways, they differ in other ways, notably cancer, a disease in which many treatments that are effective in mice do not work in people.

Even if caloric restriction extends longevity in people as well as mice, the extent of the effect remains unclear, though Dr. Weindruch believes the effects will be in the same general range. His monkeys were not started on the diet until 6 to 14 years of age, and seem to be doing as well as mice that are started at equivalent ages. The most striking extensions of life span occur only when the mice are put on the diet from birth.

Dietary restriction seems to trigger an ancient strategy written into all animal genomes, that when food is scarce resources should be switched from breeding to tissue maintenance. In recent years biologists have had considerable success in identifying the mechanisms by which cells detect the level of nutrients available to the body. The goal is to find drugs that trick these mechanisms into thinking that famine is at hand. People could then literally have their cake and eat it, enjoying the health benefits of caloric restriction without the pain of forgoing rich foods.

Read the whole thing.

Free the Weed!

Fox News called us all trolls for trying to free the weed.

We should take it as a compliment!

The story, from NORML:

On three separate occasions, the White House has asked the public to provide them with feedback on the top public policy questions facing the nation. And on three separate occasions, the leading question for the new administration — as chosen on and voted by the American public — pertained to the legalization of marijuana.

One might examine these results and conclude that marijuana law reform is an issue that is becoming increasingly popular with America’s voters. Of course if you’re Fox News, you interpret these results another way:

Obama's Effort at Online Transparency Stymied by Internet Trolls

“Three and a half million people participated in the event, but the ‘trolls’ had their way: Following a coordinated campaign by marijuana advocates to vote their topic to the top of the list, questions on the future of the U.S. dollar and the rising unemployment rate were superseded by questions about legalizing pot as an economic remedy.”

Got to hand it to the folks at Fox. (PS: For the record, Wired makes the same accusation!) National polls show that the public’s support for legalization has never been greater. Leading political and media pundits are now demanding that we end the criminal prohibition of pot. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, the old guard at Fox News cynically clings to the notion that nobody supports taxing and regulating marijuana aside from a handful of “Internet trolls.” We report, you decide, huh?

Of course, Fox News didn’t come up with this spin on their own. After all, it was White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs — yes, the same Robert Gibbs who couldn’t come up with one valid reason to oppose regulating pot besides “uh” — who initially tried to downplay the popularity of marijuana law reform, telling the New York Times that “advocates for legalizing marijuana, … includ[ing] NORML, had mounted a drive to rack up votes for the question.”

So let’s set the record straight shall we?

For the record, NORML did not engage in any deliberate campaign to "rack up votes" through the use of list-servs or their thousands of e-zine subscribers, nor did they even circulate information about the poll to the oodles of reefer-heads on their Facebook and Myspace websites.

No campaign, I repeat. THIS IS FROM THE PEOPLE; THIS IS REAL. As Paul Armentano of NORML writes:

The simple explanation for the White House poll results is this: Marijuana law reform is immensely popular with the public. That’s why we win initiatives — time and time again. And that’s why when the public is asked whether they support ending prohibition they say ‘yes’ — in overwhelming numbers!

As my colleague Scott Morgan writes at stopthedrugwar.org: “This is a movement, and it isn’t going away. Our issue is bigger than the organizations backing it.” He’s right.

Americans are demanding a serious and objective political debate regarding the merits of legalizing marijuana. They have come to this conclusion on their own — simply by witnessing the failure of the drug war all around them.

It seems that these politicians (even the ones with their fingers perpetually in the air, kissing voter ass and endlessly angling for re-election) don't understand how incredibly FED UP everyone is, tired of WASTING MONEY BUSTING POT SMOKERS.

The economy is in the shitter, and there is a cannabis cash cow beckoning. Why can't they see it? What is taking them so long?

There is money to be had, and time is wasting.

The case of Lance Cpl. Walter R. Smith

Left: Nicole Speirs, from ksl.com.


The disturbing, heart-wrenching story of Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith was featured in the New York Times on Sunday. I found it so upsetting, I had to read it in shifts. It made me cry. One life taken and another life shattered--and to what end?

For every war ever fought, there are Walter Smiths, the uncounted war casualties.

And let's not forget his victim, Nicole Speirs, the 22-year-old mother of his twin children, whom he drowned in the bathtub, for no apparent reason that anyone can understand.

