Bloggledygook

Man, It Pours.

So much for that beautiful Southern California sunshine. Arrived late last night after a very long day of travel. It was raining. I have never seen this much rain out here. It's still raining. People are walking around with a what the fuck? look on their faces, like someone stole them in the middle of the night and deposited them in downtown Seattle.

Which, to be honest, I don't car about much. I'll be inside for the better part of two days, so screw the weather. It's warmish at least, and the hotel is fine.

If anyone is looking for something to read this is a pretty good piece.

Send water wings.

More Religious Crap.

Carnival is winding down as we approach Ash Wednesday and Lent. Across the world, people are having more fun than I am, which is par for the course.

In Germany, the raucous parade in Dusseldorf got the message of the Danish Cartoon backlash and decided that there wouldn't be any floats about Islam. This begs a certain confusion, as Carnival, which leads up to Lent, would seem to be a Western celebration with primarily Christian undertones. Would there be any Muslims present? And if they were present, would they be those Muslims who take such offense as to wreak chaos?

The article above states that German Carnival is steering clear of religious topics, but I just saw a float on the tube (I'm packing, you see) of the Pope. Last time I checked, Bennie was a religious figure. But then again, unless one is in the Emerald Isle, Catholics rarely riot these days.

I know that there are millions of religious folk who do not riot, ever, and who can take some jabs at their spiritual proclivities. But when I look around at how people of God act sometimes, I thank God I'm an agnostic.

Nota (Not So) Bene.

I will be traveling to beautiful SoCal the next several days, so blogging may be on the light-to-missing side. Lots of meetings, schmoozing and, I fear, the bane of every adult in American business today, "role playing." I'm bucking for the part of The Terminator, but I have a feeling that this role is reserved for the VP of Client Development.

Meanwhile, and I haven't had a chance to look around, but did anyone get a small, sick feeling hearing that the Taliban's former spokesman is now a student at Yale?

Contrast this with the furor over the ports and you (okay, I) come up with a growing unease that what passes for rational thought in the upper strata of our country is a potentially deadly combination of knee-jerk reactionary scare mongering and a fuzzy-headed death wish.

I'm flying almost-coast to almost-coast this week. I will be forced to take my shoes off and asked if anyone but me packed my bags.

Fun.

Richard Chesnoff: On Holocaust Thefts.

This is part of an ongoing series of articles posted here by Richard Z. Chesnoff. Reprinted by permission.

HOLOCAUST THEFTS MUST BE REPAID...NOW! by Richard Z. Chesnoff, NY Daily News, 2/26/06

Headline stories have a nasty habit of disappearing before they're really over. Take the greatest theft in history, the systematic looting of Europe's Jews by a pack of thieves that included everyone from Nazi officials to Swiss banks to French museums. Most of the loot was never returned after World War II - neither to victims nor their heirs. When news of this shocking Holocaust injustice finally broke in the late 1990s, it triggered front-page headlines, TV specials and even a flurry of books, including one by this reporter. Since then? World pressure - especially from Washington and Jewish organizations - eventually forced the supersecretive Swiss banks to offer a $1.25 billion global settlement for hidden Holocaust victims' deposits. International insurance companies agreed to pay claims they'd once refused to honor. Former slave laborers - Jews and non-Jews - began receiving long overdue compensation. And some museums finally responded to claims they were hoarding stolen paintings - just last week Dutch officials agreed to return over 200 old masters to the heirs of Jacques Goudstikker, an Amsterdam Jewish collector whose art was seized by the Nazis, then recovered by the Dutch government after the war. Breakthroughs such as this one, however, are becoming rarer. More common: failures, embarrassments and even outrages. The Swiss, for example, provided access to only 36,000 out of some 4 million Holocaust period accounts still on record. Eastern European governments still drag their feet about restoring Jewish property to its rightful owners. Israeli authorities shamefully stonewall about land holdings and pre-war bank deposits left by Holocaust victims. Some lawyers have been accused of exorbitant fees. And the World Jewish Congress - the lead warrior in the restitution struggle - was charged with financial mismanagement. An investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer found no criminal wrongdoing - but Jewish Congress executive Israel Singer, one of the chief negotiators of restitution agreements, was barred from future financial dealings on behalf of the organization. Nor has the art world totally washed itself white. For every museum that honestly investigates the provenance of its collections, another two don't. The influential New York Jewish weekly The Forward recently raised questions about the origin of some works in New York philanthropist Ronald Lauder's world-renowned collection of 20th century Austrian art. Lauder's spokesman vigorously insists "painstaking provenance research continues." Then, too, there are the many aging Holocaust survivors who charge that the compensation system simply moves too slowly. "I am 85," says one New York woman. "How much longer can I wait?" In fact, under the circumstances, the distribution system progresses amazingly well. Much credit is due the U.S. judicial team responsible for dispersing the more than $1.25 billion repaid by Swiss banks: Federal Judge Edward Korman and his court-appointed special master, veteran New York attorney Judah Gribetz. According to their most recent report, $780 million has already been dispersed worldwide to more than 369,000 claimants. Another $65 million has been allocated for an additional 13,000 Swiss bank account claimants who lack full documentation, but have plausible stories. Still, time is running out for survivors - most in their 70s and 80s - for whom compensation from banks, insurance companies, museums and national governments is still not forthcoming. The moment has come for the media and the government to ratchet up the pressure on recalcitrant members of the pack of thieves. Originally published on February 26, 2006

