confused

I've been reading the Salon review of The Hours and I guess I'm just not the creative vision type, because I'm not really following the process by which you can be making a movie about this woman





and have this woman actually in the movie






and yet give the part to this woman



with, for some odd reason, a sausage on her face.



I don't have any reason to think she isn't good in the part, I just don't see how she got it.

and they voted for the guy who appointed me, so how smart could they be?

N.Y. Fires Agency Head For Calling People 'Stupid'

NEW YORK -- The city fired the head of its customer service office after he admitted calling New Yorkers "whining" and "stupid" in an essay on the Internet.

"I take painkillers, sleep a lot and think about killing every citizen and employee of New York City every minute I'm awake," Fletcher Vredenburgh, the former director of the Mayor's Action Center, wrote in an essay on the "FightLikeApes" Web site.

Vredenburgh told the New York Post for yesterday's editions that he had written the unsigned essay for friends soon after he was appointed as head of the center, which handles New Yorkers' complaints about City Hall.

Vredenburgh, 36, was hired in the summer of 2001. Vredenburgh said in the essay that he was responsible for handling complaints from "griping, often whining, often stupid New Yorkers."

Sadly, this is what eight or nine years of political appointments and the marginalizing of the civil service will do for a process and/or an organization.

America's Mayor, ladies and gentlemen. If you order now, we will throw in shipping.

a thought from the Washington Post editorial board

serving notice upon national Democrats as to the tack their coverage is going to take

PERHAPS SEN. JOHN EDWARDS (D-N.C.) was right when he argued last week that with their emerging battle plan for the next campaign, the Democratic contenders for president were merely amplifying what every American knows: "Washington is not doing enough to make America safe." The official alerts, after all, have not lost their cryptic character. Take the one last month: An FBI memo announced that al Qaeda wants to target "aviation, petroleum, and nuclear sectors as well as significant national landmarks." It added that we should be especially vigilant over the holidays. Frightening -- and yet so obvious as to be basically useless. The memo did not make most front pages, and there were no follow-up stories about people canceling Christmas travel plans -- signs that the alerts seem to be losing their edge.

And yet, turning the nation's vulnerability into talking points for the next campaign seems exactly the wrong way to go. Already the issue feels too politicized, as if the most practical use of the warnings is to provide political cover for the administration should disaster strike. In a country facing the threat of catastrophic terrorism, defense should be a common endeavor.

Got that? Bush is doing a piss-poor job of protecting us, and he's using the safety issue in a grossly dishonest and political way, but it would be Really Bad if you, like, discuss it during the next election when the people are supposed to be hearing why he should or shouldn't keep his job.

We decide, we report.

it's that word "net"

The Bush administration yesterday issued new guidelines to try to halt the massive loss of the nation's wetlands to roads, housing and commercial development and to quell criticism that previous proposals were far too lenient on developers.

Officials of the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the multiyear strategy and a new guidance letter that specifies the steps developers may take to replace or restore destroyed wetlands would strengthen the government's efforts to hold the line against future net losses of marshes, swamps and bogs...

...Julie Sibbing, a wetlands expert for the National Wildlife Federation, described the new guidelines as "a marginal improvement over last year's" but warned that they would do little to stem the loss of valuable wetlands.

"It seems to me they just haven't gotten the message yet that 80 percent of these wetlands restoration efforts are failures," she said. "They're just relying on the faith-based approach that this will all work out, when we've seen that it doesn't."

Tens of thousands of acres of wetlands across the country are lost to development each year. Wetlands -- including streams, bogs and seasonally flooded farmland -- provide important habitat for wildlife as well as flood protection and water purification for people.

The Clean Water Act prohibits developers, home builders and others from filling in wetlands unless the Corps of Engineers grants a permit. In those cases, the permit holder must either restore the wetlands or create a replacement to compensate for damage done.

