Changing Places

Did You Know…? / Thu 08 Jul 04: Love in an elevator

Love in an elevator

I got into an elevator yesterday with a woman (about 40 years old) and a little girl (about 3 years old). The girl had been asking the mother question after question and the mother answering them all without losing patience. Then the little girl pointed to my messenger bag and asked “What does that hanger thingy mean?”

I expected her mother to look exasperated, but instead, she just replied “A long time before you were born there were women who would get something inside them that made them feel ill and they would use a coathanger to get rid of it.”
“Why didn’t they go to the doctor?”
“Most doctor’s didn’t think that these women felt ill, so they refused to help them. Then a bunch of women got together and helped each other get a law passed that would make it possible for these women to get help from a doctor.”
“Will I ever have to use a coathanger to make myself get well?”
There was a pause, and this woman looked me in the eye with such intense focus that everything except her face fuzzed out and became dark. “Not if there are enough women like her in the world.” She nodded toward me.
Her daughter looked at me, I looked at her, unsure if I was going to cry or smile, and the little girl said, “Thanks, ma’am!”
Before I could think of something to say, to either one of them. Her mother said “At the age of three they’re full of questions.”
I smiled at them both and said “I’d rather talk to a three-year-old with questions than an adult who knows everything any day.” The elevator doors opened and the two walked in front of me talking about why it was too close to dinner to get ice cream.

As I got on the train to go home, I realized that this was the first time that someone had called me ma’am and I hadn’t been offended.

Yahoo! News - September 11 commission report links Iran to 2001 al-Qaeda attacks: media

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The September 11 commission’s report, due out Thursday, says Iran may have facilitated the 2001 attacks on the United States by providing eight to 10 al-Qaeda hijackers with safe passage to and from training camps in Afghanistan (news - web sites), US media reports said.

AFP/File Photo

AFP
Slideshow: September 11

Time and Newsweek, in similar reports quoting congressional, commission and government sources, said Iran relaxed border controls and provided “clean” passports for the so-called “muscle hijackers” to transit Iran to and from Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)’s camps between October 2000 and February 2001.

In addition, The New York Times said the commission’s report would recommend the creation of a cabinet-level post that would take power from the CIA (news - web sites), FBI (news - web sites), National Security Council and Pentagon (news - web sites) to oversee intelligence gathering said to have been lacking before and after the September 11 attacks.

The commission’s report says Iran at one point proposed collaborating with al-Qaeda on attacks against America, but bin Laden declined, saying he did not want to alienate his supporters in Saudi Arabia, according to Time.

Newsweek said the Iranian finding in the commission’s report is based largely on a December 2001 memo discovered buried in the files of the US National Security Agency.

The memo, according to Newsweek, says “Iranian border inspectors were instructed not to place stamps in the passports of al-Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia who were traveling from bin Laden’s camps through Iran.”

Time said commission investigators “found that Iran had a history of allowing al-Qaeda members to enter and exit Iran across the Afghan border,” a practice they said dated back to October 2000.

Iranian officials, Time said, issued “specific instructions to their border guards … not to put stamps in the passports of al-Qaeda personnel and otherwise not harass them, and to facilitate their travel across the frontier.”

“The new discovery about Iran’s assistance to al-Qaeda,” said Newsweek, “is among the most surprising new findings” in the 500-page report compiled by the non-partisan commission.

Former White House counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who in a recent book said President George W. Bush (news - web sites)’s administration was obsessed with involving Iraq (news - web sites) in the attacks and had ignored intelligence on Iran, told Newsweek the commission’s report confirms that.

The day after the attacks, Clarke said in his book, Bush told him: “See if Saddam (Hussein) did this. See if he’s linked in any way.”

Although there was no evidence linking Iraq to the attacks, Newsweek quoted Clarke as saying “there were lots of reasons to believe (al-Qaeda) was being facilitated by elements of the Iranian security services. We told the president that specifically. The best evidence we had of state support (for al-Qaeda) was Iran.”

Time said the Iranian offer to collaborate with al-Qaeda to attack America was made after the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole (news - web sites), which killed 17 US sailors as the ship was being refueled in Yemen.

“But the offer,” said the weekly, “was turned down by bin Laden because he did not want to alientate his supporters in Saudi Arabia.”

Time said much of the new information about Iran “came from al-Qaeda detainees interrogated by the US government, including captured Yemeni al-Qaeda operative Waleed Mohammed bin Attash, who organized the … attack on the USS Cole.”

