Imagine a country where the government decides what you can read or watch or listen to. Imagine a society that is so insular, so full of itself that it is sure that the only worthwhile ideas are its own. Iran? China? Saudi Arabia? Probably. Also the United States:
Money and goods, though, flow more rapidly into the United States than ideas and culture. As the country exports both Hollywood movies and occupying armies, it seems to be gradually closing its ears to foreign voices.
“What it takes out of our culture is understanding and humility and tolerance and perspective on the world,” Mark Gill, president of Warner Independent Pictures, of the growing difficulty of selling foreign films. “What we’re missing is not only the full range of emotion but also of storytelling.”
Distributors say that foreign-language films have a harder time each year getting space on American screens. A recent study showed that European films produced only 1.6% of the 2002 U.S. box office take at a time when American films were garnering almost 90% of audiences in parts of Europe.
Of the literary books published in the U.S., fewer than 3% are translations — a proportion no better than in the Arab world. Leading lights, most recently Northwestern University Press, have cut back substantially; even Nobel Prize winners such as José Saramago and Imre Kertész remain obscure here.
And international performance groups are finding their U.S. appearances blocked by strict immigration and visa restrictions that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Stories about postponement of foreign theater, dance and world-music group performances have become as common as laments about the shortage of translators for Middle Eastern intelligence work, and more than 50 tours have been canceled outright. (A Berlin-based chamber group, the Artemis Quartet, had its U.S. tour canceled because the cellist, who had shoplifted a pair of tweezers 11 years before, had his visa denied, according to the New York Times.)
New regulations require that a performer petition for entry within six months before a concert, to be followed by lengthy background checks and trips to the U.S. Embassy (which can be far away ) to both interview and pick up the visas in person.
In countries such as Iran, Russia or Cuba (which was not able to send any of its 12 nominees to the Latin Grammy Awards last September, and whose 76-year-old guitarist Ibrahim Ferrer was not able to appear at the Grammys this month), the procedure often takes longer. .
“There’s no question that the Homeland Security Act has limited, if not killed off, the ability to tour artists from the ever-growing list of restricted countries,” says David Sefton, director of the UCLA Live performance series, which last fall postponed an appearance by a group of Belgian schoolchildren called üBONG because of visa difficulties and, in January, Spanish flamenco guitarist Paco De Lucia. “Under the thinly transparent veil of national security, an awful lot of the ability to work with foreign artists has been closed down.”
So, our government is hard at work defending us from children and Spaniards. I know I feel safer. I’m grateful that I wont have to stress over getting tickets to Ibrahim Ferrer’s next tour, since their will be none. And thankfully, I wont have to worry about his next CD being re-mixed and destroyed by an American label. What a glorious and simple country this is becoming!
Writers often grumble about the criminal things editors do to their prose. The federal government has recently weighed in on the same issue — literally.
It has warned publishers they may face grave legal consequences for editing manuscripts from Iran and other disfavored nations, on the ground that such tinkering amounts to trading with the enemy.
Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace “inappropriate words,” according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months.
Adding illustrations is prohibited, too. To the baffled dismay of publishers, editors and translators who have been briefed about the policy, only publication of “camera-ready copies of manuscripts” is allowed.
The Treasury letters concerned Iran. But the logic, experts said, would seem to extend to Cuba, Libya, North Korea and other nations with which most trade is banned without a government license.
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President Bush, having diverted resources from Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden in favor of invading Iraq and capturing Saddam Hussein, has now decided to start looking for the real bad guys again. Remember: despite Bush’s scary rhetoric leading up to the invasion of Iraq, Iraq was never a partner of Al Quaeda, Iraq never posed an imminent threat to the United States, and Osama continues to elude capture (maybe) to this day.
So while we wasted our time and considerable effort and resources in Iraq, the mastermind behind 911 was all but forgotten about by the man who swore to bring him to justice. But we got Saddam, the weakening leader of a country that was not even a threat to its closest neighbors, much less our glorious “homeland”.
