Eastern Standard Time, that is.  I'm live from New York.  (Well, woulda been 8 pm EST, but I screwed up the formatting on the time.  Sorry 'bout that!)

I had all sorts of ideas on what I wanted my weekly essay to be about.  Fuck it.  I couldn't be consistent if you put a gun to my head.

But today's essay will be about diversity.

To tell the truth, I don't like the word “diversity.”  Sounds institutional and boring.

Yearly Kos got ripped by a lot of folks because of its lack of diversity.  The “big blogs,” i.e., Daily Koss, MyDD, Atrios, etc. did not respond in a very compelling fashion.

One of the big problems in the “response” to the charge of “whitosphere” was who was featured as doing the accusing, a white woman from the traditional media.  So all the usual bloggy retorts came out, basically “nyah, so are you but what am I?”

Had the big blogs bothered (hey, nice alliteration there!) to look at some of the more compelling accusations from other blogs, perhaps there could have been some real dialogue.  It was a missed opportunity.

I will feature one blog in my essay tonight, not because there aren't many which give difficult and compelling arguments not so easy to answer as the foolish ones by the traditional media, but because these are blogs that I believe deserve the respect of being dealt with individually, not as some homogenous group.  The blog I am featuring tonight is The Unapologetic Mexican, a great site hosted by Nezua Limon Xolagrafik-Jonez.  I have linked to Part 5 of his series on Yearly Kos — I highly recommend reading all of them, as well as his many and varied other posts on issues of the day.

I discovered Nezua's blog through a diary Kid Oakland wrote about the “Chicago 17,” bloggers from around the country who were invited to participate at Yearly Kos.  The Unapologetic Mexican is now on my favorites list and not a day goes by that I don't read what's happening with Nezua.

He definitely has a way with words:

It was all a bit strange, as I said. This whole idea of coming to Ykos to bring “Diversity.” Making my way through these chocolate streets to bring some “Diversity” to the McCormick center. I wonder what the cabbies would have said if I told them. Shit. They probably would have looked at me like I was crazy. It felt a little crazy at moments. I think I felt it a bit as I met Bernita. Maybe it was just me, but it was odd. “Hello, fellow curiosity,” I said in my mind. Or something like that. Here we are. Two of the special cases. Coming to bring some brown salvation to the Mainstream.

How can anyone say it wasn't odd that the diversity in a city like Chicago was not reflected at Yearly Kos?  Because it is odd.

Nezua goes on to say:

I know now that the money has been laid out and I have brought my Diversity Beans to the Great White Potpourri, there are certain expectations as to how I'll mash it up and spoon it out. It is understandable, really. And all well-intentioned. But por favor, squash that.

I just had to throw that in because I dig the “Diversity Beans” riff.

But here's a real argument, one that the Big Bloggers should have dealt with rather than the tame and nonsensical pap from the traditional media:

One more word in this installment (and yes, you have to wait to get inside the convention with me simply because I don't want to BLOW YOUR MIND by giving you too much goodness at once, but don't worry, I think this series (at least as written) is longer at the front than at the end). I read some junk online that there were not more bloggers of color at YearlyKos because we…what was that dumbass racist and typically Republican bullshit they spewed? That we are not educated enough? Or solvent (got paper stacks)? WTF was it? I hate to bust anyone's bubble, but I don't see myself as being uneducated. And I think if I can manage to be President of both the Creative Writing club as well as the Science Club (concurrently, thx), get straight As, Phi Betta Kappa, President's list and National Merit Scholar while pulling 24 credits (that's DOUBLE TIME, check it) at my community college, and then go right on to pull off High Honors with my NYU degree while at the same time managing a live-in relationship and a part time job (and a stint of homelessness WHILE still in school) in New York City, I can handle a convention of bloggers!

Please. You elitist schmucks kid yourself. Anyway…I think now that Bush the Moron has come out and helped destroy the world, Ivy League schools (you know who I'm talking to) are, shall we say… depreciated, in the world's eyes? So perhaps we should yank the frame and get it down in the virtual historia books that the reason some big bloggers draw such faulty conclusions about the diverse world around them is because they are…too “educated” by that system to be blind in certain ways. Sad, really.