Ports Deal Has Some Democrats in Disarray. GOP Remains Thoroughly Confused.

Senator Hillary Clinton has announced her opposition to the DPW ports deal already, even though today she has moderated her position, saying today after Senate hearings that a bill to force a 45 day vetting period would help "resolve this issue."

Hmmm.

By the way, how any people out there know that there is an American University in Dubai? Well, I did, but that's just because I am worldly and sophisticated, having lead a life of inquiry and examination.

There is also, for instance, at The American University in Dubai, a William Jefferson Clinton Scholars Program, that

seeks to further the goals of the Clinton Presidential Foundation by strengthening the capacity of people in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence through its work in racial, ethnic and religious reconciliation. In partnership with AUD, the program gives US-based students the opportunity to expand their educational and cultural horizons by studying in the Arab world.

Back in November, President Clinton was in Dubai, giving a mess of speeches, on in which he told his audience that the US made a big mistake it(we) invaded Iraq. Clinton and Dubai go way back, from selling 80 F-16s to the UAE in 1998, to speaking along with Jordan's queen at a charity event in 2002. And just last December, praised Dubai telling leaders there that the way values and cultures, Western and Islamic, was "wonderful."

Clinton said: “Dubai is a role model of what could be achieved despite the other negative developments in the region. When I went to Dubai for the first time, I was taken to a technology facility where I hooked up to a bank kiosk and found that one can use a conventional banking service, while at the same time opt for an Islamic Sharia compliant service, which I thought was wonderful. This is a very good example of how cultures and values could be merged and offered to the rest. I was amazed and I have a lot of admiration for Sheikh Mohammed for what he’s doing in Dubai.”

Clinton also urged members of the YAL (Young Arab Leaders) to spread their message across the region. He explained: “I think much can be done by just telling others about your own achievements. They can share their experience and ideas with others and help them develop their economies as Dubai has done. YAL can leverage their experience to enlighten others.”

He added: “Look at Dubai, which has achieved enormous growth in such a short period of time. Less than 6% of Dubai’s income comes from oil. It’s no longer an oil economy."

I wonder if Bill and Hillary had some time to chat last night.

Carol Browner, head of EPA under Clinton, and principal in Former Clinton SecDef Madelaine Albright's *cough* consulting firm, lobbied Sen. Charles Schumer about the deal but was rebuffed. She must be very shiny, now:

On Feb. 14, Browner went to Capitol Hill with former Long Island Democratic congressman Tom Downey, a registered lobbyist, on behalf of the Dubai-based company DP World, whose approval to take over port operations at six major U.S. cities has created political havoc.

The Albright Group's role in the effort by DP World to win government approval illustrates the intersection of government, global commerce, and long-standing relationships among powerful people.

Albright's spokeswoman said she was not personally involved in the U.S. ports issue. But the company does work with Downey's lobby firm, Downey McGrath Group Inc., and Albright herself was in China consulting for DP World in recent days.

Both Albright's and Schumer's offices confirmed that Browner was present during the meeting.

"After we first criticized the deal, Browner and Downey met with our staff and were unpersuasive," said Schumer spokesman Israel Klein. "Senator Schumer is going to continue to fight this deal."

Still, the Dems are running with what looks like a bogus AP story about the secret deal's, uh, secrets.

Meanwhile, as President Bush pushes for the members of his party to at least climb back off the ledge, GOP lawmakers are quite upset that they came out with a slam dunk issue, determined to refuse the Democrats the opportunity to get to the right (that's East if you're facing North) of them on National Security. The White House hasn't helped their people out very much, and Republicans are wondering what they have to do to get the administration to at least stay awake.

But now that both Frist and Hastert have called for some more tire-kicking, tire kicking it'll be, at least for the sake of appearances.

Meanwhile, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, who is an expert because she lives in Philadelphia, says that since Bush has browbeat  "the nation into a fear and loathing of most things Muslim" he's a hypocrite. Now matter that the author, who is presumed to be resistant to such browbeating, now finds herself fearing and loathing with the best of 'em.

