the guy by the door …

A significant number of Republican Senators have publicly called for a change in strategy in the war in Iraq. Nonetheless, they have blocked even a hint of a timetable with the threat of filibuster that none dared call filibuster¹. Surely, in the cold sober light of CSPAN2, those Senators would be forced to put their vote where there mouth is. Or at least that’s what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D-NV] hoped. But NO!!! After 30 hours of debate, the Senate voted 52-47 to end debate and vote on the Levin-Reed² Amendment to the Defense Authorization Act for 2008. Falling short of the 60 votes required, the amendment did NOT come to a vote. Senator Reid withdrew the the Defense Authorization Act from the floor, leaving open the possibility of resubmitting Levin-Reed at a future date. Presumably, pressure on the Repugs will be greater in September.

The best account I’ve seen, including full text of Levin-Reed, is at BobGeiger.com.

How much of a change in strategy are we talking about?

Not a lot. Levin-Reed calls for a reduction in troops in Iraq to be completed by April 2008, but leaves some in place indefinitely. Presumably their role would be limited. It does nothing to reduce the number of American paid mercenary soldiers in Iraq. Lastly, and most important for the long term, it leaves the door open for “redeployment” in the region. It may be a turn in course, but it is not an obvious turn away from the neo-conservative pursuit of hegemony. With the Lieberman amendment already attached to the the Defense Authorization Act, Levin-Reed might merely mean a turn in the course of the pursuit of hegemony away from Iraq toward Iran. That would not be a course for survival.

*I’m goin’ for a little Matt Drudge thing here. 🙂

¹A cloture vote to end debate and bring a measure to a vote, requires 60 of the 100 votes. Rather than say filibuster, the Repugs simply say, “you know it takes 60 votes?”

²The homophonic Senator Jack Reed [D-RI] is distinct from the Majority leader.

Some recent reports have suggested “diplomatic progress.” However, the Guardian Unlimited suggests that the debate in the White House has shifted towards Dick Cheney’s desire to attack.

Senate Unanimously Adopts Lieberman Amendment to Confront Iran on its Attacks on American Soldiers

Last Wednesday, in consideration of the Defense Appropriations Act, the Senate voted 97-0 to confront “the Islamic Republic of Iran over its proxy attacks on American soldiers in Iraq.“

The impeachment movement has notched up in the wake of what is almost certainly a deal to keep Veep Cheney’s former Chief of Staff from telling what he knows. If this has convinced you, get on board while I elaborate the case for other folks. I have seen the site, off and on, between DNS¹ errors. There are, no doubt, traffic bursts on the site as various internet sites point to this new site. I wonder also if there is a “wheel war” with Cheney loyalists hacking the DNS servers. Stay tuned.

To the “What Good Will It Do?” crowd and the cornucopia of leftish necessitarian groups pursuing their own private visions of the end of history, I will simply point out that the list of coalition members includes many of your counterparts, ranging from The World Can’t Wait to The Nation. I say “notched up” because of the breadth of this list.

I first heard about this site last night. I was signer number 95. Today July 6:

¹Domain Name System, the nodes on the net that convert domain names e.g. impeachcheney.org to IP [Internet Protocol] addresses. These are the numbers that are actually embedded in each and every packet of a message to tell the nodes where it is going.

Dan Ellsberg on Amy and Juan.

Archived streams available.

Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait ’til the war has started. Don’t wait until the bombs have fallen against Iran. … Obey your oath to the Constitution … not to the Commander in Chief…

Daniel Ellsberg to those with modern equivalents of the Pentagon Papers in their safes.

In honoring Beacon Press¹, which published the Pentagon Papers² thirty five years ago, the Unitarian Universalist Church held a convocation in Portland Oregon. Dan Ellsberg was invited to recount his part in getting the papers to Beacon. Also asked to recount his part was former Senator and Presidential candidate Mike Gravel.

¹Beacon Press is sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Church.

²Thirty five other publishers had refused to publish them.

The Senate Judiciary Committee released a letter Thursday indicating that the Department of Justice will investigate whether DOJ head Alberto Gonzales tried to bias the testimony of his former aide Monica Goodling’s testimony before Congress about the firing of U.S. Attorneys.

Monica Goodling, Gonzales’s former White House liaison, told Congress last month that the attorney general “made me a little uncomfortable” when he asked about her recollection of events leading up to some of the dismissals.

James Rowley, Bloomberg News.