Mr. Smith confessed to the killing at a Veterans Affairs hospital, which immediately set his crime in the context of his deployment and of a growing concern about care for veterans with combat stress. The fact that Mr. Smith was discharged from the Marines for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, made the prosecutor reluctant to bring the case to a jury.

“Did we want to go through a trial where basically we were going to have to defend the United States’ actions on how they treated him?” Mr. Searle said.

Nobody believes that Mr. Smith’s killing of Ms. Speirs can be justified. But many involved in the case have wondered aloud, at some point, whether Ms. Speirs’s life might have been spared if the marine’s combat trauma had been treated more aggressively.

Understandably, Nicole's family is having none of it.

“When they mention Nicole, it’s like an aside,” Mr. Speirs said, his voice quiet, his emotion muted. “I feel like a lot of people are using her death as something against the war. They practically are like saying that President Bush killed Nicole. Well, Walter killed Nicole. The war can be a factor. It’s not a reason or an excuse for it.”

Mr. Smith himself, in a long, dry-eyed interview in October, almost agreed. “I can’t completely, honestly say that, yes, PTSD was the sole cause of what I did,” he said, speaking through a plastic partition in a courthouse holding cell. “I don’t want to use it as a crutch. I’d feel like I was copping out of something I claim responsibility for. But I know for a fact that before I went to Iraq, there’s no way I would have taken somebody else’s life.”

I believe him.

In high school, Walter Smith was a typical geek, belonging to the math club and chess club. He played in the school band and sang in the school choir. The Times describes him as having been "a squeaky-clean Mormon boy," and by all accounts I have read, this seems largely accurate. One of 12 children, he didn't smoke or drink and almost decided on a Latter Day Saints mission abroad, rather than enlisting in the military.

Yet at a high school career day, Mr. Smith was drawn to the Marine Corps booth partly because the military seemed like a departure from a preordained path. “Growing up LDS,” he said, using the abbreviation for Latter-day Saints, “you’re pretty much told what you’re going to do. At the age of 19, the young men are supposed to go off on mission.”

In early 2000, Mr. Smith went off to boot camp instead, enlisting in the Reserves, like many other young Mormon recruits, so that he retained the option of mission duty.

Mr. Smith made an impression on the recruiters, scoring in the 99th percentile on the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery tests, said Christopher Nibley, a fellow reservist from Utah. “I was doing a stint in the recruiting office then,” Mr. Nibley said, “and I remember a recruiter saying, ‘Damn, that boy is so smart!’ ”

After deployment, the turning point appeared to be April 8, 2003, described by the Times correspondent as one of the war's "furious engagements."

I guess that's one way to put it:

As dawn broke just outside Baghdad, they woke to find themselves staring at Armageddon, as Mr. Nibley said, with fires burning, helicopters shooting rockets and explosions echoing through the early-morning air. Entering the city, they climbed down from their trucks and fanned out. While the first platoon to move forward took fire immediately — with one marine shot through his helmet — others found themselves walking into the arms of exultant Iraqis.

Before long, however, as they arrived at a five-point intersection near the Republican Guard headquarters and the Defense Ministry, the cheering civilians disappeared, traffic vanished and the streets turned ghostly. As they set up roadblocks, rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire began whizzing toward them from the heavily defended compounds.

“I felt like I was in the middle of a duck shoot and we were the ducks,” said Mr. Smith, who was a SAW — squad automatic weapon — gunner. “I don’t know how many R.P.G.’s we took. One landed about five feet to the right of me and my buddy. I don’t know how it it did not detonate, but instead it bounced. Bounced! I can’t believe we’re still alive.”

The fighting did not let up for many hours. “Whether or not I actually killed anybody with my own bullets, I don’t know,” Mr. Smith said. “I suspect so. But there were two to 12 guns going off at once, and only the snipers knew for sure.” At a certain point, the Iraqi fighters commandeered civilians’ cars, taking them hostage and ordering them to drive straight at the Marine positions. The marines were forced to shoot at everything headed their way.

“We were opening fire on civilians,” Mr. Smith said. “We were taking out women and children because it was them or us.”

Sergeant Major Lopez, his superior officer, said that his marines were “put in that position” and “trained to protect themselves first.”

