Category: War

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96%

96% of federal criminal cases are resolved by plea bargain.

That means that 96% of the time no judge or jury hears the evidence and makes a decision about whether or not a person deserves to be punished and how severe the punishment should be.

That means that 96% of the time a suspect is confronted with this choice: take a sure conviction of a lesser offense and less prison time, or take a chance on a trial for a more serious crime and, possibly, a much longer prison sentence.

As you are thinking it over, consider this: juries in the U.S. absolutely love to convict. They just love, love, love it. They will convict you in the morning, convict you in the night; they will convict you based on nothing, except the word of a law enforcement officer or prosecutor who just feels very, very sure that you are guilty, and the identification of a distant blind witness who saw you from 300 meters away on a dark night in the rain and picked you out of a police lineup because you were the only one complaining about being in a police lineup.

We know the system often fails because of the all the convictions that have been reversed based on DNA evidence. But as long as most of those convictions are of black men, our society doesn’t care.

We have the opportunity to go back and re-examine those cases to try to figure out why these men were convicted in the first place. The answer– aside from the obvious– is: it’s hard to tell.

You might believe that prosecutors and police are honorable, ethical professionals who never let personal ambition sway their decisions about how to handle a criminal case. I think you would be wrong. There are too many examples of prosecutors or police who were more interested in a conviction than in the reputation of the criminal justice system. Exculpatory evidence is often hidden from the defense. Dubious “expert” witnesses testify about fibers or chemicals or traces of substances found on the victim that could “only” have come from the suspect’s car or closet, to the exclusion of all other possible suspects or cars or closets even though no other suspects or cars or closets were examined.

There is no justice system;  There is a system for processing black men into prisons at the lowest cost possible.

It only took only took 9 years for the U.S. to badger Majiid Khan into confessing to numerous terrorist activities, including conspiracies with the mad Sheik Khalid Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden, whom he has never met.  And he must also confess to the bombing in Jakarta in 2003, though he was in custody five months before it happened. When Mr. Khan mentioned something about the agreement meaning he couldn’t sue the CIA for mistreatment, the live video feed was cut off.

Is this some kind of joke? Why do people take these plea bargains seriously? If the U.S. had evidence against Khan, why would they accept an 18 year sentence? If he was really co-responsible for the deaths of 50 people in Jakarta– would they not have sought the death penalty?

There is only one reason why they would not: they have no evidence.

And if you have no evidence, it may take 9 years, but you will get a plea bargain, if that’s what you want.

Because the alternative, for Majiid Khan, is forever.

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Downton Abbey Misses the Ball

In Episode 8, Season 1, of “Downton Abbey”, Bates is confronted with the accusation that he has stolen some bottles of wine. Bates says something like, “no one has ever seen me touch a drop since I came here”.

In the so-called science of “statement analysis”, this would be a dead giveaway: he doesn’t say he hasn’t touched a drop– only that no one has seen him touch a drop.  Why does he not say he hasn’t touched a drop? Because he’s not sure of that; he’s only sure he hasn’t been caught yet. It’s as if, accused of murder, the suspect blurts out, “you couldn’t possibly have seen me do it”.

Except, in Downton Abbey, we know that Bates, who is turning into a bit of a sanctimonious character, is as innocent as the driven snow.

A lot of dramas want it both ways. Thomas and O’Brien are fun to watch, at first, but it’s no fun watching Thomas openly abuse William and everyone else in the house. In real life, he’d have been sacked very quickly, but then we wouldn’t have had the fun of watching him continue to needle William and try to frame Bates. Carson and Hughes are too stupefied to do anything about him?

It’s also a bit tedious to see Bates get away with saying that he can’t tell anyone why he was unjustly sentenced to two years for theft, just that he was, and if they don’t like it, they can fire him. This episode would have been dramatically improved if Lord Grantham had simply fired him like a plausible character would have. “Very well. I can’t help you if you don’t want me to or won’t take me into your confidence. I don’t have time for this: I’m afraid you’re sacked.”

Daisy, completely out of character, ruins the meals prepared by Mrs. Bird because Mrs. Patmore asked her to make sure the family misses her while she’s gone getting eye surgery. Daisy is cold-hearted enough to sabotage the meal, but not sneaky enough to lie about it when confronted? That might or might not be “possible” but it isn’t interesting: it’s a writer strong-arming his own characters into situations that provide titillating plot developments but undercut character.