The New York Times, meanwhile, said the intelligence czar proposal would likely meet fierce opposition from the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites), “which would have to cede significant authority over the government’s estimated 40-billion-dollar intelligence budget and other policy matters.”

Under the proposal, the CIA director, who now reports directly to the White House, would have to go through the new national intelligence director, the Times quoted one official as saying.

Democratic presidential contender John Kerry (news - web sites) made a similar proposal on Friday, saying: “We need to create a true director of national intelligence with the ability to manage and direct the myriad components of the intelligence community.”

The post, Kerry said in a statement issued by his campaign, should include “authority over the budget, operations, personnel and the exchange of information.”

___

So, was the intelligence that bad, or is this just the excuse to bulldoze on itno Iran now?

Stay tuned, kids…

ZAMAN DAILY NEWSPAPER (2004071410372)

Famous academic Francis Fukuyama, one of the founding fathers of the neo-conservative movement that underlies the policies of US President George W. Bush’s administration, said on July 13 that he would not vote for the incumbent in the November 2 US Presidential election.

In addition to distancing himself from the current administration, Fukuyama told TIME magazine that his old friend, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, should resign.

In 1997, Fukuyama together with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush, signed a declaration entitled ‘The New American Century Project’. That declaration set the groundwork for the neo-conservative movement.

Fukuyama began to distance himself from the administration during the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The tension between the two came to a head prior to the invasion of Iraq. Fukuyama opposed the war.

Fukuyama is still angry at the Bush administration since they refuse to admit to the mistakes they have made. Fukuyama had warned that after the war, Iraq would be dragged into an internal conflict and would export terror to the world.

Fukuyama said that because of those reasons he could not vote for Bush in the upcoming elections. He added that he has an important place among the right wing and could affect the outcome of the elections; however, he explained that he would not carry out any studies in that direction because he is not eager to fight with ‘old friends’.

In his well-known work of political philosophy ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, Fukuyama argues that history is directional and that its endpoint is capitalist liberal democracy.

The Blogging of the President: 2004

With such an impatient culture — the moment I think is there for recognizing the genocide.

To recognize it yourself:

(1) Bookmark and link this blog: www.passionofthepresent.com — and read the background and updates.

(2) Call your representative about Sudan http://www.house.gov/writerep/

(3) Sign up for http://sudanpeace.meetup.com/

(4) Spread the first three in links.

Thanks. Kerry has taken real moral leadership on this this week. The death rate in Darfur is 20 times that of a normal developing country, and the rainy season is supposed to make it worse. This is race-based murder and massive, permissive death that you can do something about.

:: John Kerry for President - DBunker ::

Mary Beth Cahill to Ken Mehlman: Release the Bush Records
Washington, DC � Kerry-Edwards campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill today sent the following letter to Bush Cheney �04 Campaign Manager Ken Mehlman in response to a letter Mehlman sent yesterday:

July 13, 2004
Ken Mehlman
Campaign Manager
BUSH-CHENEY ‘04, Inc.

Dear Ken:

Over the past several months, allies of the President have questioned John Kerry�s patriotism while your staff has criticized his service in Vietnam. Republicans and their allies have gone so far as to launch attacks against his wife and your campaign has run $80 million in negative ads that have been called baseless, misleading and unfair by several independent observers.

Considering that the President has failed to even come close to keeping his promise to change the tone in Washington, we find your outrage over and paparazzi-like obsession with a fund-raising event to be misplaced. The fact is that the nation has a greater interest in seeing several documents made public relating to the President�s performance in office and personal veracity that the White House has steadfastly refused to release. As such, we will not consider your request until the Bush campaign and White House make public the documents/materials listed below:

● Military records: Any copies of the President�s military records that would actually prove he fulfilled the terms of his military service. For that matter, it would be comforting to the American people if the campaign or the White House could produce more than just a single person to verify that the President was in Alabama when said he was there. Many Americans find it odd that only one person out of an entire squadron can recall seeing Mr. Bush.

● Halliburton: All correspondence between the Defense Department and the White House regarding the no-bid contracts that have gone to the Vice-President�s former company. Some material has already been made public. Why not take a campaign issue off the table by making all of these materials public so the voters can see how Halliburton has benefited from Mr. Cheney serving as Vice-President?

● The Cheney Energy Task Force: For an Administration that claims to hate lawsuits, it�s ironic that the Bush White House is taking up the Courts� time to keep the fact that Ken Lay and Enron wrote its energy policy in secret behind closed doors. Please release the documents so that the country can learn what lobbyists and special interests wrote the White House energy policy.