Harvard Alum (’79, HLS ’82) Glenn A. Fine, the DOJ Inspector General, joined Head of the DOJ Office of Professional Repsponsibility H. Marshall Jarrett in a reply to the Judiciary Committee that this would be investigated.

Earlier this year the OPR attempted to investigate the role of DOJ lawyers in crafting the National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program. The investigation was closed when OPR was denied the necessary security clearances. According to Torture Alum, the President personally made the decision.
Tearing up the pea patch?

My thesis advisor grew up in Opelousas, Louisiana¹. They had a saying about achievement. Does it apply to the Senate Judiciary Committee?

On Wednesday, the Judiciary Committees of both the Senate and House issued subpoenas for the testimony of two former White House staff – former White House Counsel Harriet Miers, who was nominated for the Supreme Court and Sara Taylor, the former political director at the White House.

¹To the charge of Yankee chauvinism, I must plead gulity as charged. Earlier I said Tuscaloosa, which is in Alabama. This is particularly serious in the light of Hurricane Katrina. The Gulf Coast, which was in many ways neglected before, has been profoundly neglected since. A small bit of light – Tulane Law has been working with area residents to get some of the promised government relief. Points on the posterity book for the Late Larry for taking some of their folks in. The hard question, as always, how many?

¹There always is at least one (wo|)man behind a manager otherwise they wouldn’t be a manager. N’est pas?

Alternet relays an article by Ben Landon of United Press International, Iraqi Troops Face Off Against Striking Oil Workers. The arrest warrants accuse the strikers of “sabotaging the economy”. Its hard to tell whcih labor demands are causing what reaction from the government, but:

The demands include union entry to negotiations over the oil law they fear will allow foreign oil companies too much access to Iraq’s oil, as well as a variety of improved working conditions.

refering to a law before the Iraqi parliament governing the long term [~30 year] “production sharing agreements.”  In drafts to date the law would grant the lion’s share of the profits to foreign [outside of Iraq] oil companies. Labor intervention in these agreements is certain to meet with disfavor in the “foreign investment Community.”

In the first few hours after the U.S.-Iran talks, the wire services offered no specifics, offered differing acounts of when the next meeting would be, and cast a generally negative light on the outcome. It was only later that the highly non-specific “broad general agreement” was offered. According to Michael Hirsh and Mark Hosenball of Newsweek diplomacy generally and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice specifically are “on the ascendancy” in the administration against Cheney’s desire for war with Iran. One of their sources is former U.N. Ambassador [i.e. Rice subordinate ] and Cheney intimate John Bolton. Hirsh and Hosenball claim that Bolten and others leaving the government have weakened Cheney’s position.

Secretary Provost Dr. Rice is not the first Secretary of State to go head to head with Veep Shooter Cheney. Jeff Stein of the Congressional Quarterly, reports that Cheney’s office actively tried to undermine the “One China” policy forged by Nixon and affirmed by George W. Bush. At stake was possible nuclear war with China.

Stein quotes Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations:

“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”

Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”

According to China experts Richard Bush and Michael O’Hanlon:

A Taiwanese declaration of independence, they said, “could result in the first major war between nuclear weapons states in history, with no guarantee it would be successfully concluded prior to a major escalation.”

Maybe it’s a good thing Cheney’s star is falling? Then again, maybe we should be sure that it is. With the senior military opposed to war with Iran, maybe there is some hope that it won’t happen. Their view is based largely on logistics. Hegemony is just too expensive – in treasure and blood. Slightly more hopeful is to hear a deeper question finally by asked in the “liberal media” i.e. somebody besides Noam. What kind of relationship do we want with the world?

After rally at Harvard’s Holyoke Center announcing tentative settlement.

At a brief rally¹ in front of Harvard’s Holyoke Center, negotiators from S.E.I.U. local 615 announced a tentative settlement with Allied-Barton, the company which increasingly supplies contract security guards to Harvard. No details were provided pending ratification of the membership. Union members will now vote in shifts and sometime next week, we’ll know.

¹So brief that I only caught the aftermath what with lunch and Tealuxe and all.

The “historic” talks between U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi, the first in 27 years, concluded at 2:30 P.M. Baghdad time [6:30 AM EST] after only four hours with no conclusions reached. Accounts differ about plans for follow-up talks. According to the AP, Ambassador Kazemi expects talks to continue within a month while Ambassador Crocker denies any timetable. As the talks were winding down, a car bomb exploded in the Sinak market area just across the Tigris River from the Green Zone where the talks were held. Tweny one people were killed.