With every day hat goes by, those who were reflexively and angrily against this are losing ground, and those politicians who saw this issue as a way to gain advantage are starting, slowly to wonder if maybe they have gone too far.

The 45 day wait will turn out to be a fig leaf for much of the Congress, after which many lawmakers will do the customary shrug and proclaim, "Looks fine to me."

Port Sports.

President Bush has announced that the DPW ports deal should be allowed to go through and that he will veto any bill passed to stop it. The ball, as they say, is now in the other court. Things may actually get interesting, here.

Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye has more on this port fiasco, and recounts, yet again, the important features. Read his top ten. It is about as clear and concise as they come.

Also, AJStrata has a good, logical post on the subject, although I would point out that it isn't only conservatives who are making fools of themselves. Just look around to places like this for some fine, fine thinking from the left.

For anybody who really, honestly wants to educate themselves on this issue (which should not even be an issue), this from Lounsbury is required reading. It is written by a person who knows what he's talking about, both from a business and a (ugh) cultural standpoint.  Also, on the uber blog 'Aquol, there is an expanding post here on the subject. Check back for updates.

I was out most of the day, but in trying to find something on the radio, I found that Rush Limbaugh agrees with me on this subject. That's going to keep me up all night.

Ports In A Storm: The Xenophobes Are All Over The Place.

While I did not care to blog this weekend (work, work, and for a moment, a nice dinner with the Sheriff), I engaged in a little tete-a-tete over at The Moderate Voice with a few people who neither understand the trumped-up ports controversy nor wish to be educated on it. Even the Guardian is calling this for the one company out there who has a beef with the deal (though not for the actual reasons), and the reportage of this story has been across-the-board awful.

The Blogojoint has its nose in a kink, with lefties and righties finally finding something to hold hands over. Trouble is, almost everybody is wrong about this.

For the record: Dubai Ports World (DPW) has announced the acquisition of the UK firm Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co (P&O), the very company that has been running port operations in those now under scrutiny by cretins like Charles Schumer (who didn't even know that NY & NJ were being run by furriners). DPW has a long established track record as an efficient and well-run manager. Even though it is owned by UAE, it is run like any other multinational.

But that's not the point.

The point is that all the wailing about this deal has exposed a nasty strain of racism that is running through both parties and partisans of every stripe. Suddenly, we're all to worry about foreign management of ports? Or is it just that we don't want Arabs or Muslims running them? Incidentally, DPW has announced that P&O offices and management will remain, so don't go looking for crazed terrorists to be over running Philadelphia any time soon. Oh, and by the way, security is a separate issue altogether.

We have been hearing how it is important to engage "moderate Muslims." How we need to demonstrate that we can tell the difference between a terrorist and the vast numbers of Muslims who wish nothing more than to get on with their lives. So what do we do when given the opportunity? Why, we show ourselves to be xenophobic, backward and hypocritical.

The UAE is that sort of moderate Islamic nation that the West is always saying we want. It has opened up to the West and the US in particular and is an ally in the war against al Qaeda. The message we send with this prattle is that we don't actually believe there is anything such as a "Good Muslim." We now will lump all you together because, frankly, we can't tell the difference, even when it is staring us right in the face.

We get our hackles up over some rioting over cartoons, when in fact, there is nothing we can do about those. There are a certain number of people that will just not be convinced. Better to occupy our time with those mainstream Arabs and Muslims who wish to do business and get along. These are the people we need as business partners and allies, and who we risk alienating out of fear and ignorance.

It's not a surprise that not very many people know what they are talking about here, as this is quite an obscure topic to most. But this is why one must really look at things the way they are before opening one's mouth or blowing off on a website.

So there, most bloggers and reporters are merely ignorant of the issue. But politicians--surprise--are using this to make cheap points on either side of the aisle, pandering to America's worst attributes and making us look like a nation of bigots.

The Saddam Tapes.

The release today of tapes from Saddam Hussein's inner sanctum regarding WMDs will be the subject of some controversy, with one side claiming that hey prove that Saddam had the weapons, or was planning on giving them to a third party, or something else, and the other side saying that they prove nothing of the sort. For background, Byron York's post yesterday is a good thing to read for those who hope that this is a smoking gun.

A lot of the disagreement will come down to the different translations. This is a problem for non-Arabic speakers to grasp (not that I have any expertise; I don know that those studying Arabic speak of the difficulty in making consistent translations). Beyond that, the involvement of John Loftus causes some to be more skeptical than they normally would be. And the resignations of former DCIs Woolsey and Deutch have raised eyebrows.

Too bad Rose Mary Woods has left us.

