Notes on how things seem to me from out here in Hollywood... As seen from Just Above Sunset
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Photos and text, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003,2004,2005,2006 - Alan M. Pavlik
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Consider:

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

- I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

"Cynical realism – it is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation."

- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"







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Sunday, 23 July 2006
Hot Off the Virtual Press
Topic: Announcements
Hot Off the Virtual Press
The new issue of Just Above Sunset, the weekly magazine-format site that is parent to this daily web log, is now online. This is Volume 4, Number 30, for the week of July 23, 2006.Click here to go there...

This week's commentary is mostly on the new war of course - you've got your Afghanistan War, not finished as the defeated and extinct Taliban are busy retaking towns in the south, and you've got your Iraq War, which may not be our war anymore but just one where the locals have at it and we try to keep a lid on things, hoping not for the best but the least-worst, and you've got the new two-front war Israel is waging with our approval. And with all the talk from the neoconservatives saying that this is just the right time to take care of Syria and bomb Iran back to the days before anyone discover nuclear energy or weapons - we've got them all on the run so let's kick as now - you may get two more wars. And the detail and perspective is here. But then there's an item on what seems to be missing in action - any sort of domestic policy.

At the International Desk, Our Man in Tel-Aviv, Sylvain Ubersfeld, perhaps picked the wrong time for a quick vacation, a few relaxing days in the Golan area. He offers an account of trying to spend a few pleasant days in the Golan Heights, on the Syrian border, as a war breaks out, with exclusive photos to give you a feel for the place. Amazing. Our Man in Paris (where there is no war), Ric Erickson, reports on the extraordinary heat wave there, with photographic documentation.

The Southern California photography this week covers the ultimate Hollywood statue (it's huge and newly restored), and last weekend's very odd Los Angeles Bastille Day, and the rest is the birds and the bees, quite literally, along with more extraordinary blooms.

Our friend from Texas of course provides your weekly dose of the weird, and the quotes this week are for the Jung at heart.
Direct links to specific pages -

Extended Observations on Current Events ______________________________

War Talk: On the Sixth Day of the More-Than-Six-Day War
Research: Is the Sky Falling?
War Thoughts (Day Ten)
Learning from Experience
MIA: Say, What Ever Happened to Compassionate Conservatism?

The International Desk ______________________________

Our Man in Tel-Aviv: Never a Dull Moment
Our Man in Paris: Paris-Plages, Unusual View, Real Palms
Paris Extra: The Heat Wave

Hollywood Matters ______________________________

Glamour Restored: The George Stanley Fountain at the Hollywood Bowl

Southern California Photography ______________________________

Bastille Day, Los Angeles
An Office: Just what it should look like...
Shore Birds
Botanicals: Morning Light
One Bee

The Weird: WEIRD, BIZARRE and UNUSUAL
Quotes for the week of July 9, 2006 - Forever Jung (Carl Gustav Jung)

Posted by Alan at 18:21 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Sunday, 23 July 2006 18:23 PDT home

Saturday, 22 July 2006
MIA: Say, What Ever Happened to Compassionate Conservatism?
Topic: For policy wonks...
MIA: Say, What Ever Happened to Compassionate Conservatism?
Yes the third war is being waged - you've got your Afghanistan War, not finished as the defeated and extinct Taliban are busy retaking towns in the south, and you've got your Iraq War, which may not be our war anymore but just one where the locals have at it and we try to keep a lid on things, hoping not for the best but the least-worst, and you've got the new two-front war Israel is waging with our approval. And with all the talk from the neoconservatives saying that this is just the right time to take care of Syria and bomb Iran back to the days before anyone discover nuclear energy or weapons - we've got them all on the run so let's kick as now - you may get two more wars.

Back in the days when wars were metaphoric - the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, for example - they weren't any easier to win. Like the War on Terror, these were wars on abstractions. Still there were those who thought one of them, Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, was a rather fine idea, even if a bit more conceptual than real. Johnson may have launched the thing to divert attention from the Vietnam mess, but doing something to get people who were in trouble working and fed and housed and educated seemed like that might do the country some good.

The push back from the right was the usual. These people had to take personal responsibility, not handouts, and what they needed was to be forced to work for what might sustain them and eventually get them into the mainstream. The day of handouts was over - as it wasn't fair that those who worked hard then were being forced by the evil government to chip in to keep those who had bad luck or dark skin and made the mistake of being born in the wrong place from dying in the streets. These losers needed to be forced to do for themselves, like everyone else. This was called compassionate conservatism, or tough love, or the American Way, or something, and thus we got welfare reform, where you got the food stamps and other aid, if you put in forty hours a week doing something, anything at all. There would be no more lazy "takers" - whining people playing victim and taking the money of those who worked hard and did useful things. To just give them help was wrong - it was "soft bigotry of low expectations" and the conservatives were not bigots. They knew these people were capable of becoming rich, or something.

Oddly the real welfare reform came in the Clinton administration, as he was doing that triangulation or "third way" thing, mixing liberal stuff with conservative stuff in an attempt to pull the country together. Unfortunately, there was the Monica lass.

With the conservatives taking control of the government - first with the Newt Gingrich revolution of 1994, where congress was convincingly won be the conservatives, to the present situation where both hoses, the executive branch, and most of the judiciary are in the hands of the conservatives - things might have been even harsher. But as there is a baseline of people in the country disturbed by the thought of millions of homeless dying in the streets and children starving and all that, the line became "sure we're conservative and think people should take care of themselves and the government has no business in helping people with anything, but we're not heartless." Thus Republicans ran on the platform of "compassionate conservatism" - no one deserves anything from the government, but we'll make a few exceptions here and there. George Bush ran on that idea, and got the votes of those who were resentful any of their tax dollars went to someone not working when they were, but felt a little guilty when each winter another homeless woman or two froze to death under the bridge down the street. Those who felt no guilt at all - serves 'em right for being so lazy - knew the whole thing was a ploy. There are things you have to say to get elected, and they understood.

