Bloggledygook

A Perfect Arc From My Back Porch.

Condolences For The Instafamily.

Glenn Reynolds has lost his grandmother. Glenn has often blogged about her, and she seems the very model of a Southern Lady. In the crush of life, blogging sometimes can take on a quality of voyeurism and narcissism, but at its personal best, the daily log affords an insight into character and we are briefly allowed to touch life that we would otherwise be ignorant of. Glenn has always struck a fine balance so that interest does not become prying.

We send our deepest sympathies to Glenn and his family. May Charlsie Farrior Teal find her rest.

Caspar Weinberger, RIP.

Former Secretary of Defense and a central figure in both the build-up of defenses during the Reagan Administration, and of the Iran-Contra Scandal, has died.

As head of the Pentagon, Weinberger strongly opposed concessions to Moscow in arms control negotiations and pushed hard for increased defense spending, such as Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, a program to develop a land-and space-based missile shield commonly known as "Star Wars."

"He should be remembered as a world statesman, a great American patriot," the son said. "What he did with Reagan really brought down the Soviet Union. They stuck to their plan and simply outspent the Soviets despite all sorts of doubts here."

Weinberger became caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal that bedeviled the Reagan administration. He resigned the defense secretary job in 1987 and afterward was indicted on felony counts of lying to the independent counsel investigating the administration's program for selling missiles to Iran and giving the proceeds to the right-wing Contra forces fighting Nicaragua's socialist Sandinista government.

His son is quoted as saying, "He was just a worn-out guy." I can't imagine. I had a youth dislike of Weinberger, seeing him as at once reckless and controlling. He was for me a proxy for my animus towards Reagan. In a fashion close to what is thrown about today, I considered Weinberger to be "Reagan's Brain." That was absurd, of course. Yet, history will show that Weinberger was perhaps the central figure, other than the man himself, of the Reagan Administration.

He was pardoned by the first President Bush just days before he was to go on trial in the Iran-Contra case. We can't really say whether or not he wold have been convicted, but it seemed to me at the time an ignominious twist of fortune for one of the architects of Reagan's Cold War strategy.

So we have a complicated man, one who achieved great things who was perhaps driven too far by ideology and hubris, but who nonetheless left a permanent mark on the history of his country.

Cap Weinberger was 88.

Light Turnout For Israeli Election.

The polls are open in Israel for this post-Sharon election. Reports are that Kadima is likely to be the winner and form a bloc with Labor and other small parties. Also, it looks as if the turnout is less than overwhelming.

As of 4:00 p.m. Tuesday, only 39 percent of Israel's five million eligible voters had turned out at Israel's 8,000 polling stations to cast their ballots. The figure is over 5.2% lower than that at the same time on election day 2003.

At 2:00 p.m., 30.2% of the voting public had voted, representing a nearly 5% drop from the percentages measured in the 2003 elections. By noon, only 21.7% of the voting public had voted, amounting to some 3% less than in 2003. At 10 a.m. - three hours after polls opened - only 9.9% of the voting public had cast their ballots.

658 polling stations opened in IDF bases throughout the country to allow soldiers to vote on Tuesday, according to the IDF Spokesperson's Unit. The stations opened on time and were operating properly.

Polls are set to close at 10 p.m., except in small towns, where they will close at 8 p.m.

This story highlights an effort by Arabs in Israel to boycott the elections. I often point out that Arabs have more rights in Israel than Jews certainly have in Arab countries. However, the government makes it very difficult for Arab citizens who want to participate, which leads to frustration. The situation there is perpetuated by government shenanigans and by the lack of Arab cohesiveness. Many Arabs see this as their last election in Israel, assuming that their next ballot will be a Palestinian one.

Therein lies a problem, though. Arabs vote for Arabs and Jews vote for Jews. That is not likely to change, because Israeli Jews are skeptical of Israeli Arabs. While much of the skepticism is warranted, the compartmentalization of the electorate that has been in force for decades has finally become too much to handle.

Call Immigration Reform What It Is: The Latino Influx Control Act.