Now, Bush has decided that perhaps he should start worrying about Osama again. Or maybe they are just ramping up the Osama mentions now so that the staged capture in a few months will seem a little more plausible?
President Bush has approved a plan to intensify the effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, senior administration and military officials say, as a combination of better intelligence, improving weather and a refocusing of resources away from Iraq has reinvigorated the hunt along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The plan will apply both new forces and new tactics to the task, said senior officials in Washington and Afghanistan who were interviewed in recent days. The group at the center of the effort is Task Force 121, the covert commando team of Special Operations forces and Central Intelligence Agency officers. The team was involved in Saddam Hussein’s capture and is gradually shifting its forces to Afghanistan to step up the search for Mr. bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar, the former Taliban leader.
……
With a great deal at stake strategically, symbolically and politically, Mr. Bush and his national security team have repeatedly met in recent months to refine the new approach, and it appears to have been approved in the last two months. White House officials will not say exactly when, emphasizing that the hunt for Mr. bin Laden never stopped, though clearly the effort lost momentum.
Can anyone say “understatement”?
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WaPo:
California’s Supreme Court declined Friday to immediately halt same-sex marriages and nullify more than 3,400 licenses already issued, while the mayor of a town in New York state began marrying same-sex couples.
In a suit filed in San Francisco, Attorney General Bill Lockyer petitioned the high court to order the city to stop defying a state law that defines marriage as between a man and a woman, arguing that the California constitution prohibits San Francisco from declaring a state law unconstitutional without a binding appellate court decision affirming that position. The justices declined to rule and told the city and a conservative group that opposes gay marriage to file new legal briefs by March 5.
Lockyer’s petition also argues that unless there is a binding statewide ruling resolving the validity of these marriages, “there will be tremendous governmental and legal confusion that could affect a wide variety of government functions and personal rights associated with public assistance, property ownership, personal debt liability, spousal and child support, inheritance when there is no will, worker’s compensation benefits and tax liabilities.”
In response, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said that the attorney general has made an unconvincing case for bypassing lower courts, and that the Supreme Court should be asked to rule regarding rulings in the lower courts, not in the absence of rulings. The court gave no indication when it would respond to Lockyer’s petition.
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E-voting is fraught with problems. This Tuesday should be an interesting test, although if there are problems with teh count, we have no way to verify the problems, since there is no paper trail. Look for more vague denials and obfuscation from Diebold and other manufacturers after Tuesday.
Millions of voters in 10 states will cast ballots on Tuesday in the single biggest test so far of new touchscreen voting machines that have been billed as one of the best answers to the Florida election debacle of 2000. But many computer security experts worry that the machines could allow democracy to be hacked.
Here in Georgia, along with Maryland and California, an estimated six million people will be using machines from Diebold Election Systems, which has been the focus of the biggest controversy.
Independent studies have found flaws in Diebold’s system that researchers say might allow hackers or corrupt insiders to reprogram the touchscreens or computers that tally the votes, without leaving a trace.
Without a paper record of every vote or some other way to verify voters’ choices after the fact, these experts warn, elections may lose the public’s trust.
“People complain about hanging chads,” said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a co-author of the first study that found security flaws in the Diebold machines. “But if an electronic machine has malicious code in it, it’s possible that all of the chads are hanging
What can you do? Vote absentee. In Florida, it’s legal even if you’re not actually absent on election day, and it is the only way to ensure that your vote is counted accurately.
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Lots of people believe that Bin Laden is on ice, just waiting for W to decide it is an opportune moment to unveil him. This report is intriguing, and similar reports have been coming out for weeks. It is strange that a man who requires daily dialyses treatments has supposedly been able to stay alive while essentially camping with no access to modern medicine.
Pentagon and Pakistani officials on Saturday denied an Iranian state radio report that Osama bin Laden was captured in Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan “a long time ago.”