I don’t mind Sybil considering a relationship with the chauffeur– I just don’t buy her behaving like a school girl, as if she has suddenly shucked off 18 years of upbringing and culture as if it were a hat. Remember — she did participate in her own “coming out” party, her “debut”. It would have expanded her character considerably if she had refused.

She has spent every day of her waking life dealing with servants who are expected to provide for her every need.

It also would have been far more interesting, as a story line, if Robert had had a chat with the chauffeur once he realized the Sybil has been lying to him about where she was going. Given his position and character, and given the obvious conundrum Sybil’s dishonesty would present Branson, he might have told the chauffeur that he was free to use force if necessary to prevent Sybil from attending one of those dangerous political rallies. That would have created a very interesting dynamic between the chauffeur, Tom Branson, and Sybil. Or he could have told Branson that he was not responsible if the lady decided to act recklessly. That too would have been interesting — Branson “not recommending” that her ladyship proceed and stating that he “won’t be responsible” if something goes wrong, and peevishly parking somewhere to wait for her. But Fellowes wanted the passing titillation of the argument between the two, Branson urging her to get back into the car, Sybil, without the slightest condescension, insisting on her own way. It’s a thoughtless, under-developed scene that could have been much more.

Is Downton Abbey now a soap opera?

It started out well. It started out as a period piece, like an extended “Age of Innocence”. Great acting, great filming, lovely sets and costumes. But then two or three things became clear. Firstly, that Fellowes wants to recycle certain themes and characters over and over again– like a sitcom, basically. Mary just can’t make up her mind about Matthew; Edith’s relationships, like Sir Anthony Strallan, get sabotaged by Mary– who seems bizarrely stricken by the idea of not confessing her role in the death of Mr. Pamuk. Mary? Who earlier mocked her own mother’s ideas of propriety and rules? Suddenly, she’s Karen Santorum?

Secondly, it appears that nobody connected with the show wants to spend the big bucks on a really remarkable scene like (we can only imagine) Sybil’s “coming out” party in London. We’re merely told about the affair. I recommend that you watch this episode carefully, stop your PVR or DVD player just before the scene in which they discuss the ball, and then pop “The Leopard” into your DVD player and watch the final ballroom scene from that movie instead. Then go back to Downton Abbey. (Dr. Zhivago has one or two great grand ballroom scenes; or try “Russian Ark”, a really extraordinary film that culminates with a fabulous ball.)

[January 30, 2012: there are scenes from the war, but they are rather chaste and extracted looking. Can’t blame them really– the budget just isn’t there, probably. But I can blame them for the ridiculous degree of reverence paid to all things military, especially the officers parading about, whining about how they don’t get to serve at the front. That’s not what this war was: it was precisely about officers like that ordering other people to the front to be maimed and gassed and slaughtered for reasons that have, as of yet, 100 years later, escaped most people. More appallingly, if you were not willing to blindly serve in a war with no purpose, they made you out to be unpatriotic or cowardly. ]

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Household Debt

The average Canadian household debt, excluding mortgages, is about $40,000. Yes, read it twice.

As everyone points fingers at those irresponsible Greeks– rumour has it they don’t work at all– consider the Canadian consumer, also living high on future earnings.

Now, if one in ten Canadians were in debt to the tune of $40K, you might begin to think that one in 10 Canadians is irresponsible, selfish, and/or inept. You might look at yourself: I’m pretty smart and wise and self-controlled. I have no debt.

But you can’t. You also have $40K in outstanding debt. So you are irresponsible, lazy, and inept.

Good news for you– you’re probably actually pretty average. In fact, you are average. In fact, you are everyone.

So if the average person owes $40K to credit card companies and banks, what does that say about our society? It says that the creditors in our world have found a way to transfer the hard-earned wealth you have earned from honest labour into their own pockets by simple virtue of the fact that they have capital to lend out. If this state of things were the result of a character flaw, there’s no way everyone would be doing it.

The banks act as if everyone has a choice of running up personal debt or not. But the results of their policies and practices reveal the truth: the system is rigged to their favor. The system is rigged to entice you into spending more than you have in order to “enslave” you: fixed monthly payments for most of your adult life is not “credit”. It’s indentured servitude. Twenty-eight percent interest on credit card debt is not there to provide a fair incentive to banks to lend– it’s there to keep you in servitude by making it increasingly difficult to pay off the principle.

