When, exactly, did right-wing religious screwball James Dobson, the fruitcake who claims that homosexuality 'will destroy the Earth', among other idiocies, get to be 'the nation's most influential evangelical leader'? When the NYT says so. And why would the NYT want to elevate a fringe wacko to star status? Because Dobson's threats against Bush and the Democrats wouldn't be much of a story if they acknowledged that Dobson is out there where the buses don't run.

Dobson, you see, who claims to be not just a minister but a child psychologist (that's a degree I want to see for myself), has just demanded approval of any SCOTUS nominees Bush might name in his second term, and threatened to attack any Democrats who dare to filibuster or vote against nominees he finds acceptable. If he wasn't 'the nation's most influential evangelical leader', who would care?

Dobson's Focus on the Family evangelicals are the ones responsible for 98% of the complaints to the FCC about Janet Jackson's tit and other insults to Dobson's supposed piety, the same complaints about our lack of 'moral values' that have received so much attention lately. Jimmie-Boy has a lot of influence with Michael Powell, maybe, but that's not saying much. Or does whining the loudest now prove you're the one with the greatest 'influence'? Does Dobson wield more 'influence' than fellow Christianists Falwell and Robertson? With whom, may one ask? The millionaire wingers who donated $150Mil to FF last year? The million people he claims have 'joined' his organization? That turns out to be the number of email addresses in his data bank. It's a paltry number compared to your average spammer; does that mean the NYT is going to decide that one of the many relatives of Sonny Abacha is 'Nigeria's most influential industrialist'?

There is real reporting in the NYT still--check out the series on China currently running--but this tripe doesn't qualify. Apparently the Times saves most of its waning interest in old-fashioned reporting for foreign issues because its domestic coverage is sinking deeper into mere sycophancy every day. Pretty soon we'll be able to play a game with the NYT called 'How Many Ways Did the Times Kiss the Bush Ass Today?', and the one who finds the most will get a free subscription to the Guardian so they can see what a real newspaper used to look like.

I long ago gave on making resolutions for New Year's. It's an exercise in futility and frustration, and at this stage in my life, pointless--whatever I am, I am, for better or worse. No, it's much more fun to suggest resolutions that other people should make. It's always clearer how lives can be improved when you're looking at them from the outside. So, without further ado, we present:

MICK'S TOP TEN NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTONS OTHER PEOPLE SHOULD MAKE IN ORDER TO PROMOTE A HEALTHIER, HAPPIER PLANET

10. Ashton Kutcher should resolve to do something more meaningful with his life, like dog-walking or pest control. The Boy-Toy Thang is getting old.

9. Pervez Musharraf should resolve to decide once and for all whose side he's on.

8. Tom DeLay should resolve to finally have that heart transplant he's been needing and let them install one.

7. Britney Spears should resolve to start acting her age.

6. Ariel Sharon should resolve to retire to Palm Beach and devote the rest of his life to sitting quietly in a corner with his needlepoint.

5. Bill Gates should resolve to spend the next year standing on a stool in Times Square, apologizing to anyone who walks by.

4. Steven Spielberg should resolve to leave serious film-making to serious film-makers.

3. Dick Cheney should resolve to leave his crypt in the daytime. Just once....

2. Condi Rice should resolve to admit in public her long-standing affair with Junior and, while she's at it, challenge Laura to a duel. Everybody knows she wants to.

And the Number One New Year's Resolution Someone Else Should Make In Order to Promote a Healthier, Happier Planet:

1. George W Bush (well, you knew that was coming, didn't you?) should resolve to find his natural level of competence and resign the presidency in order to become the assistant manager of a branch bank in West Alice.

Bonus Group Resolution:

• The Democratic Leadership Council should resolve to dissolve after acknowledging that they've only been right twice in the last 25 years, and both times it was an accident.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! (Yeah, right.)

Dear Leader, caught once again demonstrating forcefully how little interest he has in other countries, especially when the people who live in them are poor, is back-pedaling furiously and making savage grunting noises which are being interpreted by people who don't know him as 'compassion'.

[O]n Wednesday, Mr. Bush made his first public comments since tsunamis inundated about a dozen countries on Sunday, reflecting pressure on the vacationing president to appear more engaged in what aid groups are calling one of the worst natural disasters in history.