And the have been right. In the Washington Post, in the pages not devoted to the wars, there was this, a discussion of how the administration has said nothing at all about poverty in America since the president gave that amazing speech in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina - we would do something about the poverty that led to all these deaths, of the people who didn't have the means to get out of the path of the storm, and yes it was a racial thing too, and we'd fix that too. Enough was enough. The post notes that was it. It was a one-shot. Not only were the issues never mentioned again, anywhere or at any time, the speech was never referred to again, and no actions of any sort were taken of any sort to even vaguely related to the issues of poverty or race. It seems other things came up. And even if they had not come up, one wonders if anything would be different.

Poverty? Never heard of it. The New Orleans speech stands out as an anomaly - something from an alternative universe, the Universe of Compassionate Conservatism. It's the stuff of Marvel Comics - a place where everything is reversed, and Superman is a bad, and dumb.

Ezra Klein explains -
... the roots of the Bush administration's betrayal on poverty reach far beyond Katrina. Compassionate conservatism, after all, was once more than an empty catch phrase; it described a policy philosophy that sought economic uplift through government incentives. Myron Magnet, author of the foundational compassionate conservative work The Dream and the Nightmare, met with Bush repeatedly during the campaign, and visitors to Karl Rove's office used to leave with a copy of the book in hand - according to Rove, it laid out the campaign's roadmap. So when Magnet assured us that "At [Bush's compassionate conservatism's] core is concern for the poor - not a traditional Republican preoccupation - and an explicit belief that government has a responsibility for poor Americans," it was safe to assume he knew what he was talking about.

Only he didn't. Compassionate conservatism retained only its disinterest in small government conservatism. As the years ground excruciatingly onward and the Bush administration's domestic policy priorities crystallized, it became abundantly clear that this administration was corporatist, not conservative in nature - theirs was a philosophy of industrialist, not indigent, uplift. It didn't have to be that way: Bush's early moves were promising, with No Child Left Behind a flawed but supportable attempt at codifying equality in our schools. After 9-11, though, the war president killed the poor's president, and Bush turned his already meager interest in the mechanics of governing entirely away from domestic issues.

I've never been entirely convinced by the explanations for why that happened. Bush's record in Texas and his rhetoric on the campaign trail never suggested the sort of leader that would emerge. September 11 changed him, but it's not precisely clear why it enabled such an abandonment of the domestic realm.
Maybe because it was a joke to begin with? Just as the evangelical Christians tell us you have to understand when Jesus was just kidding - like that turn the other cheek business and that love everyone stuff - so you need to understand the New Orleans anomaly the same way.

Or as Digby at Hullabaloo puts it -
I would argue that there never was a "compassionate conservative" Bush, but a political slogan that was adopted when the face of the party was the slavering beasts of the Gingrich years who shut down the government and impeached a popular president against the will of the people. The game plan was to run Bush as a Republican Clinton without the woody.

And to the extent that they actually believed any of their campaign blather about "soft bigotry of low expectations" and prescription drug coverage, it was only to massage certain constituencies they needed to cobble together a majority - which they didn't actually manage to do in 2000. Karl was just buying votes like any smart pol does.

... They failed on social security, the big ticket domestic item of the second term, but the reason was that they always overestimated the amount of political capital a "war president" who only won a second term by 51% of the vote actually has. He had plenty of juice after 9/11 but he used it all up on Iraq - and when the WMD didn't show, most of that evaporated over time.

But the tax cuts, the indiscriminate deregulation, the expansion of executive power (not only through the programs like the illegal wiretapping but through the passage of the Patriot Act as well) can only be considered great successes by the standard he set forth. The reason his "compassionate conservative" agenda wasn't part of that package is because it was just a campaign ploy to begin with. After 9/11 they made the calculation that he could win by running solely on national security with a smattering of homo-hating. And he did.
Poverty just didn't matter.

But now it may, as those in the middle start the slow descent to the levels below. The economy is booming, a wages for most are falling, and have been for several years. This would be no problem if only CEO's were allowed to vote, and those who have large portfolios (those who own the capital). The problem is we allow those who live off their labor alone, their work, to vote. The problem is so obvious that even John Derbyshire at the old-line conservative National Review sees it -
If the rich get richer while the middle class thrives, and some decent provision is made for the poor, I'm a happy man, living in a society I consider healthy and am proud of. If, however, the rich get richer while the middle class is struggling, or actually declining, I am not a happy man. There are some reasons to think that is happening, and you don't have to be a socialist to worry about this.
Amd even the folks over at the Wall Street Journal, of all places, see the problem, as Steven Rattner notes here -
After months without a domestic agenda to capitalize on Bush administration unpopularity, Democrats are moving - haltingly, disjointedly, belatedly - toward embracing the mother of all electoral issues: the failure of robust top-line growth in the U.S. economy to filter into the wallets of Americans below the top of the pyramid.

... No amount of chaff can hide the failure of our remarkable productivity surge (and the accompanying robust growth of the overall economy) to meaningfully boost average wages, which have barely grown with inflation. Separated by income level, the picture is more dismal. From 2000 to 2005, for example, average weekly wages for the bottom 10% dropped by 2.7% (after adjustment for inflation), while those of the top 10% rose by 5.3%.
No amount of "but the economy is booming talk" can override the fact of the empty wallet at the gas pump. Interestingly he uses the word chaff, the foil that used to be dropped from bombers to befuddle the guys on the ground at their radar screens. The working man's radar may be able to see through it, even if the Democrats screw up this issue too. Rattner seems more worried about those who work for a living than any Democrat.

Is the day of reckoning at hand? If you're told you're really doing well, and you've dropped your health insurance and are skipping meals, and you can't pay even the monthly minimum on your credit cards, are you going to believe that? Who needs the Democrats? You may just feel these guys have screwed you.

Well, they always said government doesn't solve problems, government is the problem. That was one of Ronald Reagan's favorite lines, and he's said to be the father of all the concepts at play.

That leads to this rant, on the underlying issues, presented here in full, as the writer no doubt wants this widely disseminated -
What Did You Expect, America?
by SusanG
Sat Jul 22, 2006 at 03:16:59 PM PDT

Would you hire a babysitter who hates children and thinks they should be eliminated? Or who declares for years in your hearing that children are irritants who should be starved to be small, unseen and mute?