The claim came as Pakistan’s army hunted terror suspects in a remote tribal region along the border, believed to be a possible hiding place for the al-Qaida’s leader.
The director of Iran radio’s Pashtun language service, Asheq Hossein, said the report was based on two sources - one of whom later told The Associated Press he was misquoted.
The report said bin Laden had been in custody for a period of time, but that President Bush was withholding any announcement until closer to November elections.
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The GDP is up. The GDP measures just about everything, so if money is spent destroying the environment and shipping jobs overseas, and if unemployed and discouraged workers spend lots of money on anti-depressant meds, for example, the GDP goes up.
America’s economy, bolstered by brisk business spending, grew at a healthy 4.1 percent annual rate in the final quarter of 2003. That was even faster than first thought and offered new evidence that the nation’s economic recovery was firmly rooted going into the new year.
The latest reading on the gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the economy’s health — was slightly better than the 4 percent pace estimated a month ago for the October-to-December quarter, the Commerce Department reported Friday. GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced within the United States.
……
Looking ahead, the economic picture seems promising, analysts say. Economic growth in the current January-to-March quarter is expected to clock in at a rate of around 4.5 percent or higher, according to some analysts’ projections.
For out of work Americans, though, these are still frustrating times even as the economy is in recovery mode. Job growth has been painfully slow. The economy has lost 2.2 million jobs since President Bush took office in January 2001, a sore spot as he seeks re-election. Democratic presidential contenders have seized on this to make the argument that his economic policies are not working.
The GDP is one thing. I tend to put a little more stock into reports about actual people. When asked how comfortable they are with the current economy, ordinary Americans, the same folks whose family and neighbors are being laid off, the folks who are bearing the brunt of increasing health care costs, (like the California supermarket workers) do not sound as rosy as the millionaire Wall Street economists:
U.S. consumer sentiment fell sharply in February as Americans, concerned about sluggish jobs growth, turned cautious about the outlook for the U.S. economy, according to a survey released on Friday.
The University of Michigan’s final reading of consumer sentiment this month fell to 94.4 from January’s final reading of 103.8, which was its highest level in over three years, said market sources who saw the report.
The result, however, was slightly better than market expectations of a fall to 93.5, and slightly higher than February’s preliminary figure of 93.1.
And the Friday survey just confirmed another survey released earlier this week:
Consumer confidence in February took its sharpest fall in a year amid dimmer job prospects, the Conference Board (news - web sites) said Tuesday.
Its gauge of confidence slid to a four-month low of 87.3 from 96.4 in January, falling twice as much as Wall Street had forecast.
The decline was the biggest since a 14-point slide in February 2003, when war in Iraq (news - web sites) was just around the corner and terrorism fears were heightened.
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Updated below: 2/27 - 5:30PM
To be fair, Clinton didn’t do much about this problem either, but that’s no excuse for continued indifference.
Despite worldwide pressure, the U.S. continues to develop new and deadly land mine technology, and continues to deploy old-fashioned land mines around the world. Land mines tend to kill and maim civilians, especially curious and hungry children.
The Bush administration plans to announce that, in a step to lessen the dangers of land mines, it will end the use of long-lasting mines in warfare and instead concentrate on mines that go inert within hours or days, an administration official said Thursday.
The official said the policy would be announced on Friday, along with a doubling in American assistance to other countries to remove mines remaining from past conflicts. The increase will bring such aid to $70 million a year, the official said.
There will be limited exceptions in the switch to so-called inert land mines, but the official would not specify them.
……
Despite the latest steps, the administration official said, there are no plans for the United States to sign the international treaty to ban land mines, which has been in effect since 1997. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, was instrumental in getting the treaty signed.
The Problem:
What makes antipersonnel mines so abhorrent is the indiscriminate destruction they cause. Mines cannot be aimed. They lie dormant until a person or animal triggers their detonating mechanism. Antipersonnel mines cannot distinguish between the footfall of a soldier and that of a child.