“Our marines tried to limit civilian casualties,” he said. “Not a person there didn’t feel bad. But it had to be done.”

That day traumatized the reservists. [Christopher] Quiñones recalled a father carrying toward them the limp body of a young child. His voice cracking, he described a 5-year-old boy screaming as his car “turned into Swiss cheese.”

“I called cease-fire and I wanted to run and grab him, but there were machine gun rounds flying all around,” Mr. Quiñones said. “I watched this kid’s head get blown away, his brains splattering while his screams still echoed. Those images haunt me — haunt many of us — to this day.”

After returning home, Walter reported to the rifle range in Quantico, Virginia, with a friend from Fox company, the combined Salt Lake City-Las Vegas battalion nicknamed the Saints and Sinners:

Raising his rifle, he stared through the scope and started shaking. What he saw were not the inanimate targets before him but vivid, hallucinatory images of Iraq: “the cars coming at us, the chaos, the dust, the women and children, the bodies we left behind,” he said.

Each time he squeezed the trigger, Mr. Smith cried, harder and harder until he was, in his own words, “bawling on the rifle range, which marines just do not do.” Mortified, he allowed himself to be pulled away. And not long afterward, the Marines began processing his medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder, severing his link to the Reserve unit that anchored him and sending him off to seek help from veterans hospitals.

This treatment infuriated his fellow soldier, Christopher Nibley:

“All I ever heard was Walter went nuts on the firing range, and then I never see this guy again until I see his picture on the front page looking like Grizzly Adams because he killed his girlfriend,” his fellow reservist Mr. Nibley said.

Mr. Nibley, who describes himself as adrift after two tours of duty in Iraq, said he was infuriated to learn later that Mr. Smith had been processed for discharge.

“I can’t tell you how angry I am at the Marine Corps that they just fast-tracked him out,” Mr. Nibley said. “It’s the culture and mentality of: ‘We don’t want a loser on our team. We’re not here to help you, you’re here to help us.’ ”

“I understand that we’re an infantry unit and if you’re not able to carry a gun and go into combat, that’s a problem,” Mr. Nibley said. “But we were his anchors, and we would have been his advocates. He was a mentally injured person because of his service to this country. He should not have been kicked out to go off on his own and deal with it all outside.”

Walter didn't deal. Although he resumed his job at the Wal-mart, he was also severely shaken by the divorce of his parents. He saw a psychiatrist on a few occasions at an Air Force base in Utah, and attended a group session for returning veterans, in which he felt out of place:

“I’m sitting there and these guys are talking about the hard time they’re having because their supply unit heard some fire one time,” he said. “They never saw their buddies get hit. They never killed anybody. They had nothing to worry about. I never went back.”

He started taking various medications, which did nothing to help him. He stopped taking them.

“Nothing seemed to quiet the storm in my head,” he said. “I started having nightmares and flashbacks or hallucinations. During the day, I was functioning O.K., but I was feeling antsy. I couldn’t find peace.”

Two things helped: drinking — 18 to 24 cans a day of Utah’s lower-alcohol beer — and pulling a trigger. “One day, I went out skeet shooting with a buddy, and I realized I felt so much better having a shotgun in my hand and watching something explode,” he said. He bought three guns of his own.

At one point, Walter became suicidal, took his guns and fled to the nearby mountains:

Mr. Smith left goodbye messages for everyone in his cellphone directory. One of his Fox Company buddies was awake, though, and took his call. He forced Mr. Smith to tell him his location and then he called the Pleasant Grove police. The police intercepted Mr. Smith near a trail head for Mount Timpanogos, and when he saw the officers approaching, he loaded his shotgun. He later told a close friend that he had been hoping for “suicide by cop.”

The police did not oblige. Capt. Cody Cullimore, the former assistant police chief, said Mr. Smith was compliant. He was taken to a mental health center and admitted briefly for observation.

“Sometimes I think,” Mr. Smith said, “that if I had taken my life that day, I would have saved Nicole’s.”

Walter began meeting women on MySpace, which is where he met Nicole.

Chillingly, the Times describes several alarming warning signs that were ignored.

In November, Mr. Smith called the Pleasant Grove police asking for help. The officer who was dispatched to his house was the one who had intervened in his suicide attempt five months earlier. Mr. Smith advised the officer “that he was having thoughts of taking the life of his girlfriend while she was asleep,” Captain Cullimore said. “He asked to be transferred to the hospital, which he was.”