Would you hire cops who think laws are stupid and useless and should be abolished?

Would you hire a conductor for your orchestra who believes music itself an abomination?

Then why would you hire - and you did hire them, America; they are your employees, after all, not your rulers, despite their grandiose pretensions - members of a political party who think government is useless, ineffective, bloated and untrustworthy?

You've hired for your kitchen the chef who spits in your food because he despises preparing meals.

You've hired for your yardwork the gardener who sets out to kill your roses to demonstrate his assertion that they will die in your climate.

You've hired for your office the accountant who's staked his career on proving no accurate books can be kept.

In electing Republicans, America, you put people in charge of institutions they overtly, caustically loathe and proudly proclaim should not exist. Good thinking, USA, and stellar results: Katrina, Iraq, Medicare D, trade and budget deficits, mine disasters and on and on and on and ...

Conservatives have declared officially for decades that they hate public programs and love private business. Why then, do Americans profess shock when these same people run the public credit card up to bunker-busting levels to line the pockets of friendly corporations, leaving taxpayers - current and the as-yet unborn - the bill? It's the dine and ditch mentality writ large, and American citizens are the unfortunate waiters having their lowly pay docked to cover the deadbeat loss - and their future grandchildren's pay docked as well.

We are witnessing an orchestrated, unprecedented transfer of public wealth to private pockets, a national one-party feeding frenzy that's making beggars and beseechers of us all, and yet many Americans stand around muttering in a daze of semi-apathetic befuddlement about gosh darn how did all this come to be and how sure as shit, uh-huh, those Republicans shore were right, government doesn't do a the little guy a damn bit of good, no sirree bob. Better drown it some more. Cut them taxes, privatize something, anything, pronto!

Kee-rist on a pogo stick.

If you put people in charge of running a project they are ideologically committed to proving a failure, it will fail.

Seems pretty straightforward to me. But hey, I'm a Democrat. You know, one of those people who think universal quality public education is a massive good to society, that maintaining our highways and levees and bridges and dams is part of what makes this country great, that paying first-responders and nurses what they're worth helps guarantee our public health and safety, that providing for fellow citizens who fall on hard times is not only the ethical thing to do, but the pragmatic one, ensuring that this country does not incubate a permanently inflamed and disgruntled underclass ready to drop a match on a pool of social gasoline.

Here's a thought - just a thought, mind you, beloved America: Perhaps it's time to return to government the party that has an ideological stake in making it ... you know ... succeed. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to raise our sights a wee bit and elect people who think public service is more than an opportunity for the "Biggest! Fire Sale! Ever!" for their friends and loved ones. Perhaps it's time to insist on greater - if not great - expectations from the employees we decide to hire or fire every two years to carry out our will under the constitution.

As one-party Republican rule has clearly shown, when you expect incompetence, corruption and deceit from your government, you get exactly what you vote for. In spades.
Enough said. But logic seldom works.

Posted by Alan at 18:54 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Saturday, 22 July 2006 18:58 PDT home

Friday, 21 July 2006
War Thoughts
Topic: Reality-Based Woes
War Thoughts
Friday, July 21, the week ended with the war between Hezbollah and Israel in its tenth day, with Israeli troops and tanks lining up to cross into southern Lebanon for the ground phase - cleaning out the tunnels and bunkers and getting at the stores of the fabulously inaccurate but deadly rockets that Hezbollah has been popping into northern Israel. The word is they have thirteen thousand of them and have only used about a thousand. Time to get the rest. On the other front - Israel fighting Hamas, the folks the Palestinians elected to represent them, to the south in Gaza - the day brought the news of Israeli forces shooting and killing a nurse tending one of the wounded in the streets. War is like that. Things happen. And this will not be over quickly. The day brought the news that our secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will finally go over there to chat with some of the folks involved, dropping in briefly on her way to an Asian summit. It's on the way, if you fly east.

But all day long the news was playing the clip of her saying that, unlike the UN and the Europeans and Russians and most everyone else, the United States will certainly not call for a ceasefire.

Our UN ambassador, John Bolton, had previously said such a thing was simple-minded and stupid - you cannot deal with a non-state terrorist organization as if it were a nation or anything. Who there has the authority to enter into a ceasefire agreement? Yeah, yeah, Hezbollah is part of the government of Lebanon, with seats in their parliament and a few cabinet ministries, but they aren't the official government, although, if you think about it, they might as well be. The nominal government is somewhere between feckless and useless, with a small army of seventy thousand, with maybe forty thousand deployable, with no modern equipment and no battlefield experience. Like they'll go stomp on Hezbollah, their fellow Shiites, for being so stupid and making so much trouble? Or they'll go up against Israel with its F-16's we sold them and the drones overhead and all the tanks and artillery? You actually might want to work with Hezbollah, as the only thing like a government there.

Rice's take on the matter was slightly different. Her position, and thus the position of the United States, is that there's no point in getting some sort of ceasefire agreement, as Hezbollah would just break it, and you need to break and humiliate Hezbollah, and disarm them, first. Then something can be worked out. Those weren't her exact words. But the idea is there should be no ceasefire that puts things back to where they were two weeks ago, or for the last ten years. The cease fire must be based on Hezbollah just going away. Hezbollah is not impressed. But then, we don't talk to them.

It's unclear who she will talk to when she drops in. There are the Israelis, the Saudis, and the Egyptians. When the Palestinians elected Hamas, in an election we insisted upon (that spreading democracy thing), we cut all communication with them and cut off all aid too. We don't deal with terrorists. That only makes them think they're legitimate. Similarly we don't speak with Hezbollah. We isolate terrorist organizations, and shun them, lest they think they're important and get all uppity. We long ago cut all diplomatic relations, and stopped all back-channel talks, with Syria and Iran, as they sponsor terrorism. So we punish them all by just ignoring them. That'll show them. Of course this means Rice could not help negotiate any ceasefire anyway. There are only the Israelis. That makes for a rather pointless conversation about terms and conditions. The Saudis and the Egyptians aren't even in the fight. The other players and their sponsors are probably saying, "What are we, chopped liver?" Well, probably not - too Jewish.