Those who survive the initial blast usually require amputations, long hospital stays, and extensive rehabilitative services.
In Cambodia alone there are over 35,000 amputees injured by landmines–and they are the survivors. Many others die in the fields from loss of blood or lack of transport to get medical help. Mine deaths and injuries in the past few decades total in the hundreds of thousands.
Landmines are now a daily threat in Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chechnya, Croatia, Iraq, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Somalia, and dozens of other countries. Mines recognize no cease-fire and long after the fighting has stopped they continue to maim or kill. Mines also render large tracts of agricultural land unusable, wreaking environmental and economic dev tation. Refugees returning to their war-ravaged countries face this life-threatening obstacle to rebuilding their lives.
Leading producers and exporters of antipersonnel mines in the past 25 years include China, Italy, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. More than 50 countries have manufactured as many as 200 million antipersonnel landmines in the last 25 years.
More than 350 different types of antipersonnel mines exist. Even if no more mines are ever laid, they will continue to maim and kill for years to come. Bold steps must be taken now to save future generations of innocent civilians. If sufficient funds are provided, deminers from the ICBL say that mine clearance to restore daily life to near normal levels may be achieved in years, not decades.
UPDATE:
Maybe I was a little unfair to Clinton. Here’s some clarification:
President Bush will bar the U.S. military from using certain types of land mines after 2010 but will allow forces to continue to employ more sophisticated mines that the administration argues pose little threat to civilians, officials said yesterday.
The new policy, due to be announced today, represents a departure from the previous U.S. goal of banning all land mines designed to kill troops. That plan, established by President Bill Clinton, set a target of 2006 for giving up antipersonnel mines, depending on the success of Pentagon efforts to develop alternatives.
Bush, however, has decided to impose no limits on the use of “smart” land mines, which have timing devices to automatically defuse the explosives within hours or days, officials said.
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TBO.com (The Tampa Tribune online wing) confirms a USA Today report (posted on BlogWood yesterday)
Snarled barge traffic on the Mississippi River is delaying some shipments of gasoline to the Port of Tampa and causing speculation that the price of gas locally could reach an all-time high.
With less fuel moving through the port, some companies are drawing on reserves and having gas trucked in from other Florida cities, including Jacksonville and Miami.
Several of Sunoco Corp.’s stations, fewer than 10 of its 70 in the area, had run out of gas by Thursday.
“That should start to improve by'’ today, said company spokesman Gerald Davis, in Philadelphia.
Consumers probably won’t encounter any widespread gas shortages, although some stations may continue to run out until the shipping lanes are cleared.
Thank Gearge and Dick and their shortsighted energy policy. Here’s more, from an email from MoveOn.org: (Senate contact info is good for all of Florida)
Dear MoveOn member,
The Bush-Cheney energy bill is back, and it could come up for a vote at any moment. Republicans have signaled that they’ll give as little as 24 hours’ notice. We’ve got to get out ahead of it.
Please call your Senator(s) now, at:
Senator Bob Graham
Washington, DC: 202-224-3041
Senator Bill Nelson
Washington, DC: 202-224-5274
Make sure they know you’re a constituent, then urge them to:
“Please FILIBUSTER to stop the energy bill.”*
Give some reasons why you’re concerned — some good ones are listed below.
The energy bill is still terrible. Here’s what it does:
1. Delays clean-up in smoggy cities, which would increase asthma
attacks and other health problems, especially among children and elderly people.
2. Pollutes rivers and coastal waters by exempting oil and gas drilling
from clean-up safeguards
3. Allows energy companies to rip off consumers by repealing the
Public Utility Holding Company Act.
4. Includes billions in subsidies for big oil, nuclear, timber, and
coal companies.
5. Increases air pollution and global warming with new incentives to
burn coal for electricity without adequate pollution controls.
6. Threatens drinking water by allowing the underground injection of
diesel fuel and other chemicals during oil and gas development.
