WhirledView

Homeland Security

By PLS

I built a wall to keep us safe,
from you. You found rocks,
ladders, poles and somehow
got yourself over the top.

I added course after course
to make it higher. You
discovered weak spots
easy to ram or blow.

I engineered more strength
stretching it, to the East,
to the West, an endless chore,
but futile. There you were.

I decided on corners then.
Ends met to make a fort.
“Success!” I thought and relaxed.
You appeared with parachutes.

So I designed a roof
that bounces missiles, too.
And tunnels? Ridiculous.
I’ll foil any dig you start.

I bugged the phone lines, jammed
the wireless and satellites.
What you couldn’t overrun
you will never subvert.

I’m secure now, though joy
seems to have fled with risk
and days drag. The good old songs
and movies are—well!—old.

I wonder sometimes what’s new,
what’s happening, on your side.
Maybe I can open a chink
and smuggle in some life.

To the end of the earth: the story of New Mexico’s crypto-Jews – a book review

By PHK

Why would anyone in his or her right mind choose to emigrate from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World in the 16th or 17th century – first to Veracruz and Mexico City and then up to northern New Mexico and perhaps into southern Colorado - that inhospitable northern tip of Spain’s Empire in the New World - not all that long thereafter?

Stanley M. Hordes asked this question soon after he became New Mexico State Historian in 1981 after several descendants of New Mexico’s earliest Hispanic settlers had dropped by to report “unusual customs” practiced by people they knew. Having recently completed dissertation research on the crypto-Jewish community of New Spain (1620-1640) on a Fulbright grant, Hordes was intrigued. He was also uniquely qualified to search for the answer as he drew upon his own research as well as that of historians and others who had preceded and also collaborated with him.

His answer to this question forms the basis of his recent book To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

What Hordes unveiled as a result of his and others painstaking research in New Mexico, Spain, Portugal, France and Mexico City through Inquisition records, interviews of descendants of original Hispanic settlers in New Mexico, visits to villages along the Spanish-Portuguese border and even access to DNA tests was that some of the earliest Hispanic settlers in New Mexico had been New Christians or crypto-Jews who had fled to this “end of the earth” rather than face subjugation, incarceration, torture, ridicule, humiliation and occasionally death at the vicissitudes of the Roman Catholic Church’s grand inquisitors.

One Answer

to one of my "Just Wondering" questions: Is Karl Rove a political genius?

The Submerging Republican Majority

Tea in Albuquerque, coffee in Seattle: Something's missing

By PHK

Demonstrations, not just fundraisers, show political will, too

I hadn’t planned to post today because after a three day seminar on Iraq from the 4000 BC Ubaids to the current mess, I thought I’d better play catch-up – laundry, grocery shopping, that kind of mundane but essential stuff. But before I fetch the groceries, I did a little Internet research because I was so struck by the different coverage of W’s visit to Albuquerque yesterday in the WaPo, the New York Times and AP with what was published on the front page of the Albuquerque Journal.

Aside from the same photo op of W with our erstwhile pro-Iraq invasion, anti-internationalist Heather Wilson and the report of the $375,000 the Bush fundraiser netted at the Hyatt Regency for her in-trouble re-election effort, you’d think the reporters had been to different events for different people in different cities. Reminds me of “Rashomon,” that 1950s tale of a single murder seen from totally different perspectives.

Why? Because only the Journal – New Mexico’s conservative, privately owned newspaper - reported that there were 200 anti-Bush, anti-Iraq occupation, anti-Heather demonstrators outside the fundraiser here versus 300 wealthy Republicans inside. The former were dressed in faded pink denim. Many were women from Code Pink and most held anti-Iraq war banners. (I couldn’t find the picture in the web edition – wonder why.)

The latter were presumably well-dressed, well coiffed, well washed. They paid, according to AP, $1,000 per coiffed head to attend the fundraiser for Wilson and $5,000 to get their photos taken with W. Looks like photos with W were not exactly best sellers here. If my calculations are right only 15 took up the offer. But as far as the WaPo, the NY Times, AP and even the usually liberal, privately owned Santa Fe New Mexican, what was worth reporting occurred only inside the Hyatt Regency, Albuquerque’s most luxurious hotel, not across the street on the city’s downtown plaza.