One commentator, Digby at Hullabaloo (becoming one of the most insightful writers on this madness), say this business always had "a certain kabuki element," explained this way -
In the past when these situations would flare up, Israel would take an aggressive action to demonstrate that it wasn't a pushover and the US would step in like a Dutch uncle and reluctantly pull the pissed off Israelis back. In a dangerous part of the world, these face-saving kabuki's can prevent things from hurtling out of control while allowing each side to stage a little bloodletting. It's an ugly, ugly business, but ultimately it has managed to help keep this volatile region from hurtling out of control. The "honest broker" thing may have always been phony, but sometimes a phony "honest broker" is all you need.
But we don't do that any more. We're, as he notes, "letting Israel off the leash to do some real damage" before we "step in."

But why? Things could easily spin out of control, or more out of control. A regional war would be messy, and the disruption in the oil markets devastating. And we aren't exactly winning hearts and minds, and building consensus with other nations, by saying a ceasefire would be wrong right now. What's the deal?

The Washington Post ran an article where they seem to think they found out what the real deal is. The president thinks he's really smarter than everyone else on all this, and more farsighted.

The core of the Post investigation (emphases added) -
When hostilities have broken out in the past, the usual U.S. response has been an immediate and public bout of diplomacy aimed at a cease-fire, in the hopes of ensuring that the crisis would not escalate. This week, however, even in the face of growing international demands, the White House has studiously avoided any hint of impatience with Israel. While making it plain it wants civilian casualties limited, the administration is also content to see the Israelis inflict the maximum damage possible on Hezbollah.

As the president's position is described by White House officials, Bush associates and outside Middle East experts, Bush believes that the status quo - the presence in a sovereign country of a militant group with missiles capable of hitting a U.S. ally - is unacceptable.

The U.S. position also reflects Bush's deepening belief that Israel is central to the broader campaign against terrorists and represents a shift away from a more traditional view that the United States plays an "honest broker's" role in the Middle East.

In the administration's view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq. Israel's crippling of Hezbollah, officials also hope, would complete the work of building a functioning democracy in Lebanon and send a strong message to the Syrian and Iranian backers of Hezbollah.

"The president believes that unless you address the root causes of the violence that has afflicted the Middle East, you cannot forge a lasting peace," said White House counselor Dan Bartlett. "He mourns the loss of every life. Yet out of this tragic development, he believes a moment of clarity has arrived."

One former senior administration official said Bush is only emboldened by the pressure from U.N. officials and European leaders to lead a call for a cease-fire. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan demanded yesterday that the fighting in Lebanon stop.

"He thinks he is playing in a longer-term game than the tacticians," said the former official, who spoke anonymously so he could discuss his views candidly. "The tacticians would say: 'Get an immediate cease-fire. Deal first with the humanitarian factors.' The president would say: 'You have an opportunity to really grind down Hezbollah. Let's take it, even if there are other serious consequences that will have to be managed.'"

Digby's comment - "They are now officially crazy."

No, the man simply believes things are going just fine in Iraq, where we have shown the terrorists and the religious nuts who's boss - we defanged them all. And Israel is doing the same thing in south Lebanon and Gaza. So you don't tamper with success. We're on a roll.

Yep, that's madness - all the facts are just wrong. This may be denial, a form of self-protection for the ego, or all the ambitious staffers making sure he hears what they know he wants to hear, or delusion. "Everyone else is wrong, and I'll show them." Maybe it's a personality thing - the insecure bully showing off. It doesn't really matter one way or the other. He's the decider, and the decisions have been made, including this one - "The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said U.S. ideas for ending the Middle East conflict are still evolving but Washington does intend to contribute humanitarian aid to Lebanese people displaced by fighting between Israel and the militant Islamic group Hezbollah."

We're on a roll. Why bother?

Some foreign policy, but maybe it's not Bush. Digby thinks it's all Cheney - "I won't bother with Junior - he's a foreign policy ventriloquist dummy."

And Dick is mad as a hatter. The pointer is to Frances Fitzgerald in the New York Review of Books here -

In "A World Transformed," the memoir that he and Bush senior published in 1998, [Brent] Scowcroft makes it clear that while all Bush senior's top advisers had different perspectives, the fundamental division lay between Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and everyone else. By his account, and by those of others in the administration, Cheney never trusted Gorbachev. In 1989 Cheney maintained that Gorbachev's reforms were largely cosmetic and that, rather than engage with the Soviet leader, the US should stand firm and keep up cold war pressures.

In September 1991 Cheney argued that the administration should take measures to speed the breakup of the Soviet Union - even at the risk of encouraging violence and incurring long-term Russian hostility. He opposed the idea, which originated with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, that the US should withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and South Korea. As a part of the preparations for the Gulf War he asked Powell for a study on how small nuclear weapons might be used against Iraqi troops in the desert.
So we get this conclusion from Digby -
This is the person who is playing a longer game than the tacticians, not Little Bushie. And he is playing a long game. His shark-like, relentless, predatory concentration on achieving long held goals no matter what the current circumstances is quite awesome to behold. The problem is that he's nuts.
Maybe so, but he's not the only enabler here.

There's the new Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte - the man who administered our death squads in Nicaragua and such, later our ambassador to the UN, and then to the new Iraq. It seems he likes to keep the boss happy, and we see here that he has told the CIA not to do any National Intelligence Estimates any longer. There's too much risk things will be leaked, and the last one, in 2004, was "too negative." When that got leaked the president had to say publicly it was just opinion, and he wasn't paying much attention to it. It's supposed to be the best assessment at the world situation and what could be a bother soon.

Yeah and a new one might be a bit uncomfortable, as things get real nasty in Iraq -
"What do you call the situation in Iraq right now?" asked one person familiar with the situation. "The analysts know that it's a civil war, but there's a feeling at the top that [using that term] will complicate matters." Negroponte, said another source regarding the potential impact of a pessimistic assessment, "doesn't want the president to have to deal with that."
What is there to say? Is it best he doesn't know? Tell him things are going fine, and the media is filled with people what hate him (except for Fox News) and are lying, and who hate America. Let him work with that and things will be fine.