The financial crisis in the U.S. was largely triggered by the attempts of the banks in the U.S. to apply the lessons they learned about credit cards to mortgages, with balloon payments, floating rates, back-loaded payment schedules, and so on. All of this requires a very large crew of lobbyists’ and lots of political donations, because for it to work, the government must be complicit. The government provides the legal system that is rigged to enforce the banks’ rules and the banks’ views of what is “fair” and “honest”. If the banks tried to enforce their own rules themselves, that would be called organized crime. Extortion. Loan-sharking. When the government does it, it’s called “free enterprise”.

It may occasionally be necessary for some of you debtors to go over to a hot, dusty, godforsaken foreign country and kill people to maintain our glorious liberties and freedoms. Thank you very much. We’ll get you to stand up at our baseball and football games and accept a salute. No no no– not you homeless or paralyzed veterans! The ones who can stand.

Only about half of all Canadian homeowners, according to the same website (right) have a mortgage on their home. That’s amazing. But then, they probably bought a boat, or a cottage.

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The Un-War

I have said before that there is no “war” on terror. It’s not a war. It’s a series of random skirmishes. But, as I have also observed before, the Republicans would prefer to keep America in a perpetual state of war and they have now succeeded. The Republicans love to say, “sure, in normal times we could respect the constitution, but this is a time of war” or “sure, normally we don’t torture, but this is a time of war…” or ” sure, normally we try to have a fair tax system, but in a time of war, the rich should not have to pay taxes”.  Or how about, normally we don’t steal a nation’s oil reserves, but Iraq wasn’t using them for anything anyway.

There’s a brilliant mind at work here. If you can justify otherwise outrageous policies on the basis of war, why not have a perpetual war. But wouldn’t that be a bad thing? Only if it was a real war. But then how do you get people to believe we are war when we’re not? Simple. There are always terrorists and always criminals. Simply redefine “war” so it looks like something that is always going on. Bingo.

How does it serve their interests? Fear is the Republicans’ best friend. It is through fear that they can abrogate your civil rights, examine your book-borrowing records, scan you naked at airports. It is through fear that they can channel billions of dollars to their friends in the military and the defense industries. It is through fear that they can hide: our enemies cannot be permitted to know how much we spend on security– as if it would make any difference to them– and so, neither can you.

This “war” is not going to end. Obama can’t end it because the Republicans will roast him for being “soft” on terror if he does, and he doesn’t have the guts to take a chance on that. It will not end because there has never not been terrorists and there probably will never not be terrorists, and the Republicans know that perfectly well. They have their dream position. They know that they are sonsofbitches and as long as they can keep America afraid they are confident that Americans will trust them to wield the big stick and do to our enemies what we consider monstrous when they do it to us.

This war is forever. Patriotism, flag-waving, bigotry prevails for now. Trillions will be spent on fighting the phantom menace, ineffectually in the end, because the very definition of terrorism is random violence.

I don’t when or if Americans will ever realize how they have been conned.

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Deportees

On January 29, 1948, the New York Times ran a story about a plane crash in California in which 32 people died, 28 Mexicans, and four Americans. The four Americans were identified by names and professions. The Mexicans were merely identified as “deportees”.

Woody Guthrie read the article and thought about those Mexicans. He thought about their wives and children and girlfriends, and about the way they risked their lives at times to cross over into the U.S. illegally to try to make some money to send home to their families. He thought about how they were often exploited and cheated by their “coyotes” (guides), and sometimes abandoned to die in the dessert. He thought that they deserved to have names.

He wrote the lyrics for “Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos Canyon)” and recited the piece at some performances. Ten years later, a school teacher named Martin Hoffman took Guthrie’s poem and wrote a melody for it. Pete Seeger covered it and it became a hit.

It’s a beautiful song. It’s flawed (that last didactic verse isn’t necessary)– like the faces of many great beauties– but it has a zen-like clarity to it that entrances. It builds slowly, laying out the scene, literally and metaphorically, and then hammering home it’s point with

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died ‘neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

“Both sides of the river, we died just the same” may the most eloquent summation of a liberal, progressive attitude that I have ever seen. This is not about war between illegals and native sons, or Mexicans and Americans, or the owners and the dispossessed. It’s about how we treat each other as human beings. It’s about the dignity of the laborer, and the hypocrisy of a culture that openly hates illegal immigrants but depends on them to harvest their crops, look after their children, and wash their cars.