Psst: Mainstream White Sites: The reason you are bleeding hits and losing readers is because you are right about something, and yet, you are very wrong about something else. You are right that people want change. You are wrong that you are leading the way on that change. You are right that people see through the bullshit of the Bush administration. But you are wrong that you have the antidote. You are right that the Republicans are poison. You are wrong in that the Democrats are currently the cure. You are right in that there is great harm being done by the ignorant and powerful to the righteous and the less powerful. You are wrong in imagining that you are aligned with the less powerful.

And some people are catching on. That's all.

I look at the fix we're in today, politically.  What has changed?  The Iraq War is still raging.  We're now hearing folks like Harry Reid and Dick Durbin say they want to play ball with the Republicans.  We hear John Conyers backing off on impeachment for some mythical success in legislation that we all know Bush will veto.

Could it be that we don't have all the answers?  Could it be that there are viewpoints we aren't taking into consideration which are stifling our own efforts to change what must be changed if we are not to completely lose the idea that is America?

I think diversity is not some academic term, nor is it merely an indicator of one's ethnic heritage.  It is a point of view that when encountered openly and without fear, allows us to change our minds, add to our own view and see things in a larger, more panoramic scope.  And just maybe give us ideas to solve problems that we don't have solutions for now.

But hell.  Even if you don't give a damn about politics. Nezua's blog is sheer joy to read.  The man is an awesome writer.  As we would say at Daily Kos, “Highly Recommended.”

Four at Four is an afternoon briefing of four (yes only four) important or interesting stories in the news. Please look for it Monday through Friday somewhere between 4 p.m. Eastern to 4 p.m. Pacific.

1. There is still a bright spot in the deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and Russia. According to The New York Times, The U.S. and Russia are cooperating in destroying arms.

   In a little more than 2 minutes, the missile component burned itself out, the latest piece of Soviet-era nuclear hardware to be destroyed under an American taxpayer-funded effort known as Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction.

   The brainchild of Senator Richard G. Lugar and Sam Nunn, then also a senator, the effort, which had its 15th anniversary this week, has grown into one of the principal areas of enduring collaboration between Russia and the United States.

   Programs under its umbrella have helped Russia and other former Soviet states account for, secure and destroy nuclear, chemical and biological materials and the equipment related to their delivery as weapons, though some elements have suffered delays and bureaucratic resistance, and a renewed climate of secrecy in Russia has made negotiations and access difficult at some of the weapons or material storage sites.

   Still, in all, nearly 7,000 nuclear warheads have been deactivated, and silos, mobile launchers, submarines and strategic bombers that were once integral to their deployment and potential use have been destroyed. In addition, the effort has helped to safeguard highly enriched uranium from research reactors and nuclear power plants, and blend it down to a state of low enrichment — still useful for generating electricity, but not as material for a nuclear device.

2. Today is a bad day for whales. Reuters is reporting, that a U.S. appeals court ends ban on Navy sonar tests. The lawsuit was brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council because they claim the Navy’s “sonar, which shoots bursts of sound, is so loud it kills whales.” In the opinion, the split three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said whales are come second to America’s “defense”:

   “The public does indeed have a very considerable interest in preserving our natural environment and especially relatively scarce whales,” Judge Andrew Kleinfeld wrote. “But it also has an interest in national defense. We are currently engaged in war, in two countries… The safety of the whales must be weighed, and so must the safety of our warriors. And of our country.”

   The navies of landlocked Afghanistan and civil-war embroiled Iraq must be an enormous threat to America.

3. The Federal Reserver doesn’t look like it’s going to cover the risky bets of the mortgage speculators. The Washington Post reports that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says the Fed won’t let markets disrupt U.S. economy.

   But Bernanke also made clear that the Fed has no desire to bail out investors who made foolish bets. “It is not the responsibility of the Federal Reserve — nor would it be appropriate — to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their financial decisions,” Bernanke said, an apparent rebuke of critics on Wall Street who would like the Fed to cut its federal funds rate, a decision that would likely ease some of the locked up markets for home mortgage and other debt.

4. The Independent has a great story about Anthony Battersby and Rachel Feilden, a couple of Brits, who have revived a historic watermill in Tellisford, England to generate electricity. “Since going live in January, Battersby and Feilden have sent 140,000 kilowatt (kW) hours to the National Grid. That’s enough annually to power 60 homes and, thanks to a range of green energy premiums, the couple are in line to earn £25,000 a year from selling their electricity, not to mention saving 100 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.”