Under the new regulations and a 17-point National Wetlands Mitigation Action Plan developed by the administration, the underlying needs of a watershed will be given more emphasis than the conventional focus on any net loss of acreage, according to EPA spokesman Joe Martyak.

k?

You can destroy as much habitat as you want, as long as you can get a Corps of Engineers manager (remember them? they're the ones who unilaterally threw out the acreage maintenance guideline as soon as the current President got into office) to sign off on it, and as long as you create something which can be defined under the current loose standards as a "wetlands" on a roughly equivalent number of acres somewhere else.

You aren't required to maintain it, of course, it needn't necessarily be unpolluted, and the wildlife is already dead and won't be coming back, but the numbers look real good.

Go figure Christie announced this on a Friday.

Class Warfare and its discontents

Bush Aides Rethink Politics of Tax Cuts
Lower Levy on Dividends Gains Favor Over Faster Upper-Income Rate Drop

By [oh, come on, guess]
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 28, 2002; Page A04

CRAWFORD, Tex., Dec. 27 -- White House officials are rethinking a plan to accelerate last year's tax cut for upper-income taxpayers, people familiar with the deliberations said today.

Aides to President Bush had favored a plan to accelerate by a year cuts in income tax rates scheduled to take effect in 2004. But Bush's political advisers, concerned that Democrats will use a class-warfare argument to fight an accelerated reduction in the top rate, have suggested dropping that plan, instead emphasizing a cut in taxes on stock dividends.

When Congress returns next month, the White House is expected to propose a $300 billion economic stimulus package that includes cuts in dividend taxation, the accelerated income tax cuts, and more generous incentives for business investment.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the administration is "likely" to drop the idea of accelerating the cut in the top rate, which is 38.6 percent, for incomes over $311,950. Here in Crawford, where Bush is taking a holiday vacation, spokesman Scott McClellan said the White House has not reached a decision on the ingredients in the stimulus package.

But while Bush's economic advisers have argued that the top tax rate reduction is an important economic stimulus, political advisers have argued that it may be more fruitful to put Bush's clout behind a new form of tax cuts such as dividend tax cuts.

Economist Daniel J. Mitchell of the conservative Heritage Foundation said he thinks Bush's political advisers are worried that Democrats will portray the Bush as favoring the well off. "There is a general concern that you should get the most bang for the buck if you're going to engage the class warfare criticism," he said, "and their thinking is we're already getting the rate cuts if we wait a year, so why not go for dividend tax cuts?"

The willingness to drop the expedited rate cut for the wealthiest taxpayers as part of the stimulus package aggravates some economic conservatives. "There will be a very negative reaction from free-market conservatives if rates are cut but not the highest rate," said Stephen Moore, who leads the anti-tax Club for Growth. Without the top-rate cut, "I don't think it would have any stimulative effect," he added. "That would be a surrender to class warfare."

So all the viewpoints on this are represented, which is important.

If you folks don't remember the Club for Growth, they're most of them connected to the Wall Street Journal and they fund primary races against incumbent Republicans who they perceive as being insufficiently hawkish on poor people.

I really can't add anything to the substance. If Dana had a scrap of irony in his arsenal he'd be a wickedly funny man.

I have to think that this is an area where you'd pretty much bow to T.S. Eliot's expertise

LONDON - In his lifetime the poet and pamphleteer John Milton was called many things: divinely inspired, blasphemous, a Puritan, a libertine, a flatterer, a propagandist and a revolutionary.

Over the centuries since his death, in 1674, the poet who sought, in "Paradise Lost," to "justifie the wayes of God to men" has been recruited to causes ranging from atheism to orthodoxy. The author of "Areopagetica" has also been praised as a defender of free speech and damned as a male chauvinist who oppressed his wives and exploited his daughters. As T. S. Eliot observed, "Of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry."