In the burgeoning debate over what is euphemistically being denoted Immigration Reform and is, in practical terms, what might as well be called the Latino Influx Control Act, the predictable and lamentable obfuscation of the issue is now in full bloom. Parts of the Senate version of the bill fairly cry out for ridicule. One, if I understand it, is that although the United States is now to legitimize 11 million illegals, those who would sign up for temporary worker status have no possibility of gaining citizenship (pg 81 of the Bill, search "INELIGIBLE TO CHANGE NONIMMIGRANT CLASSIFICATION"). The provision is to establish a program for people who have no intention of seeking citizenship, but seems to be an awkward way of dealing with the push-pull of status.

Another crass and smart ploy by the pro-illegals is the framing of the issue as one of huddled masses yearning to breathe free. On the weekend shows the illegals were constantly portrayed as no different from Italians or Poles who came ashore in past generations. The implication, or in the outright slander by Katrina vanden Heuvel against Tom Tancredo (who, to be fair, can get a but srill at times), is that we who would like to see immigrants play by the rules set are certainly racists. The Mexicans are not white, you see, so that's all that needs pointed to. End of discussion.

However, it is perplexing when reporters either knowingly shield their subjects, or are too lazy to do some background in this case. On a drive home Sunday evening, I listened NPR's All Things Considered and a story from Debbie Elliot about how "immigrants" marched in LA and how this was a civil rights issue rather than one of legality. The report included an interview with Cecilia Munoz of the National Council of La Raza. For those who have no Spanish, La Raza means "The Race."

NCLR has been characterized as the gentle face of a movement that wishes to retake territory won from Mexico by the United States. For some background on the La Raza movement, including MECha, look here. I am not accusing NCLR of wanting a Reconquista of much of the Southwest US. However, Ms Munoz was never asked about the movement, even to give her the chance to set the record straight. What's more, the word "illegal" was used as an abstract, and dismissed by Munoz.

In this day it is unthinkable that we would give such legitimacy to a group that called itself "The White People." Instead, we get the impression from these profiles that La Raza, MECha and Nation of Aztlan, (and its outlet,  Aztlan) are just Latino Knights of Columbus. In fact, many on the left have pointed out that there are many Italian flags waving on Columbus Day, or Irish Flags on St Patty's, so what is the difference?

We are different, don't you see. We are called racists because we want to know that those marching with their Mexican flags will certainly honor their heritage and homeland, but forsake attachment to that homeland for their new country, just as Italian and Irish and all other immigrant groups have done.

But the movement has some nasty history. Read this and decide if it is racist (or anti-Semitic) or not. By the way the formulation "Alta California" is no mistake. This is a portion of the US that the movement wants back.

Now, it would be stupid and truly racist to lump every Latino (or even a majority) looking for citizenship as secretly plotting to take over California. But movements like these serve no purpose except to taint an entire group of people, and the group must make efforts to neutralize the radical elements. This is why, for instance, anti-war demonstrations have fizzled. The Che and ANSWER crowd were allowed into the fold and ended up killing whatever level-headedness existed.

When we see 500,000 people in the streets of LA rallying for special rights no other segment of society has ever been given, and when we hear that those very people are "the backbone of our economy" most Americans will recognize that that's mostly a load of dung.

I can't imagine another giant group of lawbreakers openly marching for the right to break the law and being allowed to get away with it. Maybe it's the shear numbers that discourage enforcement. After all, how does one arrest 11 million people? So we are now left to deal with a situation of our own making, in which the government of Mexico was a willing and aggressive accomplice.

But to characerize those who want a sane, workable and legal path for immigrants as racist, and those illegals now in the US as worthy of new rights doesn't answer the problem.

Illegal Immigrants Rally For... What Exactly?

The LA Times reports that a half million "undocumented immigrants" crammed the streets to protest upcoming legislation.

"There has never been this kind of mobilization in the immigrant community ever," said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. "They have kicked the sleeping giant. It's the beginning of a massive immigrant civil rights struggle."