One measure of the greatness of a song is its enduring appeal. Is there another song that has retained such a high degree of relevance? Up to 500 Mexicans die every year trying to cross the border illegally to do work that Americans won’t do, for willing employers. In return, they are treated like “outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves”.

How do I acknowledge 9/11? With this tribute to “Deportees”.

In 2005, more than 500 Mexicans died trying to cross over into the U.S. illegally.

Deportee on Wiki

Best version? I have an ensemble version that I adore that is attributed to “Woody Guthrie”– obviously, the song-writer– with no further information about the performers. Sounds like early Weavers, but it’s not them. Lists of songs performed and recorded by the Weavers do not list “Deportee”.

Dolly Parton did a version, on her album “9 to 5”. I will remind you that she was quite a good singer before the industry got their fangs into her style.

The only “tribute” to 9/11 I could really stomach to watch was the curious performance of Paul Simon, at Ground Zero, of “The Sounds of Silence”. As he sang,

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.

the camera cut to a shot of the American flag draped on a nearby office tower. Very curious. Simon didn’t change a word– good man!– so we were left with an image of the “words of the prophets” written on the subway walls and tenement halls.

We know from another Paul Simon’s songs (“A Poem on the Underground Wall”) what one of those words was.

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Kidnapping: Military Contractors

If private contractors were hired to fly victims of “extraordinary rendition” out of the country, to places like Syria– yes, indeed– so they could be tortured– under what legal mechanism have they succeeded in not being arrested and charged with kidnapping?

They were. Some of them were enthusiastic. Some of them were reluctant. Almost all of them complied. They trusted that a lying, scheming amoral government would cover their asses. And pay them well. And they did.

We’ve seen a glimpse of “legal mechanism”. The Federal Government has intervened in court cases begging the judges to refuse to hear the cases because it would “endanger national security”. Most judges– so far– to their everlasting disgrace– have complied. If I was a U.S. citizen I’d be organizing some kind of campaign to have those judges impeached.

I cannot express, in words, my contempt for the judge who accepted that rationale and informed the victim and the victim’s family: all of the most sacred rights you are entitled to as a human being can be disposed of in an instant because Dick Cheney wet his pants at the thought of the Moslem hoards rolling down the streets of Palos Park, Illinois.

Everything that people have fought for for a thousand years, from the Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1965–everything–is tossed out the window with that simple phrase. National Security.

And all the lying scumbags in the Republican Party with their obscene little flag pins in their lapels and their tearful demonstrations of patriotism and loyalty should be impeached. And the complicit scumbags in the Democratic Party who tsk-tsked the left wing about having to be responsible and after all we can’t be seen as “soft” on terror…. impeach them all.

They won’t be impeached. They will be re-elected to office by a people who do not deserve democracy.

There is no “war” on terror.

There was no crisis. There was no emergency.

There was a dramatic attack and many casualties, but there was absolutely nothing in 9/11 to justify the hysterical, overwrought panic that turned weasels like Dick Cheney into whimpering simpering bed-wedding weasels like Dick Cheney.

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Generals Who Never Admit Defeat Even When it Stares Them in the Face

General Petraeus thinks that Obama is leaving Afghanistan too soon.

After 10 years of rather conspicuous failure, Petraeus and the other generals and a few faithfully militant Republicans like John McCain claim that we are on the verge of success– just give me one more chance, honey. I know I’ve let you down over and over again, but this time I think it’s going to work.

Philosopher Karl Popper argued that a scientific theory (or any theory) could not be said to be true unless it was theoretically possible, in a rational sense, to prove that it was false. In other words, to “falsify” it. I wish there was a succinct, well-known term for this position. Maybe there is and I just don’t know it. But once you understand it, it makes perfect sense.

For example, someone tells you that he is underpaid. He deserves more money for the work he does. That’s his theory, his hypothesis.  But is it possible that everyone deserves more money for the work they do? I think a rational person would think not. Next question: is there a single person in the world who does not feel he deserves more money for the work he does? No. So you can’t falsify the hypothesis here– you can’t reasonably believe that any person feels that he should not get paid more. So you respond, “don’t we all”. He hasn’t made his case.