Whether the leader of the free world should be protected from bad news, so he can retain his optimism and strong convictions, is an interesting question. When a leader is misinformed does he make better decisions? That is both an interesting management theory and model for government.

And the upcoming meeting where Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq meeting with the president in the Whit House could be more than awkward, as everyone seems to be pointing to what Reuters reports here -
Iraqi leaders have all but given up on holding the country together and, just two months after forming a national unity government, talk in private of "black days" of civil war ahead.

Signaling a dramatic abandonment of the U.S.-backed project for Iraq, there is even talk among them of pre-empting the worst bloodshed by agreeing to an east-west division of Baghdad into Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim zones, senior officials told Reuters.

Tens of thousands have already fled homes on either side.

"Iraq as a political project is finished," one senior government official said - anonymously because the coalition under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki remains committed in public to the U.S.-sponsored constitution that preserves Iraq's unity.

One highly placed source even spoke of busying himself on government projects, despite a sense of their futility, only as a way to fight his growing depression over his nation's future.

"The parties have moved to Plan B," the senior official said, saying Sunni, ethnic Kurdish and majority Shi'ite blocs were looking at ways to divide power and resources and to solve the conundrum of Baghdad's mixed population of seven million.

"There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into east and west," he said. "We are extremely worried."

On the eve of the first meeting of a National Reconciliation Commission and before Maliki meets President George W. Bush in Washington next week, other senior politicians also said they were close to giving up on hopes of preserving the 80-year-old, multi-ethnic, religiously mixed state in its present form.

"The situation is terrifying and black," said Rida Jawad al -Takki, a senior member of parliament from Maliki's dominant Shi'ite Alliance bloc, and one of the few officials from all the main factions willing to speak publicly on the issue.

"We have received information of a plan to divide Baghdad. The government is incapable of solving the situation," he said.

As sectarian violence has mounted to claim perhaps 100 lives a day and tens of thousands flee their homes, a senior official from the once dominant Sunni minority concurred: "Everyone knows the situation is very bad," he said. "I'm not optimistic."
Nuri al-Maliki will tell him things are fine. You don't upset the boss. If Iraq as a political project is finished, the he'll deal with that later, "if there are other serious consequences that will have to be managed."

And who needs another comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate from the CIA? Other presidents, even his father, would have demanded one - just to know what we're dealing with. This one knows in his gut knows how things are, just as he looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw his good soul, and dismisses all the negative stuff that messes up your head. Cool. And scary.

But people seem to love this approach. After a long discussion of Vice President Cheney telling a campaign crowd, Friday, July 21, that everything we do shows the administration is serious about keeping us safe, and making the right assessments of threats, and the right decisions - and saying the fall elections should be about how right and strong the Republicans are, and the only issue should be "national security" - this Digby fellow says this -
... remember, the Republicans are counting on thirty years of rightwing propaganda to get them over the line again. They expect that many voters will simply fall back into their comfortable understanding of the two parties: the Republicans are tough men who can handle national security and the Democrats are sensitive women who will help you when you need help (if you're a pathetic loser who actually needs help that is.) The Fighters and the Lovers. This is the paradigm under which we've lived for many years and people find it very disconcerting to be asked to relinquish such reflexive internalized beliefs - no matter what they see before them.

I do not know that they can pull it off one more time. We may have finally reached a tipping point. But I'm not counting any chickens.
No one is. There's always something compelling about the strong-willed fellow who says what you see is not actually what you see at all, and the world is not at all what is seems, but much better - so get rid of those negative thoughts and ignore the so-called reality. It'll only bring you down. There's another reality.

That sort of things sells a whole lot of self-help books, and gizmos on the infomercials, and diet-plans. Americans eat it up. We're an optimistic people. And "life is not what is seems" packs the Contemporary Christian churches and drives the forces saying science - Darwin and all that global warming stuff - is just facts, not reality. We're not skinny, bitter, sissy Frenchmen sitting in some left bank café or bistro, smoking odd cigarettes and sipping bad coffee, thinking about reality and what is coherent and valid. This is the new world. That coherent and valid stuff is for losers.

And that may work in November, one more time. War will be perpetual. How else do you make things better?

Posted by Alan at 23:01 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 21 July 2006 23:04 PDT home

Thursday, 20 July 2006
Learning from Experience
Topic: Reality-Based Woes
Learning from Experience
Three years and five months ago, February 2003, the president delivered a speech to the American Enterprise Institute (transcript here), explaining how the war in Iraq was going to "begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace" by "bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions." So how's that going? (He also said that Saddam Hussein was "building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world," but let that pass - he needed people to feel this was important, and that would do the trick.)

But what he said about how shaking things up dramatically with a war to overthrow a nasty government would result in - when what was shaken and turned inside out and utterly rearranged in the Middle East fell back to earth - a new and better and amazingly good thing, and a far better world, seems to have been a gamble that didn't exactly pan out. The whole idea seemed to be that stability - achieved over the long years by lots of talk and compromise and ignoring some awful stuff for some practical convenience and grudging peace (traditional diplomacy) - was just crap. You needed to do something startling and spectacular to make real progress in this sorry world, to really change things.

That's an interesting theory of what this country should really be doing - change the world and eliminate evil everywhere and spread our way of doing things ("best practices" and all that) around the globe and so on. Yeah, no one asked us to do any of that, but you have to assume, for some reason that's rather obscure, that's what we're supposed to be doing, and anyway, all of that will keep us safe and is in our national interest. That was the idea. So the goal seemed to be to save the world, to transform it, because after we broke all the old patterns and ways of thinking, the new patterns and ways of thinking would be good for us, and good for everyone.