The notion of having diplomatic talks with Iran while holding large military excercises off the Iranian coast reminds me of scenes from gangster movies. Two guys enter a store to talk to the owner about “fire insurance.” The well dressed guy does the talking. The big guy says nothing as he lights matches. The difference in the current circumstance appears to be that any offers made COULD be refused.

Mainstream media are hailing the talks as “historic”. I suppose it’s good to accentuate the positive. But do these talks represent a substantial change in the direction of the winds? Probably not. There are more winds blowing toward war than I knew. John Tirman of AlterNet¹ points to a report by ABC news that Bush has authorized the CIA to “destablize” the Iranian government. The main focus of the article is the use/abuse of Iranian American Middle East scholar Haleh Esfandiari², jailed in Iran, as a geopolitical pawn, because The Right Wing Itches to Strike Iran.

Do the talks mean anything? If Steven C. Clemons is right, it depends on which parts of the government answer to “W” and which parts answer to “Shooter” Cheney³. Whether or not Clemons is right, it ultimately depnds on which parts of the government answer to the American people.

¹Those who view internet publications as suspect might be placated by noting that Professor Tirman is also the Executive Director of the MIT’s Center for International Studies.

²Tirman is refreshingly candid about the intellectual world’s focus on itself.

³Cheney’s shooting career goes back before his assault on his long time friend Harry Whittington, to at least Sept. 11, 2001 when he issued the “shoot down” order for aircraft believed to be a threat to the nation’s capitol. It remains a question whether that order was carried out.

The Congressional Wind

The determination of the Executive Branch to “stay the course” of the Project for a New American Century is anything but news. There was some hope with Election 2006 the Congress might nudge the steersman a bit. Earlier today the House cast doubt on that and a few minutes ago, the Senate dashed those hopes on the rocks. Discouraging as that is, there is more to the story. Bear in mind that there are almost as many “contract security agents” or more properly, mercenary soldiers, as uniformed military in Iraq. In all the discussion about supporting the troops, very little was said about how many billion$ will actually go to private contractors like Blackwater USA and Kellogg, Brown, and Root who are paid much more per capita than uniform military and are almost as numerous. And what accountability do these contractors have?

The Judicial Wind

Yesterday Team Juan/Amy had a report from Jeremy Scahill [author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army] about a further erosion of the rule of law. In defending itself against a lawsuit by the families of four brutally slain employees, Blackwater is claiming immunity of the U.S. Government i.e. sovereign immunity. As I read the Wikipedia entry, it seems to me that the Tucker Act specifically excludes such a claim. In any case, should this defense succeed, and it already has in part, Blackwater will have the immunity of the U.S. Military without any of the accountability of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Judiciary has joined the winds of war.

Hot air and Sabre Rattling

Blowing through the Straits of Hormuz: a Horde of Hardware

You cannot simultaneously prepare for war and prevent war. -Albert Einstein.

The military build up in the Persian Gulf has been going on for a while and is well documented. Steven C. Clemons reports on his blog The Washington Note that Veep Dick Cheney is actively planning to give the President and Secretary of State the end run – go directly to war with Iran. [Do not pass Congress. Do not collect public support.] Does this fall within his advertised need to work “on the dark side, if you will?”

“We call on you and the President to relent from this reckless path, and begin to restore respect for the rule of law we all learned to love many years ago.”

I don’t see the Decider Commander Guy or Torture Alum relenting on much of anything. So the question comes, is this ad a real response or is it a bunch of Harvard trained lawyers who had only one course in ethics as 3L’s dealing out the minimum possible dose of ersatz Veritas? Somebody should ask them.

¹McKey and James are the children of Allen Berkman. I’m unclear on their relationship, if any,^a, with Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman who gave Harvard $5.4 Million to “grow” and rename the Law School’s Institute for Internet and Society.

^aIf you are a Christian Fundamentalist, there is guaranteed to be a relationship at the root at least. I, however, think evolution to be a more robust description, but I do not know how to compute the root set of the human genome. I would guess it unlikely that McKey and James are descended from chlorophyl based life, with Jack and Lillian descended from hydrogen sulfide metabolizing organisms.