So when the generals argue that the Afghanistan effort is on the verge of success, we could believe they might be right if you could make a sensible case for the idea that they might, if the evidence was convincing, believe that they were ever not on the verge of success. But it is clear that, short of a total annihilation, these generals will never admit that they lost this war. We know this because the generals have lied from the very beginning about how well they were doing, and the prospects of a conclusive victory. Now, some generals even argue that they shouldn’t even look for a conclusive victory: let’s just stay there forever.

That, of course, is not what they promised the American tax-payer when they initiated this war.

In certain criminal cases, fiber evidence is sometimes presented by an “expert” to prove the guilt of an individual. The question I always ask is, knowing what we now know about fiber experts, is it possible that this expert could have failed to find at least one match for any fiber in any suspect’s apartment?

Apparently not. Has one of these experts ever testified in court that they could not match any fibers from the body with any fibers found in the suspect’s apartment? I’ve never heard of it.

So if I had been a congressman back in, oh, 2005, and had been part of one of those hearings at which the generals explain what they are doing and why and how it will lead to success, I would have asked the generals to lay out for me a definition of “failure”, just so we would know what it looks like if it was ever staring us in the face. I would have written it down carefully, made it into a framed poster, and hung it on the wall in the hearing room, so that five, six, seven, ten years later, when the same general was arguing that the U.S. should continue to spend over $1 billion a week on this war, I could point to the poster and say, no, we failed, let’s admit it and move on.

Without a doubt– without the slightest doubt– people like John McCain would have objected. He would say, we didn’t define failure in the right way. I have a new definition. And it’s not what we have now. And we would know that the truth is that every last U.S. soldier could be killed and every last armament destroyed and he would still insist they could win if they would just do the same except more of it.

At least it would be more transparent what people like John McCain want to do, how they see the world, how they understand the purpose of government.

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Who’s Stopping Thorium?

“Too good to be true”. I think we all have an innate suspicion of stories that sound like the stories about the possibilities of thorium.

Scientists discover an abundant, cheap chemical element that can produce energy safer and more reliably than any other substance. It doesn’t produce ugly by-products that can be used in bombs. It doesn’t produce emissions. It can be used in numerous small reactors that can be buried in the ground and managed remotely. It’s will be so cheap, they won’t bother to meter the electricity.

We used to hear this kind of talk about nuclear energy. Thanks to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now Fukushima, we don’t now.

Anyone my age or older probably remembers hearing about some amazing carburetor developed secretly by General Motors that could give cars incredible fuel mileage, but which was suppressed by GM and the oil industry and the government, for obvious reasons.

I’m not saying definitively that there never was such a carburetor. And I would never say it wasn’t likely that the oil industry– if they could– would have suppressed it. I’m skeptical that if such a device really were possible, that someone else somewhere else (India? China? Japan?) would have not have developed it as well, and we’d know about it. Almost every brilliant innovation in industry was developed in fits and starts in many different locations by many different people. There is almost no invention of which you could say, without this particular person, it would never have happened.  [Skeptical?  Check out most of Thomas Edison’s “inventions”: almost all of the important ones, and almost all of the unimportant ones, were being worked on elsewhere at about the same time– or even before!]

Any reasonable, well-informed person would immediately conclude that thorium is all pie in the sky. If it were true, we don’t doubt, nobody could have stopped it. The benefits are too wildly important. China or India would have developed it. Come on…

So, when I read about thorium, that’s what I ask myself. If it was really as good as claimed, is it really possible that it would have been resisted.

If it’s possible to believe that, here is why: to develop an efficient, effective thorium reactor, you need to invest billions of dollars and years of research and development. No individual researcher can hope to prove that thorium is viable by himself. But to get the kind of funding you need to prove it, you need the collaboration of the powers that be– the Senators and Congressmen who are all arguably in the pockets of billion dollar industries– oil and conventional nukes, and the military-industrial complex.

The military-industrial complex rejected thorium because it did not produce, as a byproduct, the plutonium needed to develop weapons of mass destruction. Hyman Rickover, who ruled the U.S. nuclear energy program in all of it’s facets, wanted that deadly plutonium very badly. He wanted the U.S. to be able to kill millions of people if it had to. It if really, really had to. Because it would never do so if it didn’t really, really have to.