“These past few days have brought loss and grief to the world that is beyond our comprehension,” he said at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., adding that Washington was prepared to contribute much more than the $35 million it initially pledged.

“We are committed to helping the affected countries in the difficult weeks and months that lie ahead,” Mr. Bush said. He said the United States would work closely with Japan, India and Australia to coordinate relief efforts.
(emphasis added)

The two giveaways are bolded:

1) 'appear more engaged'. Not be more engaged, just appear to be. The illusion of appearances is everything with this Admin; the reality has no meaning at all.

2) Friendly NYT reporting. The Emperor did NOT pledge $35Mil 'initially'. He pledged an even stingier $15Mil; they upped it to $35M only after being publicly embarrassed about their lame, offhand response, a response that smacked of a town devastated by a hurricane going to its richest citizen for help and having him generously offer $100 for blankets before heading out on the back nine at the local country club.

I've got 20 bucks says that in a few weeks, when the tsunami story is off the front pages, the Emperor will quietly--on a Friday afternoon, most likely--do what he did to NYC after 9/11: there, he promised $20Mil when he was standing on the WTC rubble with his arm around a fireman 'and more of it's needed.' Then, back in Washington, he cut it to $5Mil, saying 'we can't afford more.' The promise got acres of publicity; the broken promise got a mention here and there.

Anybody who expects this president to keep a promise like this hasn't been paying atention. So--any takers?

As The Emperor Bush uses his 'mandate' to accelerate the process of Sovietizing American govt, turning the cabinet into a corporate-style league of yes-men and boot-lickers whose loyalty to his limited vision and plutocratic ideals is more important than their expertise (on the rare occasions when they have any) and the Congress into a rubber-stamp Politburo that exists only to ratify his wishes and then shut the hell up like good little toadies, Iraq is in freefall, the economy is stagnant, and the US is gaining a world-wide reputation in the wake of the latest earthquake disaster as stingy, mean, and so unconcerned about the fate of anyone other than his campaign contributors' base of oligarchs and corporate honchos that our 'president' could respond to the deaths of thousands by going on vacation and watching it all on tv between rounds of golf.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a country run by a cross between Ebeneezer Scrooge, Draco Malfoy, and Don Knotts. It's beyond embarrassing. It's humiliating. The Emperor's 'war on the cheap' means sending troops into battle without weapons. It means institutionalizing torture to get 'information' (probably lousy, unusable information because most of what's gained by torture is) because developing human assets and technological intelligence gathering is too expensive. And it means relying on 'inside information' from and the help of people who 1) lie to you, 2) promptly lie about lying to you once they're caught, and 3) turn against you as soon as they've got what they wanted from you.

Case in point: Ahmad Chalabi. (Yes, I'm back on him again.)

Evidence is mounting that either a) insurgents have deeply penetrated the Iraqi police and military structures, or b) growing numbers of Iraqis in each organization are going over. The suicide attack in Mosul last week was almost certainly an inside job, aided, abetted, and even carried out by individuals within the security forces.

Sources said a strong nexus between Iraqi forces and the resistance is what allowed them to carry out the most devastating attack on US troops since the beginning of the invasion. US forces have imposed a curfew in Mosul and have launched a military operation in the city, but, the sources say, this will have little effect on the problem, for the simple reason that the US-trained Iraqi military is heavily infected with people loyal to the resistance groups.

The bureaucracy that does the vetting is controlled by friends and allies of our old friend Ahmad, who spent the first year of the Occupation using the files of the Iraqi secret police that we gave him to blackmail, extort, intimidate, and otherwise force his people into positions of bureaucratic control. His son Saleem is all but in charge of the nascent Iraqi judicial system, for example. But Ahmad's strings are embedded a lot deeper than that--the financial ministry, civil administration, and the police and military training centers are all run by Chalabi's minions.

This was noted at the time of his near-arrest and the (temporary) arrest of his second-in-command as 'a possible problem' even in the US press. So are we finding out now what they meant by that? Did Chalabi tell his employees to help JAAS out by providing them with the passwords and security schedules that made the attack inside the military compound possible?

For Ahmad Chalabi, playing both ends against the middle is a way of life. So is opportunism. If he thought helping the insurgents would either lend him some protective coloration should they win, or--better yet--make him a player in a 'new Iraq', he'd have done it in a heartbeat. Personally, I'm thinking he was--and is--in it up to his eyeballs.