To the Honorable City Councils of Cambridge and Boston,

• Report of Public Officials and Other [Boston]
• Consent Communication [Cambridge]
• Online at  The Spring 2001 occupation of Mass Hall by the students of the Progressive Student Labor Movement[PSLM] brought some improvement to the lives of some of Harvard’s lowest paid workers. Included in the settlement that ended the occupation was a temporary and limited respite from the steady trend over the last 35 years to outsource and deunionize labor at Harvard.¹ The group had a number of significant assets and some luck. They had been steadily at work for four years – greater than average continuity for student political groups. They were members from Law, the Kennedy School, Medicine, and Public Health, as well as graduate and undergraduate students from Arts and Sciences.² A student doing “worker outreach” spoke to me at the guard desk of the Lamont Library. They had a fairly vibrant organization with fairly broad recognition on campus, when they had some luck.

  President Neil Rudinstine announced his retirement in the spring of 2000. Going into the fifth year of PSLM, I was invited to a meeting in the Parlor Room of Phillips Brooks House. It was full about 50 people; surprisingly close to the number that went into the occupation. There was a steady stream of events involving a coalition of three groups of low wage workers.

  • Cooks – some “direct” Harvard employees represented by Hotel Entertainment and Restaurant Employees and some working in “cash ops”. It was an explicit goal of the campaign that these contract workers should be “direct employees”.
  • Custodial workers, some “direct” Harvard employees represented by Service Employees Internation Union Local 615 and some employees of cleaning firms under contract to Harvard. It was an explicit goal of the campaign that contract workers should be “direct employees”.
  • Members of the Harvard University Security Parking and Museum Guards’ Union. Administration was replacing them with guards from Security Systems International. [now Allied-Barton]

  Then there was the occupation. For twenty one days close to fifty people inside Mass Hall and anywhere from 300 to 1000 outside. Radical groups and mainstream politicians came in support.³ It was an inclusive effort. Nonetheless, as I’ve said, it did not achieve all of it’s goals, but they did achieve measurable success. There were, I’m sure many things went on behind the scenes that would have made me wince had I known. Still, I think there is only one thing I would criticize. They did so many things well that they made it look easy. Incoming students never quite got it.

  In defense of the newer students [SLAM], the Class of ’01 did not completely create their own circumstances. A long tenured President concerned about his legacy has vulnerabilities a sitting President does not have.⁴

  There was among the newer students a desire to outdo their predessors. They wanted to acquire the assets of PSLM, but “rebrand’ the organization to a more explicitly radical mold. And the leadership was largely First Years and the group undergraduate. It made a difference. They were very late to learn that in the abscence of the ‘guaranteed’ secular apolcalypse a successful radical action involves a lot of boring non-radical work. The result was an effort smaller and less significance than the effort they were determined to outdo. This has left one significant downside for Harvard Labor. The contract Security Guards, with community support, will probably get a reasonable contract with Allied-Barton. But the Student Labor Action Movement has left the door wide open for Harvard adminsitration, at the end of that contract, to simply go to another, lower bidding, non-unionized vendor. This may be good for SEIU in the long term, but the particular guards at Harvard now will have their lives disrupted. Further, the guards in HUSPMGU and my library guards are probably more vulnerable to outsourcing than before.

  I urge the community to support S.E.I.U. 615 in it’s efforts to get a livable contract with Allied-Barton, but I also urge the community to condemn Harvard’s continuing policy of outsourcing and deunionization of Harvard labor. We must “insource” jobs at Harvard.⁵

  This is admittedly a rearguard action, a genuinely progressive program for labor has yet to emerge.⁶ But secular apocalypse is so notoriously unpredictable that in the current historical circumstance the misestimation of its imminence is creating a lot of disjoint pockets of heat and not a lot of light.

  ¹Coworkers who were at Harvard before me say that the painters were all “let go” in the early ’70’s. That’s just about the time that the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers [AFSCME local 3650] was formed.

  ²At the sit-in proper there were people from the Business School, but I don’t know when they entered the picture. There was even a string theorist 🙂

  ³I would like to have heard the discussion when the HUPD officer explained to Senator Kennedy that he was not allowed in to see the students. I was rather proud of the Senator’s performance.

  ⁴The Late Larry Summers had no legacy to protect when he shuffled off this mortal coil. As I’ve mentioned previously, there are cases where mortality and departure from Harvard are the same. There do, hovever, appear to be backdoor attempts by the Fellows to partially resurrect him. The legacy of a second time President who, despite a background in labor, presided over the beginnings of union busting at Harvard is harder to calculate. It is doubtful that SLAM is able to do, let alone take advantage of, such a calculation.