   The article suggests that “if small hydroelectric projects on all Britain’s streams and rivers could be tapped it would be possible to produce 10,000 gigawatt hours of electricity – or 3 per cent of our total energy needs.” There are likely to be old mills in the United States, especially in New England, that could be similarly restored and converted for green hydropower.

So, what else is happening?

I heard the music.  Grace Slick spoke to me.  The words tore at my heart.  I was living those lies.  And it seemed that my options were few.

I was a failure in so many ways…or so it seemed.  Unwanted, unloved, even in my own family.  At least that was my perception.  The great hope for my family…but no hope for me.  Sent off to an Ivy League school to become the next Einstein, I returned home a broken failure.  I couldn’t even manage to succeed at suicide.

I sent letters to my past friends.  Within them I quoted the Tao te Ching, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada.  Sent to crack the code of the universe, I found the words telling me the pursuit of that lay within.  On top of that were the words of Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder telling me of the futility of war.  But there were also the words of Hesse in Steppenwolf, which taught me about transcending.  It was 1967. 

I could not stay there in my home town and face the music.  Shame forced me to leave.  Where was a failure to go?  It was the Summer of Love…and I had none.  And seasons change.

I decided to chase Life…or Death.  Which one didn’t seem to matter much to me.  So I went to the Haight and joined in with the Diggers.  I dedicated my life, whatever might be left of it, to giving things away for free.  I still do that.  Welcome to the Diggers Free Store.  Care for some free words?  Want me to teach you something?

And I fed my head.  Me and “Oh, shit” Bill.  Every chance we found.  And that was often because Bill could smell dope at amazing distances.

Bill got his name because he heard voices.  The voices told him jokes.  They were often funny enough to make him cry out, “Oh, shit!”  He told me of his escape from Lompoc…and about not wanting to go back.  He told me of not wanting to take his medication either.  I could grok that.  We self-medicated together, so he could free himself of the voices and I could search for myself.  I was in there somewhere.

One of the pains of my life is being a day late and a dollar short as they say.  I got to San Francisco just in time for the Death of Hippie.

And in my head?

I chased her down and down.  My regret is that I didn’t catch up to her for a quarter century. 

Meanwhile I was stuck with reality.

Hippie was dead and I was dying inside.  I left the Haight for the first time…disillusioned.

I went to search for roots in Seattle.  But there are no roots on the original Skid Row.  I allowed myself to be nearly raped in order to avoid freezing to death.  The experience told me I was not gay.

So I went on the road again, once again in search of my soul.  I lost my religion in a mission in Tucson in the waning days of the year.  I decided that if that’s what it was to be a Christian, then I wasn’t one.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

( – promoted by pfiore8)

I think one of the bigget glaring omissions about the GAO report is that the War Czar will not be presenting it. Remember that guy, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute? I mean, come on, he was just made War Zar in June. President Bush decided a single figure was needed to oversee all military campaigns abroad, which I know, use to be called Commander in Chief. But shouldn’t the dude he just created to oversee the Iraq Occupation be the one to present the GAO report on Iraq?

Of course not, that is why it is being ghost written for General Petraeus, not the freaking War Czar. Oh so how quickly we have forgotten. But the War Czar was meant to be forgotten because he had one sole purpose, which is why no one else wanted the job.

He was created, as was his title, to be a trial balloon for the draft.

It all started with his NPR interview:

‘War Czar’ Concerned over Stress of War on Troops
http://www.npr.org/t…

August 10, 2007 ·  Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, says he is concerned about the toll the war in Iraq and extended deployments are taking on U.S. forces.

The man who is widely known as the “war czar” also says that from a military standpoint, a return to a draft should be part of the discussion.

Here he is puffing it up this month:
Army Chief calls for return of draft to ease fatigue
http://www.nzherald….

The US “war tsar” has called for the nation’s political leaders to consider bringing back the draft to help a military exhausted by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a radio interview, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said the option had always been open to boost the all-volunteer army by drafting in young men as happened in the Vietnam war.

“It makes sense to consider it.”

Again, here is another piece, which again comes from an oversea media outlet. For some reason, no news source in America wants to touch this story.