So we got thousands of nuclear missiles and bombs, enough to kill the entire world over and over and over again until no possibility of human life existed ever again. And our lousy, dangerous nuclear power plants.

When I think of it that way, I don’t think you’d have to be especially paranoid to conclude that it is quite possible that thorium really is at least as promising as it’s proponents say.

You would have to believe that the powers that be, for understandable reasons, stopped it.

Now, in the realm of understandable reasons, the most understandable is self-interest.

You also have to understand that as promising as Thorium is, it would take years and years and billions of dollars to develop it… precisely what was invested in uranium instead, because the U.S., leading the way, decided it needed nuclear bombs more badly than public safety. Ditto the Soviet Union.

So why, in the face of global warming, isn’t it being promoted today? Well, it is, in India and China. Stay tuned.

Notes:

Read this and tell me it doesn’t sound too good to be true.   Is there a downside we don’t know about?   Wiki on Thorium.

Wired on Thorium

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to believe that the oil and nuclear industries would both stop at nothing to prevent development of thorium reactors.

Indeed, India now does have a thorium reactor development project under way, and China appears to be working on one.

Some skeptics, at least, argue against thorium because … well, why?  Because we’re already here is why.

In the U.S., Senators Harry Reid (D) and Orrin Hatch (R) have co-sponsored a bill that would allocate $250 million to the Department of Energy for  research into thorium reactors.

The primary challenge, they say, is that the special containers for the thorium can degrade due to exposure to radiation and salt.  It will take some research to find a solution.

It’s in the nature of new, promising technologies that proponents exaggerate, in their minds, the benefits, and minimize the challenges.

 

Molten Salt Reactor

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Republicans and Military Service

I have observed many, many times how the most militaristic Republicans seem to have almost never actually served in the military–John McCain being a notable exception– but then, real Republicans still don’t like him.

Someone told me that Ronald Reagan served. I couldn’t believe it so I checked. By golly, it’s true. Reagan was a captain… eventually… in the cavalry! And then in the Army Air Force Motion Picture division.

He never left California, except to go to New York to raise war bonds. But then, during election campaigns, he seemed to remember events from the movies as if they had really happened. Or maybe he realized that he was in a movie, about a long-ago, far-away, dreamy America of white picket fences and crime-free small towns… and look– there’s Opie.

Suggestion for Democrats: try to add an amendment to any bill that takes away collective bargaining rights that no executive or manager with the same organizations, institutions, or companies, can earn more than 4 times the highest wage of the lowest-paid 25% of employees.

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Censorship: Republicans Win Again– “The UnQuiet Americans”

The US release of this movie was delayed for more than a year by the terrorist attacks on the USA of 11 September 2001. The producers were concerned that it would be seen as anti-American. [IMDB Trivia on “The Quiet American” (2002)]

Think about that. In America, the free, the land of liberty, where we don’t censor the media, where people are not imprisoned for their thoughts– well, they didn’t used to be–, and which never tires of singing their patriotic hymns, a movie about American involvement in Viet Nam was held out of the theatres and almost shelved completely because it would be seen as anti-American.

A number of thoughts spring to mind.

1. Did the producers (Miramax) believe that, given the right time and place, the film would not be seen as anti-American?

2. Isn’t the entire point of the film that American involvement in Viet Nam was a disaster, for democracy, for freedom, for humanity? Isn’t pointing out the hypocrisy of American values in this particular historical situation sort of “anti-American”?

3. Can’t Americans take criticism? Well, not all of them. The Republicans and the Texas State School Board would basically like to just shut those critics up, purge them from our school books and legislatures, and ban them from the airwaves.

4. Why is Miramax, a private company, cow-towing to this minority opinion?

I don’t actually believe that most Americans support the idea of banning a film because some segments of the population simply don’t want to hear criticism of U.S. attitudes (because “The Quiet American” is more than criticism of policy: it’s criticism of attitude). But that minority who do support the idea can screech very, very loudly. That’s why the Republicans have been winning so many battles with Obama lately: they just start screeching.

I just read today a commentary about movies: did you know that almost all of the nominees for best foreign film at this year’s Oscars dealt thoughtfully with the subject of the clash of values between Moslem and Western communities?

And not a single nominee for Best Picture did. Even the recent films, like “The Hurt Locker”, that dealt indirectly with Islam didn’t bother to explore Islam very much at all.