At the request of people who would like to blogroll Blog Tower without having to change the address with every issue, I have created a Home page. The page has links to each issue plus short run-downs on the articles with separate links to each one for people who may be looking for or want to link to a specific piece. That should make one of the problems with issuing a monthly stand-alone zine easier.

The Blog Tower Archives

Hope this helps.

Update to previous post: I couldn't face It's a Wonderul Life again and fortunately noticed A Child's Christmas in Wales with Denholm Elliot in time to avoid that awful fate. It was a big improvement.

Merry Christmas, etc.

It was another quiet holiday. My family are all far away--brothers and sisters in northern New Hampshire and Maine, daughter in Virginia--so not much running around to do. I worked on Christmas--there was work to be had and it was welcome after the skinny leavings of the last few months--and then on Christmas night watched my favorite Xmas movies: Miracle on 34th Street, Holiday Inn, Comfort and Joy, and--of course--Die Hard 1&2. A marathon that lasted into the wee hours. I ate hamburgers and drank hot chocolate, so it was just an orgy of pitiable self-satisfaction and indulgence.

But that's not why I'm writing this. Actually, I don't know why I'm writing this except to share the disappointment. What are friends for if you can't ruin their holidays by sharing your complaints and frustrations?

On Christmas Eve, my one and only present arrived in the mail and I couldn't wait to open it. So I waited. I worked on Xmas and was too tired to do anything with it when I got home so I watched the movies and let my anticipation build to a climax. Then today, with trembling fingers, I cracked open the package.

I have wanted to get out from under MS and away from the unreliability and instability of Windows for years. A while back I tried Mandrake's Linux system but there was still too much command-line stuff for my limited knowledge and it was too frustrating. I dumped it, reluctantly. Then about 6 weeks ago I read about a new Linux OS called 'ubuntu' which was supposed to be simple and user-friendly. It was also free, what with being open-source and all. So I sent away for the installation CD and waited with baited breath. It arrived on Xmas Eve with what I thought was immaculate timing--a Christmas present! perfect.

Actually, they sent 3 CD's: one for an AMD environment, one for an Intel environment, and a 'live cd' so you could play with the system right off the CD before you had actually installed anything to the hard drive. I spent a couple of hours on that live CD, and liked what I found.

ubuntu is an amazingly simple OS to use, so simple it's almost primitive by Windows standards. The suite of utilities it comes with includes a music program, a movie viewer, and a full copy of the OpenOffice suite--wp, spreadsheet, the works. I used the OpenOffice wp for months before I discovered Atlantis and am quite comfortable with it, so this was a bonus. Unlike Mandrake, on ubuntu you get to applications through menus and icons just like you do on Windows or Macs--no command-line complexity. A kid could use it.

Convinced that I had done the right thing, I broke out the installation CD and loaded it in. I rebooted the computer, the ubuntu installer took over, and the first part went swimmingly. It identified all my devices, plugged into them, scanned the hard drives and the CD-ROM, and then--fully prepared--began to install itself. Then the install stalled.

It got a third of the way through--34%, to be exact--and then stopped. The screen flickered madly, and then froze. Everything came to a crashing halt. I tried the installation three times and it stopped at the exact same place every time, flickered madly, and froze. I cleaned the CD thoroughly--it looked dirty--and tried again with the same result. Upon closer examination, I saw what I think is a scratch on the CD--precisely the kind of thing that would cause the behaviour I witnessed. Sometimes you can force a disk beyond a thing like that, but either the scratch was too big or too deep or in the wrong place. Whatever, after trying several more times, I finally gave up.

My Christmas present was broken. So was my spirit.

In retrospect, it was probably not such a hot idea to let all that anticipation grow into such a Mighty Wind. Falling from The Heights is so much more painful than falling, say, off a bed. I was depressed beyond imagining. Years I had waited to be able to tell Bill Gates to shove it--at least once in a while--and now the time had come and it was a bust. I was heart-broken.

I've ordered 2 more CD's (in case one is flawed, what I should have done in the first place) and now will have to wait another 6 weeks to free myself of the Gatesian Monster.