Well, Iraq was shattered and now it's so bad there, and not falling into a new pattern, that bright shiny new secular democracy, you get this - Gil Gutknecht, a Republican congressman from Minnesota, who last month was admonishing the House to "give victory a chance" in Iraq and not "go wobbly," took a field trip to Baghdad. He says it was "worse than I expected" and it's time to bring the troops home. "We learned it's not safe to go anywhere outside of the Green Zone any part of the day." No kidding. Well, he hadn't trusted the press, just the administration. He says he seems to have been receiving faulty "spin" - claims that the violence in Iraq was being caused by just a few hundred insurgents. "All of the information we receive sometimes from the Pentagon and the State Department isn't always true." Oh. Really? It's almost comic. The idea that congress checks up on the executive branch to see how they're doing in faithfully executing the laws passed and wisely using the funds allocated hadn't occurred to him. He's learning on the job. We'll see how saying he was keeping himself uninformed, was a gullible follower, and actually not really doing his job, plays out in his reelection bid. Too bad about all the dead people - ours, theirs, and the civilians in the middle.

And since the congressmen had his epiphany, it just gets more dismal, as on Thursday, July 20, there was more.

There was this -
Bombings and shootings soared by 40 percent in the Baghdad area in the past week, the U.S. military said Thursday. An American general said extremists were preparing "an all-out assault" on the capital in a decisive battle for the future of Iraq

... U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said there had been an average of 34 attacks a day involving U.S. and Iraqi forces in and around the capital since Friday - up sharply from the daily average of 24 registered between June 14 and July 13.

"We have not witnessed the reduction in violence one would have hoped for in a perfect world," Caldwell told reporters. "The only way we're going to be successful in Baghdad is to get the weapons off the streets."

Caldwell said insurgents were streaming into the capital for "an all-out assault against the Baghdad area."
Say, how often does one get what one would have hoped for in a perfect world? Just a thought... Think what Samuel Johnson said about the triumph of hope over experience - he mocked it.

And there was this - "Tens of thousands more Iraqis have fled their homes as sectarian violence looks ever more like civil war two months after a U.S.-backed national unity government was formed, official data showed on Thursday." The data showed a hundred Iraqis die each day, and six thousand in the last two months. Anyone would get out fast. The relatives get the kids someplace safe when mom, a translator for the Americans, gets grabbed off the streets, raped, has holes drilled in her head, then is shot, and her body is dumped in the street (see this on July 18). No point in hanging around.

And Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas are at war and have been for a week - and now Israel hints at full-scale Lebanon attack - and, yes, they rolled in once before and stayed eighteen years. That didn't work out well, so this may be a bit more temporary. But Beirut is under siege. And we're blocking all attempts at any cease fire.

And the same time our troops are under attack from Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan (here) - but didn't we wipe them out? And the president keeps warning that Syria is trying to reassert control over Lebanon and Iran is hoping that the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel will mean everyone forgets about its nuclear plans. And now Turkey is sending signals that it's ready to send troops into Iraq to fight Turkish Kurdish guerrillas there (see this).

Bill Montgomery links to even more such stories and see it all like this -
Let's see. We've got: Israeli Jews fighting Lebanese Shi'a and Palestinian Sunnis; Palestinian Fatah militants who've stopped fighting Hamas militants, but only because they're both fighting the Israelis; Saudi Sunni fundamentalists issuing fatwas against Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Egyptian Sunni fundamentalists backing those same Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Iraqi Sunnis killing Iraqi Shi'a and vice versa; Iraqi Shi'a (the Mahdi Army) jousting with Iraqi Shi'a (the Badr Brigade); Iraqi Kurds trying to push Sunni Arabs and both Sunni and Shi'a Turkomen out of Kirkuk; Turks threatening to invade Kurdistan; Iranians allegedly shelling Kurdistan, Syrian Kurds rebelling against Syrian Allawites who are despised by Syria's Sunni majority but allied with the Lebanese Shi'a who are hated and feared by the House of Saud and its Sunni fundamentalist minions. Oh, and American and Israeli neocons threatening to bomb both Syria and Iran.
That's about it. So begins begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace. Maybe the "shake everything up and see what happens" approach was a bad idea. But it all could have worked out. It just didn't. Bummer.

Ah well, live and learn.

And the curious thing is that the White House has a "Director of Lessons Learned." Really, they do. Mid-month they released a list of White House employees and their salaries, and pay increases - required by law as congress is supposed to know how the money appropriated is being spent. That led to this speech by congressman Rahm Emanuel on the House floor -
Mr. Speaker, yesterday the President said we continue to be wise about how we spend the people's money.

Then why are we paying over $100,000 for a "White House Director of Lessons Learned?"

Maybe I can save the taxpayers $100,000 by running through a few of the lessons this White House should have learned by now.

Lesson 1: When the Army Chief of Staff and the Secretary of State say you are going to war without enough troops, you're going to war without enough troops.

Lesson 2: When 8.8 billion dollars of reconstruction funding disappears from Iraq, and 2 billion dollars disappears from Katrina relief, it's time to demand a little accountability.

Lesson 3: When you've "turned the corner" in Iraq more times than Danica Patrick at the Indy 500, it means you are going in circles.

Lesson 4: When the national weather service tells you a category 5 hurricane is heading for New Orleans, a category 5 hurricane is heading to New Orleans.

I would also ask the President why we're paying for two "Ethics Advisors" and a "Director of Fact Checking."

They must be the only people in Washington who get more vacation time than the President.

Maybe the White House could consolidate these positions into a Director of Irony.
No, that wouldn't work. The president doesn't understand irony. It puzzles him, or makes him angry.

Meanwhile, back at the American Enterprise Institute, it seems the neoconservative who have shaped everything we've done don't do irony either, as the Washington Post here, quoting Danielle Pletka, their "Vice President For Foreign And Defense Policy Studies" - she doesn't know anyone who is "not beside themselves with fury at the administration" given the way things are going. They have issues - "Conservatives complain that the United States is hunkered down in Iraq without enough troops or a strategy to crush the insurgency. They see autocrats in Egypt and Russia cracking down on dissenters with scant comment from Washington, North Korea firing missiles without consequence, and Iran playing for time to develop nuclear weapons while the Bush administration engages in fruitless diplomacy with European allies. They believe that a perception that the administration is weak and without options is emboldening Syria and Iran and the Hezbollah radicals they help sponsor in Lebanon."

We need to be strong and kick ass - if all who oppose us are defeated and humiliated and seething with resentment but unable to do anything, and we keep reminding them of that, then we'll be safe. No, that can't be right. But that is the thinking. They have no Director of Lessons Learned, or so it seems.