Nicole Speirs became pregnant with twins, which Walter did not believe were his. He met another woman, but it ended badly:

One night, he came home with duct tape and demanded that the woman accompany him to the basement, said Mr. Searle, the prosecutor. Once downstairs, Mr. Smith turned to the woman and implored her to get away from him quickly before he did her harm. She ran away. The couple broke up. In a further sign of his deterioration, Mr. Smith filed for bankruptcy and moved in with a marine buddy.

Seven months after their twins were born, Walter re-connected with Nicole. He saw photos of their babies on MySpace, "smiling out at him like carbon copies of his own baby pictures." Nicole, raising twins alone, was ecstatic that Walter had come back to her.

They moved into an apartment together in Tooele. Both of them were working at Wal-Mart, she as a cashier at the Tooele store, he as the manager of the photo lab at the West Jordan store. They did not fight, according to their friends and families, and “he was not mean to her,” said Pauline Speirs, her mother.

And just like that, something snapped inside Walter. Reading the account, you are grateful young Nicole did not see it coming, and probably didn't fully understand what was happening. (I like to think she didn't, anyway.)

In the post-midnight hours of March 25, 2006, the couple took a bath after making love. Ms. Speirs turned to rinse her hair under the faucet, and Mr. Smith pushed her head underwater and held it there until she died. Then he left her in the tub, dressed, fetched the twins, put them in their car seats and drove off, as planned, to a family reunion in Idaho.

Obviously, Walter had lost touch with reality, even leaving a message on Nicole's cellphone that he would be returning early from Idaho. The water was still running when he returned, and he lifted Nicole's body out of the tub, performing CPR. He called 911. He called her parents and without emotion, told them their daughter was dead.

Walter had no record of arrests, not even a traffic violation. There was no history of domestic violence; neighbors had never even heard them raise their voices to each other. He was not a suspect, and besides that, Tooele, Utah, doesn't even have a homicide team. Nicole's death was officially listed as "a drowning from unknown causes."

Walter drew attention to himself during the funeral, as he showed no emotion. He commented that he had seen a lot of death, and it didn't affect him anymore.

Walter then began a relationship with Michelle Zeller, who describes Walter's further descent, as he alternately slept for long periods, only to awaken with tremors. He decided to try more counseling, and finally, went to the VA hospital and confessed to the murder.

At first Mr. Searle, the prosecutor, was cautious. “I didn’t want to just take his confession based on his history that we knew,” he said. Doubt was planted in part by something that Mr. Smith said to the police: “The biggest thing I want to get out of this is help.”

Further, when Matthew Jube, the lawyer hired by Walter Smith’s family, asked Mr. Smith what had happened, Mr. Smith asked him “which version” of events, the one that he had told the police or the one that he saw in his dreams. Mr. Jube began to think that Mr. Smith had given a false confession as a “cry for help,” motivated partly by guilt, both over his relationship with Ms. Speirs and about his killing of civilians in Iraq

Left: Walter Smith at his sentencing, photo from the New York Times.

A manslaughter plea was negotiated, which according to state guidelines, means a sentence of one to 15 years. At his sentencing, he mumbled and didn't want to speak, but finally did:

“I didn’t plan on doing what I did,” he said quietly. “I wish I could take it back, but I know I can’t. All I can say is I’m sorry. I’m not asking for leniency.”

The judge asked him to turn and address his victim’s parents directly.

“I’m sorry,” he said to them, his head falling down once more. “There’s nothing else I can say beside that.” His face crumpled, his voice cracked and his eyes watered. “I couldn’t ask for better people to raise my children,” the former marine continued, adding yet again, as his and her relatives wept, “I’m sorry.”

We're sorry, too, Walter, that we have not been vigilant as a society. We are negligent, we have sinned; we haven't halted this brutal insanity. We are sorry, too, Nicole, that your life was taken from you, as so many other women and children's lives have been taken, by this sordid, immoral, disgusting, reprehensible act of butchery that is the Iraq War.

Sorry is the word.

BRING THEM HOME NOW!

----------------
Listening to: Nina Simone - I Shall Be Released
via FoxyTunes