Yes, MSM reporters did contact the opposition, e.g. the Madrid campaign where Heather’s challenger, Patsy pointed out that our wonderful lapdog Congressperson has a record of voting 88 percent of the time for W’s policies. This while the Republicans are busily painting Heather as her “own woman” and Patsy as a “cut and run” Democrat.

Heather an independent?

My eye. I don’t think so. And I’m glad to see the Madrid people counter this piece of pure balderdash. Yes, Patsy thinks the US military needs to get out of Iraq, that our troops on the ground there have become a part of the problem, not the solution, and that the draw-down needs to happen sooner rather than later so fewer New Mexicans are dying early and unnaturally in that desert on the Tigris and Euphrates versus living a longer more productive life in this desert on the Rio Grande. A position I largely support.

W's Albuquerque tea party

But back to the MSM coverage - or more accurately - biased coverage of W’s brief touchdown in Albuquerque yesterday afternoon – perhaps before he headed off to ride his bicycle in Crawford over the weekend. Yes, it’s important to know that W remains a formidable fundraiser for Republican candidates and be told the amounts he has raised and is expected to raise on their behalf this mid-term election season.

But shouldn’t the American public also be told of opposition on the streets and in the plaza? Doesn’t the opposition have a voice worth reporting, too? Isn’t this also part of the story? As veteran political analyst and University of Virginia professor Larry Sabbato and independent political analyst Stuart Rothenberg indicate, the Albuquerque race is too close to call and it will be “ground zero in the fight for the House.”

The Cambrian Was a Very Strange Place

by CKR

The Cambrian is the geological age in which the earth becomes home to many kinds of creatures. That was five hundred million years ago. Even before the Cambrian, there were bacterial colonies called stromatolites, whose fossils look very much like rocks. Then, suddenly during the Cambrian, there came some lifeforms that aren’t much like anything we know now, along with many that do. Good fossils of the strange ones, including soft tissues (fossils usually are just bony parts), were first found in the Burgess shale in Canada. There were trilobites and brachiopods too, very popular fossils that many of you may know. Their descendents are pillbugs and, well, brachiopods, which are still around today. Stromatolites are still around, too.

Those strange Burgess organisms died out, and organisms that begin to look familiar to us became more prevalent. We don’t know why larger organisms showed up all at once, we don’t know why there was such a riot of forms, and we don’t know why some of them died out.

There’s a strange reminder of that strange place on the north coast of Estonia. Estonia is separated from Finland by the Gulf of Finland, from Tallinn and Helsinki east to St. Petersburg. I haven’t found the geology of it yet, but there has to be a fault under the Gulf. To the north, Finland is all shield geology: granites and pegmatites, old, old, Precambrian rocks, Precambrian, no life. To the south, Estonia is all sedimentary rocks: oil shale, limestone, dolomite. The Cambrian blue clay outcrops below all of them on the glint (or klint; g and k are very close in Estonian), the northern cliff on the sea.

W’s fantastic week: what does a bad one look like?

By PHK

W is having a fantastic week, at least that’s what the White House press corps and Republican-leaning columnists are repeating ad nauseum in case anyone happened to miss this wonderful news the first time around.

Give me a break. I’m sorry but this is spin at its most repugnant. What about, for instance, the triple suicides at Guantanamo? Remember what happened over the weekend? Or the latest Pew polling results that find the US in even lower esteem abroad than last year?

And is it really all that good news that W decided to drop-by unannounced on Iraq’s President Maliki in the Green Zone yesterday?

In my view, this kind of behavior is at best an embarrassment that demonstrates the worst of all possible manners. Unexpected drop-ins of very good friends in the very small town where I grew up were one thing, but never in my 27 plus year career in the U.S. Foreign Service did I even hear a single rumor of a US President arriving in another country for an official, or an unofficial visit, unannounced.