● Medicare Bill: Please release all White House correspondence between the pharmaceutical industry and the Administration regarding the Medicare Bill, which gave billions to some of the President�s biggest donors. In addition, please provide all written materials that directed the Medicare actuary to withhold information from Congress about the actual cost of the bill.

● Prison Abuse Documents: A few weeks ago, the White House released a selected number of documents regarding the White House�s involvement in laying the legal foundation for the interrogation methods that were used in Iraq. Please release the remaining documents.

We also wanted to wish you a happy anniversary. As we are sure you and the attorneys representing the President, Vice-President and other White House officials are aware, today marks one year since Administration sources leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent to Bob Novak in an effort to retaliate against a critic of the Administration.

In light of the fact that the Administration began gutting the laws protecting the nation�s forests yesterday, we hope you will accept the paper on which this letter is written as an anniversary gift. (The one year anniversary is known as the �paper anniversary.�)

Sincerely,

Mary Beth Cahill

Campaign Manager

Racism at root of Sudan’s Darfur crisis | csmonitor.com

Racism at root of Sudan’s Darfur crisis

By Makau Mutua

BUFFALO, N.Y. � The visits by US Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to Sudan last week gave hope that the genocide in Darfur can be arrested before an entire people is obliterated.
But anyone - including Mr. Powell and Mr. Annan - interested in averting more tragedy there must understand that Darfur is not an accidental apocalypse of mass slaughters, enslavement, pillage, and ethnic cleansing. The Darfur pogrom is part of a historic continuum in which successive Arab governments have sought to entirely destroy black Africans in this biracial nation.

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Darfur is not a mere humanitarian disaster that access by international relief agencies can reverse. The raison d’�tre of the atrocities committed by government-supported Arab militias is the racist, fundamentalist, and undemocratic Sudanese state. What is required for peace in Sudan is either regime change, in which a democratic, inclusive state is born, or a partition, in which the black African south and west become an independent sovereign state free of Khartoum and the Arab north.

Sudan, like most African postcolonial states, is partially a victim of imperial cartography. Thoughtlessly carved out by the British during the 19th-century scramble to claim Africa, Sudan is a forced crucible of Muslim Arabs and black Africans. The blacks in the south either hew to their ancestral traditional African religions or have converted to Christianity. The fact that black Africans in Darfur are exclusively Muslim has not stopped the Arab Janjaweed militias and the government from exterminating them.

Race - not religion - is the fundamental fault line in Sudan, though religion has certainly added fuel to the fire in the south. Indeed, since independence from the British in 1956, the demon of Sudan has been race. The Arab north, except for brief periods when token Africans were included in government, has exclusively held political and military power. To protest political exclusion, military repression, enslavement, and economic exploitation, Africans in the south rose against the state several years after independence.

Since 1983, the armed insurrection in the south has drawn a scorched earth response from Khartoum. President Omar Bashir and his fundamentalist Islamic government declared a holy war against African groups in the south - the Dinka, Nuba, and Neur peoples. More than 2 million people have been decimated, millions more have been internally displaced, and hordes have been exiled.

Khartoum’s genocidal policy in Darfur and the south is also a grab for resources. The Arab north is arid and barren, but the south is arable with vast oil deposits Khartoum covets and badly needs. In the west, in Darfur, Arabs seeking to escape the spreading desert kill and displace Africans for more productive land.

But there is a reality check. Khartoum has been unable to vanquish Africans militarily in the south. That’s why Khartoum now appears ready to conclude its peace agreement with the south. But just as the guns are about to fall silent in the south, Arabs in Darfur have killed at least 30,000 Africans and displaced more than a million from their homes and villages.

____
Excellent article on the Sudan and Darfur. Go read.
Racism at root of Sudan’s Darfur crisis

By Makau Mutua

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The visits by US Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to Sudan last week gave hope that the genocide in Darfur can be arrested before an entire people is obliterated.
But anyone - including Mr. Powell and Mr. Annan - interested in averting more tragedy there must understand that Darfur is not an accidental apocalypse of mass slaughters, enslavement, pillage, and ethnic cleansing. The Darfur pogrom is part of a historic continuum in which successive Arab governments have sought to entirely destroy black Africans in this biracial nation.

E-mail newsletters

Get all of today’s headlines, or alerts on specific topics.
Subscribe for free.