  ⁵This is actually easy to do. Harvard could negostiate a rent-to-own agreement with Allied-Barton. SEIU is constrained by law against such a demand, but the community at large is not and the students in particular could raise this with impunity. I once heard the argument advanced that Harvard Human Resources couuld not find guards at the then going rate of $11.50/hour which required using S.S.I. who could find guards at the then going rate of $9.00/hour. Administration clearly didn’t check with Harvard economics on that one.

  ⁶There are some encouraging movements on the scene e.g. Participatory Economics and the Free Software Movement. Participatory Ecomomics seeks to be general, but has limited “mindshare’ at the moment. Free Software is restricted in the activities it covers, but it has achieved significant “marketshare”. Micro$oft may dominate the personal computer, but Apache software has dominated the webserver space for years. Both movements explore how to spread advanced modes of production beyond the privileged few. And they are not locked in to a specific prediction of a secular apocalyptic event. They are achieving results now!

The SLAM fast for contract security guards has moved into the post action phase. This is the phase where people try to figure out how to get Havard to actually do what it agreed to do to end the fast. I’ll have a lot to say about this, but there is a more pressing issue.

Another fast for a different cause is, as far as I can tell, still going on:

Photo: Chelsea Collonge, No Nukes Hunger Strike Blog

Students on several campuses of the University of California are fasting to end nuclear weapons research at the University. The Harvard Inititative for Peace and Justice posted an appeal for support on their list. The fasters have a blog with pictures and a suggested letter to the UC Regents.

Most of the Arts First events are over, but the photo exhibit by Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin¹ will be open M-F 9-5 on the 4th floor of Boyleston Hall through May 18. Stefan has heightened my sense of buyer’s remorse in spending a ton of money on a Canon Digital Rebel XT. The eye of the photographer in finding the good shot can make a 5MP point-and-shot do just as well most of the time.²

¹Stefan assures me that if he marries a hyphenated woman, they’ll do something with more panache than triple hyphenation.

²For the benefit of Ryan et. al. in Economics, I’ll just point out that free market fundamentalists pretend that barriers to entry don’t exist, while stock market analysts rely heavily upon it. And for Gustavo, a single person cannot sell anything. He can offer something for sale. It takes a buyer to make a sale. At least one flavor of Harvard’s would be Trotskyites are a little fuzzy on their capitalism. And most have bigger ruling class pensions than I do.

Their placards say “Support Harvard Workers” and “Stand for Security”. This action specifically supports employees of Allied-Barton¹stationed at Harvard. To the administration, they are not Harvard employees. Outsourcing is the major tool in Harvard’s 30 year long program to deunionize the Harvard’s low wage labor force.²

From 1995 to 2001 the Harvard Living Wage Campaign sought to address this issue, culminating in the sit-in in May of 2001. That group included “direct employees” as well as employees of contract workers. In H.E.R.E., Harvard has both. Sadly, the current crop of students doesn’t care about “direct” employees.

Nonetheless, after taking the above picture and officer of HUPD admonished me to get prior approval from University Spokesperson Joe Wrinn. Here’s the thing, one time photographer and union activist has put down his camera lets administration determine what he writes. I’m going the other way.

To Wit, Wherefore, Hut Sut, and So Forth

Robert W. Iuliano, Esq. you are hereby admonished to cease and desist from prior restraint of the free press and interference with a duly elected Union official engaged in concerted labor activity.

That said, I would like to apologize to the officer involved in the event that he be the same as the officer who admonished me to not walk through a hard hat area.

¹The first phase of Bob‘s outsourcing of security at Harvard was to hire Malden based Security Systems International. They were bought by Allied which then merged with Barton.

²The late Polly Price, ‘director of human resources’ made much ado about Harvard being a good place to work. It depends. Marxian analysis though incomplete is useful. Bob was the Assistant General Counsel. He lost – big time.

Former U.S. Representative Elizabeth Hottzman [Wikipedia]

Radcliffe and Harvard Law School Alum1 Elizabeth Holtzman2 has an article in the Los Angeles Times, Alberto Gonzales’ safety net. In June of 2005, the Nation published her article Torture and Accountability, in which she describes Gonzales’ role in helping Bush evade the War Crimes Act of 1996. The Wikipedia account goes on to observe, “The adoption of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, by rewriting the War Crimes Act, appears to immunize the Bush administration and others against possible legal challenges regarding war crimes,3“

In Pushing Back on Detainee Act, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, describes the devastating experience of he and his colleagues lobbying against the death of Habeas Corpus. He is confident that it will be overturned in the courts – in perhaps a year.

