Month: April 2003

No Surrender (Star Trek: SCE, Book 4)
is now out from Simon and Schuster. Written by by Mike Collins, Ian
Edginton, Robert Greenberger, Jeff Mariotte, and yours truly bringing
up the rear. Last time I looked, the book was in the top 5000 in sales
at Amazon. Unfortunately, the time I checked before that, it was in the
top 3000… and I refuse to buy my way to the top like some authors do;
I want you to buy them as well.

There’s a bill kicking around that would repeal the 22nd amendment,
which restricts US Presidents to two terms. Follow the link and search
on H. J. RES. 11.
Bush might really want to try for his open-ended junta, but I’d bet a
lot of money that if this passed, Clinton would come back and mop the
floor with him. It’s noteworthy that it was introduced by Jose Serrano,
a New York Democrat.

From a poll on the AOL/Netscape sidebar:
Has the war in Iraq made you more likely to vote to re-elect President Bush?

* Yes, he’s my choice now

* I would have voted for him anyway

* I would never vote for Bush now

Oh lord, how can there be so many problems in so few words…? Perhaps more interesting are the results at the moment:

Yes, he’s my choice now – 15%

I would have voted for him anyway – 40%

I would never vote for Bush now – 45%

55% voting for him, eh? Those are damn soft numbers coming off a war… and that’s before we look at the depressed economy.

Excellent essay by Steve Gilliard over at the Daily Kos.

I want to get back to his topic of fear at some point, as soon as I can catch my breath…

Let’s see, two journalists were killed when US troops shelled a hotel. We’ve already lost David Bloom and Michael Kelly. At least one other journalist from the BBC was killed.

Do those numbers seem a bit high to you?

Take
a good look at this photo. It’s an AP photo by Paul Sakura. She bears
wounds she says she got after she was fired on by police during a
anti-war protest in Oakland, CA. This one.

Police opened fire with non-lethal bullets at an anti-war protest at
the Port of Oakland Monday morning, injuring several longshoremen
standing nearby.
Police were trying to clear protesters from an entrance to the docks
when they opened fire and the longshoremen apparently were caught in
the line of fire.
Six longshoremen were treated by paramedics and at least one was
expected to be taken to a hospital. It was unclear if any of the
protesters was injured.
“I was standing as far back as I could,” said longshoreman Kevin
Wilson. “It was very scary. All of that force wasn’t necessary.”

Let me say that again. Police opened fire on protesters.
Now, look at that woman above. I’m willing to bet $50 I know who it is.
I think I went to college with her. The rest of the circumstances fit.
But you know, it doesn’t matter if I know her or not. This woman was
fired on by police for speaking out against the war.
Look at the location of the bruises. At best, her jaw has probably been
dislocated. A few inches up and her eardrum would have been ruptured
from impact, or her eye.
There are a few folks who are convinced that the War in Iraq won’t be a
replay of the Vietnam War. To which I say… really?

From the Chicago Tribune:

Despite promises that the war in Iraq will make the United States
safer from terrorism, residents of the city most affected by terrorism
are far less enthusiastic for the war than other Americans. And the
more personally a New Yorker was affected, the weaker the impulse seems
to be for avenging the more than 2,800 lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.
New York’s antiwar chorus includes many lower Manhattan residents,
Sept. 11 survivors and others like the immigrant dishwashers, busboys
and cooks who lost their jobs at the Windows on the World restaurant.
A poll released this week showed that just after the conflict began,
New Yorkers became more supportive of the war and President Bush’s
handling of the conflict. Still, even as about 70 percent of all
Americans back the war, just 47 percent of New Yorkers support it,
while 49 percent oppose it….
“`Rally `round the flag’ is the resounding cry heard throughout the
nation. In New York City, that cry is muted,” said Maurice Carroll,
director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Many New Yorkers with direct ties to the Sept. 11 attacks say their
painful experiences helped form antiwar opinions….
Maria Weisbin, a book editor who has lived six blocks north of the
trade center site since 1979 recalled her husband screaming for revenge
from the rooftop of their apartment building as they watched the towers
burn and collapse.
She supported the war to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan. “I could
throttle bin Laden myself,” said Weisbin, 53.
But she and her husband oppose the war in Iraq, she said, because they
believe there is no connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Sept. 11 attacks.
[emphasis mine]
“We have come the closest of anyone in America to seeing war in our own
neighborhood,” Weisbin said. “We don’t want our grief to be used.”

“People are fooled into believing that they are powerful when they are
members of a powerful state, or when they are soldiers wielding
powerful weapons or when they have real or imagined connections to
people in powerful positions. Powerless boys in uniform feel powerful
when they think of the empire they represent; powerless masses imagine
themselves powerful when they cheer the dictator who suppresses them;
powerless bootlickers feel powerful when they think of the mighty
personage whose boots they lick. But democracy doesn’t meaning
‘feeling’ powerful. It means holding real power.” – C. Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy

by way of wood s lot and Wealth Bondage.

Peter David
notes:
\\An anthrax scare was caused at Random House and Del Rey (where
Kathleen [his wife] works) today when a package was discovered brimming
with white powder.
Turns out the package was postmarked April 1, and preliminary testing
on the substance comes back negative. Apparently it was someone’s idea
of an April Fool’s Joke.\\
Mean, cruel, and outright dumb– but on the other hand, who would have
thought a major book publisher would have actually opened an
unsolicited manuscript?

Jim MacDonald points out in Electrolite’s
comments:
\\I’ve figured it out. Why the Iraqi conscripts are fighting to the
last ditch rather than surrendering, why people who fled Saddam’s
terror are returning to fight on his side, why Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr
al-Hakim, the leading Iraqi Shiite cleric, has sent instructions to his
supporters and secret cells in Basra, Najaf, Karbala and other southern
Iraqi cities not to start an uprising or support the American-led
coalition in any way.
It’s Ann Coulter’s fault.
Listen to her, back in 2001:
“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them
to Christianity.”
That got transmitted worldwide.
So the good folks of Iraq are looking at that and saying, “Okay,
gotcha. ‘Kill their leaders,’ check. ‘Invade their countries,’ check.
Any reason to think they aren’t planning to convert us to Christianity
too? Nope. Allah akbar!”
Poor fellows, they live in a place where what’s in the newspapers and
on TV is what the government wants to put in the newspapers and on TV.
How were they to know Coulter’s a nutjob who’s only speaking for
herself rather than stating official government policy?\\
Me, I tend to use one of the numerous lessons of 9/11: when your nation
is attacked by outside forces, people in the country will rally around
a leader even if he is a brutal moron who gained power by dubious
means.