7. Weakens environmental safeguards to pave the way for more oil and
gas drilling on sensitive public lands in the Rocky Mountain West.
At least sixteen national hunting and fishing organizations oppose
these provisions.
8. Locks in American dependence on foreign oil by adding new
roadblocks to better fuel economy.
9. Tramples on states’ abilities to protect their coasts from harmful
oil and gas exploration by weakening their input on federal
coastal projects.
10. Promotes nuclear proliferation by reversing long-standing U.S.
policy against reprocessing waste from commercial nuclear
reactors, and using plutonium to generate commercial energy.
Please call your Senator(s) now, at:
Senator Bob Graham
Washington, DC: 202-224-3041
Senator Bill Nelson
Washington, DC: 202-224-5274
Urge them to filibuster the energy bill.
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Bush’s fossil fuel friendly energy policy:
Motorists face gasoline shortages as well as record prices the next few weeks because of the skintight U.S. refining and distribution network.
The vulnerability of that network, combined with low inventories of both gasoline and the crude oil from which it’s made, have the government and energy experts increasingly nervous that some places in the USA will run out of gas temporarily. An accident that has disrupted shipping on the Mississippi River and in the Gulf of Mexico could trigger shortages this week.
“It looks like the big bulk terminals in Florida are going to run out in the next few days,” Tom Kloza, analyst at the Oil Price Information Service, said Wednesday. Big gasoline suppliers were warning their customers of imminent Florida shortages and reduced allocations, he said. The Coast Guard said it had reopened some of the channel Wednesday, but a backlog of ships remained.
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This week, Clear Channel fired both Bubba and Howard Stern so that Clear Channel CEO John Hogan can tell Congress that he’s being a good boy and cleaning things up. Bubba and Howard share many traits, most of them not to my liking. I’m not a fan of either, and both are borderline indefensible. Actually, Bubba is beyond the border, so I’ll concentrate on Howard.
It’s hard to jump to Howard Stern’s defense, and he’s hardly the type who needs help defending himself, but Clear Channel is so evil, and so much the mouthpiece for the Bush administration that my instincts are screaming for me to start boycotting all Clear Channel stations immediately. Then I remember that I don’t listen to that canned pap that serves as commercial radio these days, and that I avoid Clear Channel venues and concerts like the plague, so I guess a boycott of company that I already shun is rather pointless. Billmon gets to the heart of the story:
Since Stern is a disgusting sexist pig and Clear Channel a soulless cog in the GOP corporate machine, I suppose my attitude towards this fight probably should be roughly the same as Henry Kissinger’s take on the Iraq-Iran War: Too bad they both can’t lose. But, as hideous as he may be, Howard Stern is probably the most progressive media voice a lot of the F-You Boys are exposed to these days. Which, along with his notoriety, probably explains why Clear Channel singled him out for censorship. So one cheer for Howard.
And from Billmon’s comments section:
It’s interesting, though, that Stern gets in trouble ONLY after he has turned on Bush. I’m a long-time listener, call it my guilty pleasure. Stern has always been crude, sexist, homophobic and borderline racist. Clear Channel and Viacom knew that when they signed him. He was for Gore in the 2000 election, but got behind Bush after 9/11. He strongly supported the war in Iraq, even though he confessed to knowing none of the particulars. Lately, though he’s defended Howard Dean, had a friendly interview with Al Franken, and apparently declared himself to be Anybody But Bush. Clear Channel was willing to put up with him as long as he was apolitical or pro-Bush, but when he swings the other way, they decide he’s suddenly too vulgar to be on their air.
The culture wars are upon us, and many on the right would like to see a return to their utopian vision of a mythical Amerika free of anything that they might be able to paint as being even vaguely offensive to anyone. People will look at today’s congressional hearings and this censorship by Clear Channel and creativity will be chilled. Artists will self-censor to avoid raising the ire of the self-appointed moralists and the noose will be tightened around our collective creative spirit.
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