For those who missed it, the Military Commissions Act was signed the day after Michael Chertoff visited his alma mater, Havard Law School. I wonder what our Law faculty told him to pass along to the prez. I wonder who, if anyone, from Harvard Law went with Michael Ratner to Congress. Much as I like the color orange, they also serve who take names and ask questions in class. And if they hide behind big furniture, try outside.

¹I miss the mild pedantry of knowing no Latin except genger inflection and the odd plural. For readers of an earler edition, genger infliction is when I ask a woman for a date.

²She really is from Brooklyn. Dean Elena went to Hunter College High School which is in Manhattan. If I got it wrong I’m blaming the Alumni Office for failing to correct me.

³Two references are provided:

• Micheal Ratner, Pushing Back on Detainee Act, The Nation, October 4, 2006 (web only). He also co-hosts Law and Disorder Radio.
• Michael C. Dorf, Why The Military Commissions Act is No Moderate Compromise, Findlaw an open-source-alike website.

Thomas Becker in class 1A Gitmo drag seems to have the right idea. He confronts Harvard Law School Alums because

Torture Alum Alberto Gonzales was there.

Ok. I’m being just a bit melodramatic. I discovered that Harvard Law School is not totally a branch office of the Federalist Society, when the Legal Left took me to dinner¹, again when Unbound had their Resistance and the Law conference, and again on the 4th anniversary of the invasion. But I am still getting over the Milgram reception given to Chertoff.

Actually, I picked a bad week to be home taking care of domestic matters. The Harvard Coalition to End Torture [great pictures! including the two above] demonstrated for a full week and I missed it. I don’t watch mainstream media much, but Yahoo doesn’t show anything until Torture Alum showed up. The guy in orange has the right idea. What’s wrong with all those other people? Maybe Dean Elena [endearingly Brooklyn²] is right, a single required course in the third year isn’t quite enough to set folks’ moral compass straight.

Missed it by that much!

The reunion was on Saturday in Austin Hall [next to the Littauer building]. i went a little bit, but had to go guard the library. Sounds like the demonstration occurred during my shift.
I watched Dean Elena on the overflow. Aside from straightening out folks’ moral compass, she’s gonna build a lot of really, really, big stuff. What is it with law types and big furniture? Judges and their big desks? Some kind of compensation thing goin’ on? The wavefunction of the universe will fit in the pencil drawer of a regular desk.³
But I gotta go with Professor Janet, them big Hauser windows are glorious.

¹It was heartening that they took care to feed the help who were on duty. I’m sorry I didn’t quite get the recycling regime. I can tell you from years in the library – there’s no sign everyone will understand; you need a guy by the sign to explain it. And it helps if you’ve thought about it in advance.

²On beginning grad school, I lived just west of Park Slope on the ‘transition’ block. A coupla three days there, we heard a popping noise outside. Some guy had a gun. At least that’s what Gil said. I was hugging the floor boards. My first experience of buying dirt in a plastic bag was there.

³Of course, all the “human degrees of freedom” are “integrated out.”

If you end a line with a superscript and put the “more” break imediately after, the tag that generates the “more”  is inserted  before the  closing “sup” tag. This leads to  unpredictable results in subsequent  posts on the page.

Does anyone know how to embed html in a post title? My e-mail moniker is “randy.f”. It liveth in the duchy of “earthlink.net”.

Thanks to Mathew Cardinale of the Atlanta Progressive News for a slightly polished version of the full text and Representative Dennis Kucinich for the original. -30-

The Thai government has issued a compulsory license for production of a generic version of an Aids drug. Abbot Labs has threatened reprisal. In the aftermath of 9/11, when 6 people had died of Anthrax, the Bush Administration proposed to issue a compulsory license for parallel importing of Cipro. The Aids toll is a bit higher. Democracy Now!

Also, morning becomes Μήδεια. Some people think she’s a cut up, but she makes me feel young. Code Pink had a card carrrying girlie-man with them. He was wearing a pink hat. I haven’t seen that since I left New York City. I got’s to get me one.

Bill Moyers returns to the air tonight with, “Buying the War,” a study of the press during the run-up to the war in Iraq. It airs tonight on PBS. Amy Goodman interviews him for the full hour [after the headlines: bill of impeachment filed] today.

David Halberstam [’55 🙂 ] was the one reporter who, over time, made me realize that it’s not how close you are to power. … The further you get from power the closer you can get to the truth.*

Democracy has become a racket, when it comes to money and politics and the media.*

*Bill Moyers on Democracy Now! April 25, 2007.

Headlines and archived streams.