The demonstrators, many wearing white shirts to symbolize peace, included both longtime residents and the newly arrived, bound by a desire for a better life.

Arbelica Lazo, 40, illegally emigrated from El Salvador two decades ago but said she now owns two businesses and pays $7,000 in income taxes each year.

Jose Alberto Salvador, 33, came here illegally four months ago to find work to support the wife and five children he left behind. In his native Guatemala, he said, what little work he could find paid $10 a day.

"As much as we need this country, we love this country," Salvador said, waving both the American and Guatemalan flags. "This country gives us opportunities we don't get at home."

I admire Senor Salvador's ambition, and I believe that legal immigration is vital to the nation's continued health. However, illegals demanding retro active rights aren't going to garner support from the general populace. In fact, the more I hear from advocates the more I am inclined to agree with those who would tend toward more draconian immigration laws. And rankly, I don't accept the premise re: Arbelica Lazo and how wonderful it is that he's now paying taxes.

Illegal aliens have broken the law, making it more difficult for those following the rules to gain entry. It getting more difficult to accept that the flood of those breaking the law is not a concerted effort to supplant the laws of the United States and gain some advantage.

As I understand it, the current move is to bolster border security while urging those here illegally to pay back taxes and go through the process like everybody else. Good luck with that.

Complicit in this are businesses who employ illegals and justify it with false claims of financial ruin if they are compelled to pay a reasonable wage.

We must decide sooner or later to have a rational, workable policy. Those arguing for unlawful activity are doing the country and their constituents no favor. Can't we continue to be a nation of immigrants without giving into what amounts to organized blackmail? And (this is an honest question) do we tolerate illegal entry from any other ethnic or national group?

It also seems that if the Mexican et al economies were providing better for their citizens illegal immigration would not be such a problem. It seems to me that free trade agreements at least address this issue. When Americans rail against CAFTA and NAFTA, they miss a central irony to their own positions.

Sarah Caldwell, RIP.

Boston icon and opera impresario Sarah Caldwell has died.

''Her whole life," her friend and Opera Company of Boston prima donna Beverly Sills once said, ''was one big improvisation, most of it inspired."

Ms. Caldwell died Thursday night in Maine Medical Center in Portland.  She was 82.

Her longtime assistant and former manager of the Opera Company, James Morgan, said yesterday that she died of heart failure. For many years, Ms. Caldwell had respiratory problems.

In 1958, Ms. Caldwell founded her company with $5,000. She directed its first production, Offenbach's ''Voyage to the Moon," on Boston Common, a staging so successful Ms. Caldwell took it to the White House lawn; she followed up with Puccini's ''La Boheme" in a converted movie theater. Over the years, she presented a large, diverse, and challenging repertoire of more than 75 operas of every period and style, including many US premieres, and with a significant commitment to challenging 20th-century work.

I was a student in Boston during the early '80s when Caldwell's reign was beginning its long, sometimes aching wind-down and would make my way to the Opera, stepping over drunks to get my rush tickets. The Opera lived on the end on the Combat Zone and as a poor student, I found the juxtaposition of swanks in couture rushing into the House, averting their eyes somewhat from the gritty surrounds.

Inside, however, there was a different world, Caldwell's world. She displayed great avenues of brilliance amid more than a few wrong turns. But it was her personality, her insistence on fidelity to her craft that seized the public attention.

There was no single ''Caldwell style" of operatic production: She was interested in everything from Baroque theater practice to avant-garde methods using the latest advances from the labs at MIT, always applying her diverse interests in surprising and provocative ways. She embraced the whole spectrum of possibility -- original languages and English translation; major stars and emerging American singers; standard and variant performing editions; anything that was lively and pertinent. Ms. Caldwell's work was unified by a profound and comprehensive vision of how opera could be relevant and vital in our time, and defined by a splendid theatricality. Her adventurousness was often ahead of its time, and it took decades for other US companies to catch up to her daring, especially in repertoire. She also opened the door for subsequent generations of important female operatic directors.