How would W have liked it if Maliki had tried to do the same thing to him in Washington? I say tried because the White House’s roof is full of sharpshooters armed to the gills to prevent unannounced visitors - friendly or not - from approaching the ramparts.

And we wonder why the rest of the world sees the US occupation of Iraq as akin to the worst vestiges of nineteenth century colonialism. Its way past time that this ride’m cowboy finds the stables, saddles up Pinto and returns to Crawford. Permanently.

Victory is just around which corner? When?

But W’s quicky helicopter drop-in on the US crusader-style fortress in central Baghdad on Tuesday that also houses the Iraqi government - such as it is - belies the fact that the rest of Baghdad is far more dangerous than it was even a few months ago. This according to New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins reporting from the beleaguered city in an interview Tuesday night on the Newshour. Is this something to chalk up as success? To add spring to your step? I don’t think so. Or is this bad news report to be brushed under the carpet because it tells the truth?

This deteriorating situation, however, Mr. Bush, is the reality – in case your nearest and dearest have been too afraid to tell you. An advisor problem I was told Saddam was also afflicted with – bad news is often far more difficult to deliver - so sounds to me as if you both surrounded yourselves with “yes” men and women eager to please.

A ridiculous war on an adjective

A Sanity Check on a Timid Press

by CKR

What do science and journalism have in common? As I’ve been trying to learn journalism—that’s what blogging is, of course, journalism—I find a fairly straightforward correspondence of objectives and techniques. The point of both science and journalism is to uncover the facts and put them into a recognizable, understandable story. Preferably that story will allow us to see glimmerings of possible futures.

Journalism is slipperier than science, although not as much as a nonscientist might think. Interrogation of matter by setting up experiments isn’t as much a part of journalism, while interrogation of people isn’t as much a part of science, but both have their moments. To begin in either, you have to decide what’s important and how to go about finding out about it. You have to be careful that the stories you weave don’t eliminate other possibilities.

Eric Boehlert, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, looks at press coverage of the Bush administration in Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush. He’s interrogating press coverage of comparable stories on George W. Bush and Democrats. His objective, he says is to “cut through incessant rhetoric about a liberal media bias.” He does a good job of amassing facts on what was covered and how, including quotes and numbers. He finds that the coverage has been wildly different for George Bush than for his electoral rivals or for past presidents. By the end of the book, he has developed strong arguments that the press has given George Bush everything he could want and more while ignoring or trashing his opposition.

Covering the Kos political confab in Vegas or not: Is the MSM catching on?

By PHK

You have to give The New York Times credit for sending not only Adam Nagourney, its veteran political correspondent, but also celebrity columnist Maureen Dowd to cover the Daily Kos convention of about 1,000 liberal bloggers of all ages being held in Las Vegas this weekend. Only the San Francisco Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli took the conference as seriously as they did - as far as I can see. A Los Angeles Times blogger mistakenly pooh-poohed it, the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune fail to cover the conference at all and the usually far more blog savvy WaPo is only covering it – well by one of its bloggers.

The interesting thing about the WaPo coverage though is that it allows for responses – and they’re there hot and heavy. From what I read the comments on WaPo blogger Chris Cizzilla’s reports range from the astute to the ridiculous with a number of hostile and grudgingly unhelpful conservative comments tossed in. There is also a recommendation to tune into C-Span for anyone who wants to see the sessions live. But the potpourri – or perhaps cacophony – of opinions expressed is a gauge of the complex and troubled political opinion in these United States these days.

Have only Nagourney, Dowd and Garofoli caught on that the center-left blogosphere is developing a power of its own? Is the often slow-off-the-mark NYT rethinking its political campaign coverage to include blogs this election season? Looks like it. The Daily Kos convention in Vegas has a national attendance as well as a far larger stay-at-home audience trying to follow it. The convention has not only attracted politically active, concerned and frustrated Americans who have finally found an outlet for their views, but they and other similarly minded blogs and bloggers who did not attend this year may well be in positions to influence the vote come November.

Even if the number of voters each one influences is small: In a tight election, a very few votes can change an outcome.