E-mail this story

Write a letter to the Editor

Printer-friendly version

Permission to reprint/republish

Darfur is not a mere humanitarian disaster that access by international relief agencies can reverse. The raison d’�tre of the atrocities committed by government-supported Arab militias is the racist, fundamentalist, and undemocratic Sudanese state. What is required for peace in Sudan is either regime change, in which a democratic, inclusive state is born, or a p

FOX’s O’Reilly fabricated evidence of success o … [Media Matters for America]

FOX’s O’Reilly fabricated evidence of success of purported boycott of French imports

Host Bill O’Reilly threatened Canada with a boycott like the one he advocated against France, then cited a phony statistic about the success of the French boycott. The threat came during O’Reilly’s April 27 debate with Toronto Globe and Mail columnist Heather Mallick about Canada’s harboring of two deserters from the U.S. military who have fled to Canada. From FOX News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor:

O’REILLY: Now if the [Canadian] government — if your government harbors these two deserter [sic], doesn’t send them back … there will be a boycott of your country which will hurt your country enormously. France is now feeling that sting.

MALLICK: I don’t think for a moment such a boycott would take place because we are your biggest trading partners.

O’REILLY: No, it will take place, madam. In France …

MALLICK: I don’t think that your French boycott has done too well …

O’REILLY: …they’ve lost billions of dollars in France according to “The Paris Business Review.”

MALLICK: I think that’s nonsense.

Media Matters for America found no evidence of a publication named “The Paris Business Review.” A Google.com search revealed no mentions of “Paris Business Review,” “Revue des Affaires de Paris,” or any similar French name. A LexisNexis search for “Paris,” “France,” or “French” within five words of “business review” produced no relevant results. There is a journal called “European Business Review,” which is published in England; however, over the past two years, “European Business Review” has not mentioned an American boycott of France.

Furthermore, contrary to O’Reilly’s claim that France has lost “billions of dollars” due to an American boycott, American imports from France have actually increased since international tensions with France began in the months prior to the start of the war in Iraq in March 2003. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in February 2004, the United States imported $2.26 billion in French goods and services, up from $2.18 billion in February 2002.

Two days later, on the April 29 episode of The O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly plugged a poll on his personal website, BillOReilly.com: “A new BillOReilly.com poll asks you the question will you boycott Canadian goods and services if that country does not return two American deserters who are being glorified by some of the Canadian media?’”

My First (and Last) Time With Bill O’Reilly

It started innocuously enough. On Monday, June 21, a producer from Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor called to ask me to appear as a guest that evening to comment on a front-page story in the New York Times claiming that the Bush Administration had overstated the value of intelligence gained at Guant�namo and the dangers posed by the men detained there. I’m generally not a fan of shout-television, and I had declined several prior invitations to appear on O’Reilly’s show, but this time I said yes. Little did I know it would not only be my first time, but also my last.

I sat in the Washington studio as the taping of the show began in New York with a rant from Bill O’Reilly. He claimed that “the Factor” had established the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and then played a clip from Thomas Kean, head of the Senate’s 9/11 Commission, in which Kean said, “There is no evidence that we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in any way in attacks on the United States, in other words, on 9/11. What we do say, however, is there were contacts between Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Iraq, Saddam–excuse me. Al Qaeda.”

I was impressed. O’Reilly, who had announced his show as the “No Spin Zone,” was actually playing a balanced soundbite, one that accurately reported the commission’s findings both that there was no evidence linking Saddam and 9/11, and that there was some evidence of contacts (if no “collaborative relationship”) between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Maybe all those nasty things Al Franken had said about O’Reilly weren’t true after all.

But suddenly O’Reilly interrupted, plainly angry, and said, “We can’t use that…. We need to redo the whole thing.” Three minutes of silence later, the show began again, with O’Reilly re-recording the introduction verbatim. Except this time, when he got to the part about Kean, he played no tape, and simply paraphrased Kean as confirming that “definitely there was a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda.” The part about no link to 9/11 was left on the cutting-room floor.

Now it was my turn. O’Reilly introduced the segment by complaining that we are at war and need to be united, but that newspapers like the New York Times are running biased stories, dividing the country and aiding the enemy. “The spin must stop–our lives depend on it,” O’Reilly gravely intoned. He then characterized the Times story that day as claiming that the Guant�namo detainees were “innocent people” and “harmless.” He said the paper’s article “questions holding the detainees at Guant�namo.”

I noted that the Times had said nothing of the sort. And I pointed out that the article relied on a CIA study finding that the detainees seemed to be low-level and had provided little valuable intelligence.

That didn’t convince O’Reilly, however, who again criticized the Times for misleading its readers by terming the detainees innocent and not dangerous. I replied that he was misleading his own viewers, by exaggerating what the Times had said. “No, I’m not,” he retorted. So far, the usual fare on newstalk television.