Tim Grieve here -
Why are Iran and North Korea able to do what they want with little fear of serious repercussions? Why might Syria and Iran and Hezbollah think the administration is weak and without options for stopping them? It gets back to the beginning of all of that, the part about those U.S. troops "hunkered down" in Iraq. They're there, of course, because Bush sent them there - and because people at places like the American Enterprise Institute applauded so enthusiastically when he told them what they'd been telling him: Invade Iraq, and we'll transform the Middle East. Invade Iraq, and we'll make the world a safer place.

Are they chastened by the experience? Wiser for the knowledge that the deaths of 2,544 Americans and more than 50,000 Iraqis have bought? It doesn't look that way. This morning on Fox News, neocon pundit Bill Kristol said that the United States has to be ready to use military force against Iran. "Think what this crisis would be like given what we now know about the Islamic Republic of Iran, its regime, its recklessness, its close, close ties to terrorist groups," Kristol said. "Think what the world would be like with an Iran with nuclear weapons."

It sounded like satire, only Kristol was dead serious - even as he delivered the greeted-as-liberators punch line: The Iranian people "dislike their regime," he said, and they might just welcome "the right use of targeted military force."
He wasn't laughed off the set. It was Fox News. He's a brilliant man, and a fine writer. He's a slow learner. Those of us who have done project management and remember all that stuff about "lessons learned" and "best practices" may wonder if the Project for the New American Century could use a real project manager, with the PMI certificate and all. The idea is to learn from experience.

Maybe the refusal to learn from experience isn't a lack project management skills, but just a psychological limitation, as in this -
The current squawking also strikes me as a useful reminder of how very, very important war is in the neoconservative vision. It is as central to that vision as peace is to the classical liberal vision ... Who we're fighting is secondary. That we're fighting is the main thing. To be a neoconservative is to thrill to the sound of gunfire.
Well, they do love war, and shaking everything up, scorning stability and working things out. It must be the thrill of gunfire - makes you think big things are happening. And they are. They're just not good things.

So you set aside what happened, and shrug at the idea of learning from experience. That only takes the thrill away, and messes up the theory of how things should be.

Of course that's kind of the opposite of how science works, but that too is overrated, as the president made clear when, as promised, he vetoed legislation that would have expanded federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. It was very the first veto of his presidency, but there was no ceremony, and press photographers were barred from the event (noted here). Seventy-two percent of the population favors this research, and the Democrats would love to have photos of the president vetoing thing for their campaign ads this fall. But the White House Press Secretary, Tony Snow, late of Fox News, said that wasn't it at all. Photographers weren't allowed in because the president "doesn't feel it's appropriate," Snow said. "He's signing a veto."

So this puts him at odds with almost all scientists and most Americans, including some in his own Republican Party, but "It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect so I vetoed it." And there aren't enough votes to override the veto.

Anger from the left, Oliver Willis here -
The pathetic excuse for a president uses his constitutional powers to do the bidding of the extremist "religious" right and issues a veto of the stem cell bill, consigning many Americans to pain and death. But hey, the conservative mullahs wanted it done, so whaddya gonna do?

There are two uses for these cells:

1. Throw them away down the drain

2. Use them to save possibly hundreds of thousands of human lives

The president and the con movement has chosen the latter, simply to boost their own inflated egos.
No, not at all, as Andrew Sullivan, notes here -
I feel obliged to come to the president's defense on his embryonic stem cell research veto. I find the absolutism of those who view a blastocyst as a human person to be morally unpersuasive, but I cannot see how it can be seen as anything other than human life. I know also that many of these superfluous blastocysts and embryos will be discarded anyway and so not using them for research does not protect them from extinction. Nevertheless, it is hard not to be troubled by the line this crosses. Human life is created and then experimented on to save other human lives. I think the argument for the benefits of such research is compelling; there's little doubt that this avenue could be extremely fruitful. I live with one of the diseases, HIV, it might help cure or treat. For those reasons, I don't believe such research should be banned - or even that individual states shouldn't, if their citizens support it, directly finance such research from the public purse. I'm a federalist. But when a very significant number of Americans feel deeply that this really is morally unconscionable, and when the research is taking place anyway under other auspices, I see no reason why the feds should actively finance this research as well. I don't think that Bush's compromise is so unreasonable, in other words. This isn't a ban on such research; it's a decision not to throw the weight of federal financing behind it. I respect the case of those who favor it; but, when push comes to shove, I'm with Bush on this. It took political courage to take this stand. And the morality it reflects - a refusal to treat human life as a means rather than as an end - deserves respect even from its opponents.
Of course you could argue, and may have, that the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those to come in Syria and Iran, are treating human life as a means rather than as an end, a geopolitical and political end, writ large.

And even then, Sullivan may be wrong, as one of his readers from San Francisco points out here -
What you don't understand is that when a researcher conducts research, he is often involved with many projects. Therefore it is likely that one who would engage in embryonic stem cell research, funded by a state or private organization, will also be participating in research funded by federal agencies such as the NIH. The problem with this ban means that none of the researchers implements funded with federal money can ever be involved/associated with research funded by other means. This includes the lab space, every beaker, piece of paper, pencil, etc.! This is not practical in the slightest. That means that a researcher, say here at UCSF, who wants to tap into the money allocated by the state of California for stem cell research, would have to have a completely different facility whereby NOTHING funded with federal dollars can enter, and that likely includes the researcher himself. In academic medicine this is impossible.
Too bad. It's done. The living will die so the blastocysts might live, or remain frozen, or be thrown out in the medical waste. The theory wins, or the principle. It's just that the principle here looks more like a political calculation. The man isn't big on science (see global warming), and he has always been more than willing, from his days as governor of Texas to these wars now, to makes sure others die. He just doesn't seem like a "life is sacred" kind of guy. Maybe he's just sentimental.

Not to say he doesn't learn. After five years of icy separation, he finally addressed the NAACP [the writer is a member so this may be biased]. This is a first for him. And he was showing he may have learned something after all, as in this -
"I understand that racism still lingers in America," Bush told the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "It's a lot easier to change a law than to change a human heart. And I understand that many African-Americans distrust my political party."