‘Return to conscription should be considered’
http://www.telegraph…

A draft would revive bad memories of the 1960s and early 1970s when tens of thousands of young men were drafted to fight and die in Vietnam. Few policies proved as divisive.

But the floating of the idea by a general in such a key political position will add dramatic impetus to a debate over the expansion of the US armed forces. It has primarily been anti-war Democrats who have argued for the restoration of the draft.

Some argue that the draft should be reinstituted as a way of preventing future wars by ensuring that the pain of conflict would be spread across all sectors of society. Anti-war agitators such as Michael Moore have highlighted that very few relatives of members of Congress or other politicians have served in uniform.

Lt Gen Lute said that repeated overseas deployments affected not only the troops but their families, who often had a key influence whether a service member decides to stay in the services.

“There’s both a personal dimension of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living room conversations within these families,” he said in an interview with National Public Radio “And ultimately, the health of the all- volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions.”

An opponent of the current “surge” in Iraq, Lt Gen Lute is viewed with intense suspicion by conservative Republicans, who will be incensed by his unexpected comments, in his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate.

Yeah, I bet the conservative Republicans were incensed, not getting the memo the dude is only here to float the idea about a return to the draft.

No one talks about it here, except for the Baltimore Sun,  from their freaking Paris office:

Both parties in denial on need for draft
By William Pfaff

http://www.baltimore…

PARIS – The question of reviving military conscription in the United States made a fleeting reappearance in the American national debate recently, with thus far curiously little reaction.

Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, named in June as President Bush’s “war czar,” gave his first interview Aug. 10, to National Public Radio, subsequently re-broadcast on international television. But his remarks on the draft seem to have vanished into the void of news Washington does not want to hear.

So far as the public debate to this point is concerned, General Lute’s remarks would seem to have been treated as misspoken or even unspoken – as if politicians and the press feared making any comment. Rep. Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York, called some time ago for reinstating the draft (as a way to end the war), but he remains a man alone.

The general’s comment seems lethally impolitic in today’s Washington, but it was the truth, and possibly it was a deliberate inauguration of a discussion that has to take place soon. Everyone knows that the Army and Marine Corps are tightly stretched, with some units on at least their fourth combat rotation to Iraq or Afghanistan – a pace unknown in Vietnam, where GIs did a year and that was that. Today, soldiers (and their families) are cracking under the strain, as General Lute indicated.

——

The plan hasn’t worked. If public opinion does not support a war, not only do people vote against the politicians in office, but the all-volunteer Army loses its volunteers.

The Army now understands this, or it wouldn’t talk about the draft. The politicians don’t admit it. The Democrats who say they are against the war, but also say that the United States must stay on in the Middle East with a bigger Army, and the Republicans who share the administration’s flagging belief in victory in Iraq, have yet to grasp that their electoral platforms can’t be carried out without military conscription.

How can they promise to enlarge the Army to perpetuate the Middle East mission without resort to the draft?

It is a discussion whose time has come, because any candidate that even pretends we can even keep a presence in Afghanistan without addressing the breaking-point of the all-volunteer Armed Forces is just blowing smoke up our collective asses. From either party.

I think it is also interesting how the War Czar’s talk of a draft is only covered in international press, and never mentioned here, even as the GAO report is coming due.

I think it is also interesting that Lt. Gen. Lute would accept the title of War Czar, knowing his job would be to promote the draft as an option to bluster the ranks of the military. No wonder no one else wanted it. Wonder if he will tell Congress about the draft when he testifies later this month?

Where else are we gonna get boys to die attacking Persia?

Only the War Czar knows, or has the misfortune of telling the American people.

also posted at Truth & Progress

(apologies to Casey Neill)

(Ammiq wetland, also at bottom – photos reproduced with permission of A Rocha.)

I began looking into the subject of this essay almost a year ago and it is still mostly unfinished just as it was then, crucial research not yet done and important questions not answered. Like everything else this little project was interrupted by personal tragedy, the sudden unexpected death of my dearest friend of some 30 years, and the aftermath. But somehow it seems appropriate now.

As a child I was regularly shooed off to Sunday school at the only church in our tiny little town. Probably just to get rid of me for a while, but maybe also in some vague hope that it would improve my behavior. As far as I know, neither of my parents ever set foot in the place.

It was a pretty gentle Christianity, heavy on parables and light on hellfire. The texts didn’t really take in my case, not in the intended sense of conversion anyway. But something else eventually did.