But then I decided to go one step further: “It seems to me like the pot calling the kettle black, Bill, because I just sat here five minutes ago as you re-recorded the introduction to this show to take out a statement from the head of the 9/11 commission stating that there was no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.”

Apparently O’Reilly does not like being called “the pot.” He exploded, repeatedly called me an “S.O.B.” and assured me that he would cut my accusation from the interview when the show aired. He also said I would “never ever” be on his show again. At this point, I wasn’t sure whether to take that as a threat or a promise.

Sure enough, when The O’Reilly Factor aired later that night, both Thomas Kean’s statement about 9/11 and my charge about O’Reilly deleting it were missing. All that was left was Bill O’Reilly, fuming at the liberal media’s lack of objectivity and balance, and ruing the divisive effect “spin” has on our national unity.

___

I am so sick of the O Reillys and Limbaughs spewing their crap. And some idiots suck it up and believe it. Half this country is just a bunch of gullible idiots, and the rest of us are sick of it. Wake up, America - you’re being lied to.

ASIAN POP How Hello Kitty Came to Rule the World / With little advertising and no TV spinoff, Sanrio’s 30-year-old feline turned cute into the ultimate brand

Faster, pussycat — sell, sell!

So goes the unspoken mantra for Hello Kitty, one of global pop culture’s most successful, most ubiquitous and, after three decades, most durable brands. For Japan’s Sanrio Company Ltd., the worldwide purveyor of everything Hello Kitty, its steady outpouring of cute-cat merchandise constitutes more than a product line; with more than 20,000 items available at any given time, of which roughly 10,000 are aimed at the North American/South American market, Hello Kitty amounts to a vast consumer-goods universe, accounting for the largest chunk of Sanrio’s nearly $1 billion annual sales around the globe.

Sanrio has other, lesser stars in its cute-character lineup, including the droopy-eyed penguin Badtz Maru and the baseball-playing frog Keroppi. None of them, though, has as big a fan base or as much earning power as Sanrio founder and President Shintaro Tsuji’s signature creation — a white-faced, round-headed cat with a little bow on one ear, a strangely emotionless expression and, perhaps most strikingly, no mouth. No other creature whose image appears on the key chains, handkerchiefs, coin purses, stationery and other items the Japanese call “fancy goods” has Hello Kitty’s allure.

That’s because no other member of the Japanese company’s money-making characters has what Hello Kitty has managed to attract and keep drawing back for more, year after year — legions of girls eager to spend their pocket money generously on products that are seen as fun, affordable and unabashedly cute. They’re girls as young as 6 who, at the very start of their shopping careers, begin spending on little trinkets — pencil cases, notebooks, hair clips — for themselves and their friends. They’re older girls in spirit, too, including women in their 30s who may purchase Hello Kitty lamps, sheets and clocks to outfit their daughters’ bedrooms, or Hello Kitty microwave ovens, T-shirts, tote bags and party supplies for their own use and amusement. (For some, it’s a girlish guilty pleasure.)

The Birth of Cute

“Kawaii (’cute’ in Japanese) resonates through generations, and it’s the reason for Hello Kitty’s success,” says Ken Belson, a co-author, with Brian Bremner, of “Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion-Dollar Feline Phenomenon” (John Wiley & Sons). Belson, a business reporter for The New York Times, and Bremer, Asia economics editor for Business Week in Tokyo, had unprecedented access to Tsuji and other Sanrio executives in Japan while researching the book, whose November 2003 release coincided with the 30th anniversary of Hello Kitty’s debut.

In their book, the authors explain that Tsuji, who grew up during the hardship years of World War II, became an engineer with an instinctive, entrepreneurial flair. Among the first products Tsuji brought to market: silks, “oriental sandals” and, under license from Hallmark in the United States, greetings cards. Those early ventures taught the young businessman about the ups and downs of trend-fueled sales. By the late 1960s, he had secured the licensing rights for Japan for goods emblazoned with the Snoopy character from Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts” series. Tsuji also turned his attention to developing character-driven products of his own.

“Hello Kitty came out in 1974 when Japan’s kawaii culture was first emerging,” Belson said by phone from New York, referring to Japan’s now well-known, popular passion for cuteness in general — in pop stars, animal images, advertising — and in cutely designed, cute-looking character goods in particular. “She is the original, and it is hard to replace her. She became the icon of cute for a whole generation. You can’t buy that kind of lucky coincidence.”