That line generated boisterous applause and cheers from the thousands in the audience, which generally gave the president a polite, reserved reception.
No kidding. The Republican Southern Strategy since Nixon has been to get the white vote in the south LBJ threw away by backing all that civil rights stuff in the sixties. The party made its bones on the race issue.

But he was slick, as John Dickerson explains here -
Condi Rice hasn't left for the Middle East yet, perhaps because the president wanted to send her into combat here at home. Today the secretary of state joined George Bush for his first presidential visit to the NAACP. Rice received no special announcement when she arrived, and she didn't have to say a word, but when she preceded Bush into the vast ballroom, she got a standing ovation. "I knew he was bringing her," said one woman as she applauded. "That's his confidence blanket."

Bush was braced for a tough reception from the audience of a thousand or so at the Washington Convention Center. In 2004, the president described his relationship with the nearly 100-year-old civil rights organization as "non-existent." Openly hostile would have been a more accurate characterization. During the 2000 presidential race, the organization ran a television ad against Bush featuring the daughter of James Byrd, a black man dragged to death by three white men in a pickup, blaming Bush for refusing her pleas for a hate-crime law when he was governor. Julian Bond, the NAACP chairman who sat behind Bush on the stage, once accused him of appeasing the "wretched appetites of the extreme right wing" and picking "Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection." Before he stepped to the podium, Bush took the kind of consuming deep breath David Blaine does before an underwater stunt.

White men generally behave in one of two ways when they are anxious to connect with African Americans: They're excessively solicitous or self-consciously chummy. The first produces an unending smile. The second produces expressions like: How is it hanging, my African brother? When Bush shook Bond's hand with the sweeping theatricality of friends meeting to play a pickup game of basketball, I thought we were in for an uncomfortable morning, but Bush put away the awkwardness. Instead he was relaxed, and immediately addressed the tension in the room. Speaking about NAACP President Bruce S. Gordon's introduction, Bush said: "I thought he was going to say, 'It's about time you showed up.' "

Bush kept at it, describing the country's history for the audience in a way that would drive conservative talk-radio hosts to their prescription medications if a Democrat did it. Slavery placed a "stain on America's founding, a stain that we have not yet wiped clean," said Bush, before going on to compare African slaves to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. "Too often [people] ignore another group of founders - men and women and children who did not come to America of their free will, but in chains. These founders literally helped build our country."
Yipes! What's going on here?

What's going on is the Republicans need votes. It looks bad this year. He's learning. And later in the day the Senate confirmed what the House had done the week before, and voted to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act, unchanged, the same legislation that drove half the south into the Republican Party back then. Various southern senators had put up a fuss, saying things were better now and they were still being punished, and the "damned dirty Mexicans everywhere" senators had wanted mandatory English-only ballots put in, but votes are votes. The right will forgive the president's NAACP comments, and congress renews the voting rights act. Votes are votes. You learn.

Sometimes, not always, experience is a good teacher.

Posted by Alan at 23:32 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 21 July 2006 06:39 PDT home

Wednesday, 19 July 2006
Our Man in Paris: The Heat Wave
Topic: World View
The Heat Wave
Cole Porter may love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles, but it can be unbearable. Our Man in Paris, Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis, sends us the status midweek, with photos.
Paris - Wednesday, July 19 -

I don't know how things are in Hollywood today, but here the thermometers are popping their gaskets. The breeze - there is one - feels like it is full of fine sand from the Sahara. So appropriate for the beginning of "Paris-Plages" tomorrow.

Captured, Matt z'Art standing under the famous pharmacy thermometer, convinced that it gets its temperatures from Yahoo France because that is what he has on his Internet radio. He can look out the window and see if the sign is right. While standing there the temp hopped up another half degree, to blood temperature. Cool, eh?

alt="Paris

 

 


























The previous afternoon, 15h00 [3:00 pm], in the 14th arrondissement -

Paris heat wave - pharmacy thermometer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Fahrenheit to Celsius converter says 37 Celsius in the first photo is 98.6 Fahrenheit. And Ric has much more to say about all this here.

Out here? At three in the afternoon on the 19th it was 104 at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Ventura Boulevard, over the hill in Studio City. That's what the thermometer on the bank said anyway. That would be 40 Celsius.

Wednesday, July 19, USA Today says Europeans Struggle to Keep Cool in Heat Wave.

A few paragraphs on France -

In France, several days of dry heat and high temperatures - which reached 97 degrees in Paris on Wednesday and 102 degrees in Bordeaux a day earlier - recalled a heat wave in 2003, when 15,000 people died from dehydration and heat-related disorders. Many were elderly and were in some cases left alone while families vacationed. Since then, France's government has adopted measures to avoid a repeat of the disaster. On Wednesday, French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin visited a retirement home to check on the prevention plan.

In Paris, heat-busters included four giant humidifiers placed around the Eiffel Tower, one at each foot, that sprayed passersby with water vapor as they tried to escape the sun's punishing rays.
And some news nuggets from London -
At the historic Royal Courts of Justice, judges were allowed to remove their traditional wigs for court proceedings. One of Britain's largest trade union federations, the Trades Union Congress, issued a statement urging people to wear shorts to work.

And in a rare move, the two-hour shifts of the royal guards who stand outside Buckingham Palace were reduced to one hour at the beginning of the week in preparation for the heat, said the London headquarters spokesman, Col. David Sievwright.

At the Colchester Zoo, zookeepers gave lions ice blocks flavored with blood, and monkeys got blocks containing fruit.

But the heat failed to dash one of Queen Elizabeth II's annual garden parties. Nearly 8,000 people lined up to enter Buckingham Palace.

Did they serve ice blocks flavored with blood?

A screen capture at 6:30 in the evening, Wednesday, July 19, 2006 in Hollywood, 9:30 in New York, and 3:30 in the morning in Paris -

Weather forecast - LA, NYC, Paris

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Global warming, or just summer?

Paris photos and text, copyright © 2006 - Ric Erickson, MetropoleParis


Posted by Alan at 19:04 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 19 July 2006 20:16 PDT home

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