Iran, Cheney, Hewitt, O'Donnell, Abu Ghraib, Mohammed Cartoons, NSA Wiretap: Did I Miss Anything?

Anybody out there wondering why, as Iran is going balls to the wall to produce nukes, Hugh Hewitt and Lawrence O'Donnell are pissing around with whether Cheney was drunk or not? I'll tell you why: because Iran, and China, and the new Abu Ghraib photos, and the continued trumped-up story of a few cartoons, and the questions surrounding the NSA wiretap story are too much for these people to handle. Instead, Hewitt takes his position as Cheney apologist and O'Donnell takes his as heroic exposer of conspiracy. And they get to play as if there's something like news, here.

Read this from O'Donnell on Hewitt's show:

All we're doing is guessing, because the Vice President forced us to guess, because he did exactly what Ted Kennedy did at Chappaquiddick. Exactly, Hugh. The same behavior. That's what you do when you're drunk. Now there's other possible reasons why the Vice President did what he did. There are many other possible reasons, but he's going to have to tell me what those are, and he's going to have to make those believable. So far, I do not believe him...

Let me get something straight. I've never said the guy was drunk. I said ask the question. I don't know if he was drunk. I don't know if Ted Kennedy was drunk in Chappaquiddick. You don't, either. I'm sure you believe it as strongly as you believe your religion that Ted Kennedy was drunk at Chappaquiddick. I don't know it.

O'Donnell seems to have a scoop, here. But maybe not. He didn't talk to police, but to lawyers who say that it's SOP to avoid the authorities until one dries out. Okay.

But the motivation is something else:

I get credit for Was Cheney Drunk. Make sure all your audience knows I'm the guy who asked was Cheney drunk, and I forced Fox News into asking him about what his alcohol consumption was that day.

I started the whole thing. Everybody who's jumping on the bandwagon, everybody who's out there, the wild people who go out there and make assertions that Cheney was drunk were all inspired by me, yes. I asked the question, they've turned that into an assertion.

So O'Donnell wants the credit, but not the blame, as it were.

And he also likes the whole blogging cover:

All right. Good. Listen, there's a different standard for posting. This is a posting on the Huffington Post, okay? I had no substantive facts on the matter of the Vice President's sobriety. I would not have written what I wrote in the L.A. Times or the New York Times. I wouldn't do that. But in a post on a website that is a blog, this is exactly the kind of question you're supposed to ask, and you ask those questions so that the media will read that, it'll provoke them to ask the questions, which is exactly what has happened. And yes, for Howie Kurtz, yes, I think assumptions are exactly the standard for website blogs, yes.

Get that bloggers?

Why am I doing this? Just to illustrate that it's not enough to ask the good questions about Cheney and why he waited so long to talk to the media (and remember, when the media say that Cheney is coming in for a "lot of criticism," that criticism is largely coming from the media).

Cheney handled this like he has handled just about everything else. Delay, get the story straight, go to a sympathetic venue with a mea culpa. And I guess that some see this as a way to get at him, like getting Capone on his taxes or some other cliche. So get him, for chrissakes, and get back to the real stories. It's amazing how both sides see Cheney as either worth protecting at all costs or ruining at all costs.

Or if you don't want to get back to the real stories, say so and admit that our vaunted fourth estate has become inhabited by a bunch of tabloid-minded buffoons, no better than the idiots that we have elected and who are supposed to be running the country.

Somewhere in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is laughing.

You people make me sick.

Oh and the title? Just seeing how many hits I can get from piling everything in there.

German Muslim Group To Ahmadinejad: Come To Auschwitz.

This is not what you might think:

A Muslim cultural institute in Germany on Monday criticised Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for disparaging the Holocaust, daring him to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp.

"In this place of horror he can again deny the Holocaust, if he has the courage," a spokesman for the Islam-Archiv-Deutschland Central Institute told the German Catholic press agency KNA.

In recent statements, the hardline Iranian president has dismissed the Nazis’ systematic slaughter of mainland Europe’s Jews as a "myth" used to justify the creation of Israel and called for the state to be "wiped off the map".

By denying the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad not only denigrated the Jewish victims of the genocide but also the 200,000 Roms and Arabs murdered in the "gypsy camp" of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps, the institute spokesman said.

The fact that the president of an Islamic state repeated Nazi anti-Semitism was harmful to the image of Islam and "a disgrace for all the world’s Muslims", he added.

The Berlin-based institute, founded in 1927, is the oldest Muslim body in Germany.

Good on them. I wonder if Mad Mahmoud will accept the invitation. Of course, there is little evidence that he has any ability towards self-examination, so I wouldn't expect this to turn out.

What is most important is the statement by the group and the principle behind it.