genarlow wilson freed!

At long last, a court has ordered that Genarlow Wilson, a black kid from Georgia who was sentenced to 10 years in jail for having consensual oral sex with a minor, although there was only two years' difference between them (he was 17, she was 15). The Georgia state legislature changed the law that put him away, but he didn't get out until the state supreme court ruled today that his sentence was cruel and unusual under the state constitution. It's about damn time. Here's TalkLeft's post about it.

the revolutionary guard is a "state sponsor of terrorism"

Here's the Times article about it. Gee, just like our military is, however inadvertently, sponsoring the PKK in Northern Iraq. Only difference is, the PKK has actually INVADED AND KILLED THE TROOPS OF ANOTHER COUNTRY. The Revolutionary Guard is horrible and probably responsible for a lot of really bad shit. But the PKK overtly attacked one of our major regional allies, Turkey, without whose help any future withdrawal from Iraq will by much, much harder.

The Bush foreign policy gets more tortured and hypocritical every day. What's perhaps most unbelievable is that I'm not even the least bit surprised by this potentially catastrophic turn of events. Just another day for Bushco. Madame Speaker, I know you said you wouldn't impeach Bush. But you know what? HE AND HIS ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY AND EVERYTHING WE STAND FOR. They are war criminals, domestic felons and usurpers of the Constitution. If that's not enough to get impeachment hearings going, I don't know what is. Oh, right, the right wing noise machine is enough. Damn, wish we had our own army of horribly dishonest demagogues ruling the airwaves and editorial pages. That'd be nice. Related note: The top three opinions on wapo online today are by Broder, Novak and Will. That they even pretend to be fair there anymore is distressing. And that anyone accuses the Post of being left-leaning is simultaneously laughable and sneerable. Sidney Blumenthal's piece in Salon this week is about media complicity; I couldn't even open it because I'm angry enough as it is.

On a lighter note, I'm loving fascism class more and more. It's really nice to be in an interesting and edifying setting where I feel like I really get the connections and implications and nuances of what we're learning about. Now it's time for me to go home and change before the MagnUM track workout at 7. Oh, one more thing. I really, really love Los Fabulosos Cadillacs' cover of "Revolution Rock," by the Clash. So here's a video of half the song (couldn't find a complete one).

Todo el mundo moven los pies, ya bailan hasta morir!
[Everybody move your feet, now dance until you die]
Esta música causa sensación, este ritmo toca la nación!
[This music causes feeling, this rhythm touches the nation]
Llama a viejo, llama a tu vieja!
[Call your papa, call your mama]
Todo todo todo va a estar bien!
[Everything's gonna be all right]
Escuchálo, no lo ignores, todo va a estar bien!
[Listen to it, don't ignore it, everything's gonna be all right]

new blog

Just now I read a column by Berkeley public policy professor (and former Clinton cabinet member) Robert Reich about the need to raise taxes on the wealthy (and why Democrats are reluctant to do it). It was very good stuff, and there was a link to his blog, which is also full of good stuff. So I'm going to be adding it to my list and reading it. You should, too.

turkey

Juan Cole has a really interesting article over at Salon today about the abject failure that is the Bush administration's foreign policy. Here's a particularly troubling excerpt:

As usual, the Bush administration has reacted to these predictable problems in a purely ad hoc manner. There is no evidence that anyone in the administration has crafted a policy for dealing with tensions between Ankara and America's Kurdish allies. The U.S. State Department has designated the PKK a terrorist group, but the PKK is given safe harbor by the Kurdistan Regional Authority of northern Iraq. What will Bush do about having wound up as the de facto protector of a radical peasant guerrilla group that is attacking the troops of a NATO ally? If the United States acts against the PKK, it risks alienating the Iraqi Kurds, whose pro-American peshmerga fighters perform security duties and enlist as troops in the new Iraqi army. If Bush does not restrain the PKK, then he is playing Mullah Omar to its al-Qaida and "harboring" terrorists, which he trumpeted six years ago as grounds for war.

frisbee

Well, after two weeks of psyching myself out, telling myself over and over that I'd get cut in the hopes that if it happened it wouldn't hurt quite so much, I didn't get cut! I made the B-team (which they're calling the Developmental team now). So there was room for me after the shake-up after all. Only five new guys made the A roster, and they are all clearly better than me, so no hard feelings about that at all. I'm just glad I get a chance to keep playing. So, image for the day:



Magnum on three, Magnum on three...one two three MAGNUM!

david horowitz is criminally fucking insane

This week at Michigan. I don't even know where to start with this. Horowitz and everyone who thinks like him are a threat to national security. People are dying in Iraq and dying in Israel/Palestine because of this kind of totally divorced-from-reality worldview. Bush DID create the War on Terror. To even try to deny that is laughable on its face. He obviously didn't create jihadi Islamism nor its conflict with the US; nobody who's even been paying a LITTLE bit of attention thinks that. But the War on Terror is his ugly, disfigured offspring. Also I'm not sure I've ever seen or heard a left-winger claim that global warming is a greater threat to national security than "Islamofascism." Not least because left-wingers tend not to use unbelievably dishonest terms like "Islamofascism."