I have my own personal story of Caldwell, that I will keep, mostly because it wasn't very memorable to anybody but me and only slightly embarrassing.

Caldwell was not only a voracious, passionate character, but a singular talent who at a time rivaled Boston's more widely known musical personalities for the heart of the city.

Sarah Caldwell was 82.

Marshall Wittman: The Neo-Rasputin.

I am currently in the midst of a semi-irregular semi-annual disgust with politics. I have spent what little time I have had recently clicking through a bunch of site, many written by people I respect and read daily, only to find myself rendered (mostly) silent, not from a lack of opinion, but from a realization that positions are ossifying rapidly and it doesn't do to point that out.

The Bull Moose hasn't thrown in the terry cloth just yet; in fact he seems a bit delighted at being labeled Hillary Clinton's "unofficial Rasputin." Still, the frustration is evident in these paragraphs:

Today, there is a moronic convergence of the Buchananite paleo-conservative right and the left on the notion that we went to war at the direction of a cabal of neo-conservatives who seized the brain of the President. Even though Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are hardly neo-cons, the right-left conspiracy has it that the forces of the Project for the New American Century distributed letters signed by the likes of Wolfowitz and Feith and that led us to war.

In the interests of full disclosure, the Moose once signed a PNAC letter. Suffice it to say, his signature probably had little impact on the President. But, the Moose proudly stands by his association with the neo-cons conspiracists , who, by the way, were the most vociferous supporters of the Clinton Administration in stopping the slaughter in Kosovo. Liberal internationalism is something with which the Moose has no quarrel.

I was making this point to a friend the other day. This friend was among those who, during Kosovo, repeated the meme of the time that the US was not to be "the world's policeman" while he supported Iraq on the "democratization" of the Middle East was good policy for the US and that, after all we were liberating 25 million people.

When I mentioned this to another friend who had supported Clinton, but now was against "being the world's policeman," I realized that the sides had simply changed while arguments stayed static.

In other words, it depends on who is running things. Clinton was accused of "wagging the dog" in Kosovo to change the subject from Monica, even though his administration waited far too long to commit troops. If he had been wagging, he would have jumped at the chance to take his affair off the front pages.

Okay. The left and right have changed places. That is, I suppose, not very surprising. However, while there have been efforts to legitimize the so-called moderate, middle, independent voter, the middle isn't doing a very good job of holding itself together. Maybe it's because the middle by definition can be cohesive. But it is discouraging that even those for whom inquiry is more important than dogma, the time seems near when positions become hardened and independent thinking becomes unthinkable.

Inanimate Objects Run Amok!

I wonder how one gets a job writing headlines for Yahoo!

Witness:

Yahoo! Alerts

Yahoo! News - My Alerts - Edit Alert

Thursday, March 23, 2006, 10:43 AM PST

MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica (AP) A Jamaican official says a cigarette is suspected of causing a cruise ship fire that killed one person and damaged 150 cabins. Breaking News Alerts may be sent before a story is available on Yahoo! News. A story should be published shortly. Search for related news on Yahoo! News Search.

That's one nasty cigarette.

English, please.

It's The Bomb Imam!

Another big splodey story:

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Danish police will launch an investigation into allegations that an imam at the centre of the Prophet Mohammad cartoon row issued death threats against a moderate Muslim politician, a spokesman said on Thursday.

At least 50 people have been killed in protests in Asia, Africa and the Middle East after Danish paper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons about the Prophet last year.

A French TV documentary crew secretly filmed Imam Ahmed Akkari threatening to have Naser Khader -- a founder of Denmark's Democratic Muslims network, which opposes violent protests over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad -- bombed.

"It is truly shocking that an elected Danish politician can be the object of threats in this way," Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters. "I take for granted that the police will investigate what happened and will deal with it."

Police spokesman Flemming Steen Munk said the inquiry would begin as soon as Akkari returned from Bahrain, where he was attending a conference that finished on Thursday.

So I guess that the cartoonist who drew a bomb in Mohammed's turban has a point, huh?