Two teachers in particular left an impression that would take me many years to understand and to appreciate. A husband and wife team. They recited and exhorted. They produced little plays and arranged trips to church camps in the mountains and on the coast and served as chaperones. And paid themselves for the kids who couldn’t afford the minimal expenses involved. In the wintertime, they found ways to distribute food to families that had fallen on hard times without embarassing them.

They once organized a cleanup campaign. Not for the church grounds; someone was paid to do that. For the rest of the town. I wound up on ditch detail, removing the beer bottles and assorted trash from the old mill ditch that ran through town. In the old days, it was the water source for fire trucks equipped with pumps. Now, it was a trash collector, but one full of tadpoles, wild iris, and crawdads that grew to enormous size in the absence of predator fish.

Do this because you know it is right.

Your reward is in heaven. Ask for no other.

Looking back years later, I saw the great and essential gift they had really given me: a living example of the difference one person of pure intention could make in the life of others and in the community at large. I came to think of my unwitting secular heroes as the Saints of the ditch.

Thoughts of my Saints returned when I ran across A Rocha for the first time in the summer of 2006, in a news article about their evacuation of staff from the Ammiq marshes during that year’s war – or whatever we call them these days – between Israel and Hezbollah.

The Ammiq (English transliteration varies) wetlands, by far the most significant in Lebanon, are the remnant of a once much larger system of swamps, now drained or dried up. Their unique position in the migration flyways elevates their importance further. An incredible 250 species of birds frequent the swamp.

Sadly they exist on other crossroads as well. Suffice it to say they drain into the Litani, and are fed by runoff from the Al Shouf Cedar Nature Reserve, home of another remnant, the scraps of the great forest under documented assault since the time of Gilgamesh (and also bombed, accidentally, last summer).

I became intrigued with these A Rocha people, who quietly and successfully worked to preserve a swamp; Christians who publish manifestos in Arabic on the imperative of caring for creation. (The name is Portugese for “the rock.” The British mother group’s first project was in Portugal.)

And I’m looking at them again, after my ten months in nowhere. There is a lot to explore; their webpages go on forever. There is sometimes an emphasis on the Christianity, but at other times one has the impression of an environmental movement infiltrating and evangelizing the Christian community. The group seems to embrace a strategy of bringing Christianity around to its green way of thinking, and reinvigorating the environmental movement with its Christian perspective.

The emphasis is on research, conservation, restoration, sustainability, community development. And the targets aren’t all small: one declared goal is the reversal of global warming.

In the meantime there are little projects around the world. In northwest Washington state, A Rocha volunteers are working to reestablish kestrels as natural controls on the introduced starlings that drive berry farmers to despair. 

Above all A Rocha understands the value of ecosystem services and the inordinate threat their loss poses to the poor. Here is Stella Simiyu, national committeewoman of A Rocha Kenya and A Rocha International Trustee:

While their newsletters sometimes include terms like abomination, affront to God, blasphemy, they are universally reserved to describe not the sexual behavior of imaginary cartoon characters or the tenets of other faiths, but mercury pollution, illegal dumping on streambanks, and the impoverishment of biodiversity.

The frequent use of the term creation might give some pause. But to the extent that A Rocha talks about God’s creation, it is creation in a certain theological sense, not the opaque dead literalism of televangelists and the legions of village atheists who mistake them for Christianity. While there may be a few somewhere in the tent who sympathize with creationism, the following, from Tsunami Tragedy: Where was God? by a Sri Lankan member of A Rocha’s International Council of Reference is typical:

That might as well be Jay Gould. In searching A Rocha’s publications and web materials so far, the only direct references I can find to creationism describe it as “an annoyance.”

And frankly, I have to like a group that finds joy and purpose in the Book of Job. One of the most popular sermons passed around A Rocha sites is on the following text:

But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you.

–Job 12:7-8, New International Version

This is not far at all from a fundamental buddhist notion. In the common image of the buddha touching the ground, the gesture is a claim of authority. Questioned as to the reality of his enlightenment or what gives him the right to say such outlandish things, buddha doesn’t appeal up to heaven but reaches down to the earth itself as witness.