Juan Cole has a good and very upsetting post on a related topic today, though, so go read that.

ron paul

Came to campus last night to speak on the Diag. I went to see him, along with a couple hundred other people. It was nice because I got to talk to Jessica Hibma for a while, and Sam B-F. They're both cool and I hadn't really talked to either of them in a while. Well, I guess I saw Jessica earlier in the day yesterday, but it was in passing and hardly counts. Anyhow, to sum up Paul's speech: "Freedom freedom Constitution troops home freedom freedom government BAD." He's a racist libertarian extremist who wants to abolish the IRS and the Federal Reserve, and in 1992 had this to say about black people in his personal publication:

Regardless of what the media tell us, most white Americans are not going to believe that they are at fault for what blacks have done to cities across America. The professional blacks may have cowed the elites, but good sense survives at the grass roots. Many more are going to have difficultly avoiding the belief that our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists -- and they can be identified by the color of their skin. This conclusion may not be entirely fair, but it is, for many, entirely unavoidable.

Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty, and the end of welfare and affirmative action.... Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the "criminal justice system," I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

If similar in-depth studies were conducted in other major cities, who doubts that similar results would be produced? We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.

Perhaps the L.A. experience should not be surprising. The riots, burning, looting, and murders are only a continuation of 30 years of racial politics.The looting in L.A. was the welfare state without the voting booth. The elite have sent one message to black America for 30 years: you are entitled to something for nothing. That's what blacks got on the streets of L.A. for three days in April. Only they didn't ask their Congressmen to arrange the transfer.

Maybe I'm just being judgmental and unfair, but I feel like a lot of the people who were there last night waving signs with his name on them were sucked in by his being against the Iraq War. Well, kudos to him for being right on that count, but he's wrong on just about everything else and I feel like he wouldn't have so much support if people knew just a twinge more about him. One thing I can say, though, is that he does seem like a principled guy, never really wavers or compromises what he believes in. The problem is that his principles are terrible.

glory days!

Big news! I'm going to Naperville, IL this weekend for Glory Days, which is a big fall ultimate tournament. So that should be fun.

okay, and a song

Because it's a great song.

back by popular demand

Well, I've just finished my paper for tomorrow on the federal budget as key to understanding real governmental priorities, and let me tell you, the budget is really interesting. The paper topic and limits (1000 words hard cap) meant that writing this baby sucked. I would have much preferred to write 5000 words and been able to get into real meaty rants about public and media misunderstanding--and governmental manipulation--of tax policy, but as it was I barely covered revenues, outlays and expenditures and a couple of recommendations for shrinking the deficit (another area I could have really sunk my teeth into) in the space allotted. Oh well.

Seems that some people are asking for a little update about school so far, so here goes. My classes are as follows:

ENGLISH 223 Intro to Creative Writing
ENVSTD 232 Intro to Oceanography
POLSCI 300 Contemporary Political Issues
POLSCI 357 History and Politics of India and South Asia
POLSCI 489 H & P of the European Right

So far, the first two have been satisfactory but kind of up and down. At least they've been easy. The Poli Sci classes, on the other hand, have been fantastic. CPI, for which I was writing until 15 minutes ago, is really basic but engaging all the same and also easy in terms of reading/work load. The India and European Right classes feature fascinating subjects and are taught by two high-powered and absolutely terrific professors, Ashutosh Varshney and Andy Markovits. I could (and do, often) go on and on about these two, but won't right now.

My apartment is big and beautiful, although we've had a few problems with leakage from the apartment upstairs and with our dishwasher, which is on wheels and supposedly hooks into the sink, but which doesn't, in fact, hook onto the sink. No really big deal there, we just have to do dishes by hand and they pile up sometimes.

Frisbee has been a little more stressful than sophomore year because they're shaking up the way the teams are organized and as a result there might not be space on either the A or B teams for an average-skilled, average-athletic player like me. We hosted a tournament last week, Best of the Midwest, which was really fun and led to me making the first cut down to about 70 guys (from close to 150). So now, really all there is to do is keep showing up and playing hard and hope not to be in the next 20 cut (there'll be about 25 on each final roster). I'd say my chances are about 50-50. But we'll see. Hopefully I get invited to the Glory Days tournament in Naperville in a couple of weeks, that would be a good sign, I think.

Things seem to be going pretty well on the family front, which is obviously great, and even more so because things have been a bit chaotic here. Okay, I've run out of energy to write for the time being and my eyes are starting to cross, so I think I'll close up shop here at the library and head home. Sorry for the abrupt ending. I'll try to post more frequently, but now that I'm back in the country the blogosphere has become a lot less important to me in general. As a final note, I feel compelled to announce that Blogger's own spell check doesn't recognize the word "blogosphere." And with that, good night.