I shoulda stuck with the hamburgers and hot chocolate. Now, instead of playing with my Christmas toy, I will be forced to watch It's a Wondeful Life for the 27,000th time. This time, I suspect, I will know exactly how he feels when he's on the bridge.

After many hours of reading, copying-and-pasting, and a few minutes of editing, Issue 2 of Blog Tower is on the block, ready to be ignored until the holidays are over. *sigh* Really, I've got to do something about my rotten timing.


BlogTower 02

Still, if you find yourself with a spare moment or two, there's an awful lot of good stuff in it. This time around BT has been expanded--at readers' requests--to include four new sections: Science, Philosophy, Society...and Wal-Mart Watch. Yes, that's right, campers: tearing WM a new one every time a blogger goes after them is now a regular feature. I can think of no non-governmental entity that more deserves careful and consistent tagging (except maybe the media, and we're considering that). This issue, in The Great Wal-Mart of China, the indefatigable Eric Martin of Total Information Awareness does an exhaustive study of WM's impact on the economy. The news, I don't need to tell you, ain't good.

But it hardly stops there. There's an important post from BOP's Ellen Dana Nagler, The Constitution v God; a lovely essay on The Heart of the Dream by lars of Spurious kicks off the new Philosophy section; Nick Lewis of the Progressive Blog Alliance contributes his own recording of the Ossia Cadenza from Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto (thus taking BT multi-media for the first time); BlondeSense's pissed-off patricia lives up to her handle and cuts to the chase in Greedy Hogs in Angel Costumes; and in the spirit of the Season, our Feature is a series of posts wherein andante of Collective Sigh takes us through the typical madness of Christmas pageants with Spare A Kind Thought for Christmas Spirit Makers (she survives, in case you were wondering).

There's lots more, too, so when the madness is over--and it will be--take a look. There's something for everyone.

BTW, if you'd like to call my attention to a post you especially liked--even if it's one of your own--email the link to it to mick.arran@gmail.com.

Somebody--god bless em--has posted what various corporations have donated to the respective parties and it's a bit of a shock occasionally, I must say. I'm sure that the fact that Wal-Mart donated 80% to Republican candidates won't come as a surprise, but amazon.com gave over 60% of its political contributions to the Pubs. Did you know that? Or that Circuit City gave 96% to the GOP? Or that the May Dept Stores chains (Filene's, Lord & Taylor, Hecht, et al) gave 90% to Pub-slugs?

buyblue.org and choosetheblue.com have the skinny online where its easy to see.

It's also easy to see where I'm going with this. I'll let Mark Morford explain it since he's the one who turned me on to it.

And then what? Just what are you supposed to do with this information? Well, like any good American living in a gutted economy that's trillions in debt, all while a massive bogus unwinnable war is being waged by the most irresponsible cadre of pseudo-leaders this nation has ever known, you go shopping.

But maybe, just maybe, you shift your choices just a little. Maybe you change where your weakened and abused dollar goes as it slowly dawns on you that you might not be as powerless as you might've thought.

And maybe you recognize that if there's one thing that corporations absolutely goddamn never fail to respond to in a million years, it's the bottom line, consumer satisfaction, the almighty but increasingly limp dollar. You think?

Because I don't care how shriveled the souls of a given company's GOP-lovin' board of directors are, if they see profits dropping because all the shoppers in the huge and culturally potent blue cities -- the shoppers, in other words, who don't live in the red welfare states and hence who actually have a shred of disposable income and maybe a modicum of concern and integrity regarding who profits when they spend it -- if they notice that those shoppers are suddenly skipping nasty little Circuit City (98 percent to Repubs) and instead buy their compressed-plastic Japanese-made landfill-ready electronics at monstrous Price Club (98 percent to Dems), well, it sends them a message.

And the message is, in a calm and respectful nutshell, "Bite me."

Now that's a message I'd enjoy sending. I can't though--without a car, around here it's Wal-mart or nothing. So you do it for me: turn right around in the Wal-mart parking lot and head straight for Costco (98% to Dems) instead. And when you're going through the check-out line, tell em why you're there. If enough of you do that, the tale will be told in the lunchroom and at the weekly 'associates' meeting and from there will go upstairs where, before you know it, some VP will call a buddy at WM and brag on you.

Ain't that worth a little extra driving?