I do not understand the endless ranting and raving about religion that goes on in the blogosphere, particularly the dimwitted antinomianism focussed on Christianity so much of the time. Sure, all the children of Abraham are bloodthirsty and tiresome. Filthy gets, the lot of them. But they’re not going away, and I’d miss them after just a few days of listening to bores like Hitchens and Dawkins.

Barrels of ink and millions of pixels are squandered daily on the likes of Fred Phelps. Ever see a story about A Rocha? If you know a Christian who might benefit from the acquaintance, tell them about A Rocha.

Here are two videos produced by A Rocha. That is at least one too many, but they offer slightly different perspectives. The second is included partly for its casual, offhand demolition of the Dominionists that seem to loom so large in American Christotainment.

Me, I ran screaming from the church long ago and have never looked back, but were I to attempt an argument for Christianity, it would be largely about the care of creation and on the terms laid out by A Rocha, whose work would be exhibit A. If I still had a Jesus, he would be this Jesus of the swamps.

Dear Senator Reid,

Who was it that, in February, said:

This war is a serious situation. It involves the worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country.

Oh. Right. It was you.

Who was it that, in February, also said:

There can be no purely military solution in Iraq.

And:

At a time when President Bush is asking our troops to shoulder a larger and unsustainable burden policing a civil war, his failed policies have left us increasingly isolated in Iraq and less secure here at home.

Oh. Right. That was also you.

And who was it, in July, who was reported to have said: 

…he now saw ending the war as a moral duty, and even if the Senate again falls short… would turn again and again to Iraq until either the president relents or enough Republicans join Democrats to overrule Mr. Bush.

Yes. Again. You.

So, what has changed? Why are you now saying you will “compromise” with the Republicans, not to actually end the word, but to just put some meaningless babble into the next bill that will continue it? Could it be all the good news that’s recently come out of Iraq?

Like the new National Intelligence Estimate that says, in effect, that the Bush strategy in Iraq has failed?

Or the nearly two-thirds of the more than a hundred experts surveyed for the Terrorism Index, who believe that the “surge” has either failed, or even had a negative impact?

Or the Fund for Peace saying Iraq is near a total collapse?

Or the recent report in the Observer that fatigue is crippling our army?

Or the recent Los Angeles Times report that: “As military and political leaders prepare to deliver a progress report on the conflict to Congress next month, many soldiers are increasingly disdainful of the happy talk that they say commanders on the ground and White House officials are using in their discussions about the war.”?

Or the new military report that our Army soldiers are committing suicide at the highest rate in 26 years?

Or the report by Oxfam and other aid providers that “the number of Iraqi children who are born underweight or suffer from malnutrition has increased sharply since the US-led invasion,” and that “around 8 million Iraqis – almost a third of the population – (are) in need of emergency aid.”?

Or that our puppet “government” in Iraq recently missed all the benchmarks that were supposed to measure its progress?

Or that The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces?

Or the report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction that “”Iraq’s national government is refusing to take possession of thousands of American-financed reconstruction projects, forcing the United States either to hand them over to local Iraqis, who often lack the proper training and resources to keep the projects running, or commit new money to an effort that has already consumed billions of taxpayer dollars.”?

Or that six years since Shock ‘n’ Awe, we still can’t keep the lights on?

Or that thirty percent of the weapons given to Iraqi security forces- some 190,000 assault rifles and pistols- are missing?

Or that Iraqi security is still lagging and incapable of doing its job, and the Iraqi army won’t be self-sufficient for years?

Or that a major Shiite faction won’t work with our puppet government, while  Sunni leaders say they’ll keep attacking until we leave?

Or that the United Nations says conditions for Iraqi children are worse than they were a year ago?

Or that Britain is leaving Iraq, with its tail between its legs?

Or that Australia’s secretly planning to leave, next year?

Or that Turkey keeps hinting that they might invade Kurdish Northern Iraq?

Or that a July Washington Post-ABC poll found that “(m)ost Americans see President Bush as intransigent on Iraq and prefer that the Democratic-controlled Congress make decisions about a possible withdrawal of U.S. forces”?

Or that Bush has made clear that the war won’t end while he is playing president?

Please, Senator, explain. Are you afraid of Bush’s historically low approval ratings? What is it? The American people want and deserve to know. People are being murdered and maimed. Every day. This isn’t a compromise, it’s a capitulation. Why, Senator? Why?