Since September, however, the pages of a venerable British literary journal have rung with a new charge: that Milton's verse play "Samson Agonistes" is "an incitement to terrorism" and that its hero, the blind Israelite champion, who pulled down the pillars of the Philistines' temple, killing himself along with thousands of citizens, "is, in effect, a suicide bomber."

The President, of course, knows better than most how little academic achievement really means

More Schools Rely on Tests, but Study Raises Doubts
By GREG WINTER

Rigorous testing that decides whether students graduate, teachers win bonuses and schools are shuttered, an approach already in place in more than half the nation, does little to improve achievement and may actually worsen academic performance and dropout rates, according to the largest study ever on the issue.

With calls for accountability in public education mounting, such make-or-break exams have become cornerstones in at least 28 states in the drive to improve public schools. The idea is that by tying test scores to great consequences, the learning process will be taken that much more seriously and tangible progress will be all the more likely.

The approach is also central to some of President Bush's sweeping education overhaul, lending even greater momentum to the movement known as "high stakes" testing.

But the study, performed by researchers at Arizona State University and financed by teachers' unions that have expressed skepticism about such tests, found that while students show consistent improvement on these state exams, the opposite is typically true of their performance on other, independent measures of academic achievement.

For example, after adopting such exams, twice as many states slipped against the national average on the SAT and the ACT as gained on it. The same held true for elementary-school math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an exam overseen by the United States Department of Education.

a new twist

From: Mr.Daniel Osondu
Fax: Number +23417597019

Dear Sir,

I am writing this proposal hoping that you would be of assistance in this business of mutual benefit. My name is Daniel Osondu an auditor at one of the Banks in lagos-Nigeria.

During our last audit exercise,some amount of money totalling $18.5Million was discovered and traced to be owned by one late Engineer Manfred Becker, a foreigner who died in a crash. The source of this fund was further traced to be a contract payment made to him but has remained unclaimed till now.Since his death, nobody has shown up to claim this fund and this attracted our curiosity.

I therefore made a research and found out that he did not leave any next of kin in his confidential document with the Ministry that he executed the contract for and also with our Bank. A panel setup by the Federal Government on recovery of funds expects that this fund should be unquestionably claimed by any of his available foreign next of kin or alternatively the fund should be donated for arms and ammunition at a military war college here in Nigeria. Fervent valuable efforts were made by the Panel to get in touch with any of the family or relatives but all have proved to no avail.

It is because of the perceived possibility of not going to be able to locate any next of kin ( he had no wife and children) that the panel under the influence of our chairman, Rtd Major General Thomas Danababa , that arrangement is being made for the fund to be declared UNCLAIMABLED and then be donated to the Trust Fund for arms and ammunition which will further enhance the perpetration of war in Africa and the third world in general. To forestall this move, my colleagues and I have taken it upon ourselves to source for a foreign partner who could assist in claimimg this fund for further transfer abroad.

If you don't steal this money (what exactly would a german engineer have to do in Lagos, Nigeria to earn an $18.5 million contract settlement?) the terrorists win.

Wonder if they link to blogs?

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 - The Web site of a North Carolina county Republican organization today removed a link to another site with anti-Islamic statements after receiving criticism from a Muslim group.

The Guilford County Republican Party's site, guilfordgop.org, includes the usual color photographs of Senator-elect Elizabeth Dole and President Bush, and election information and meeting schedules. But among its links was one to a site called IslamExposed.com, which describes Islam as "one of the greatest evils on our planet."

"This false religion is nothing more than a barbaric occult invented by savages for savages," the site said.

It was not clear who had created the IslamExposed site. It has a link to another site discussing atheism, as well as an advertisement for a site called ChristianityExposed.

On Thursday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations urged its members and other Muslims to ask the Guilford County Republicans to remove the link. Today, the county organization, based in Greensboro, N.C., complied and posted an apology.

"We have received a few e-mails from Muslims who indicate that this material misrepresents their religion," the party wrote on its page. "We apologize for the link to this Web site and have instituted safeguards against links to such sites in the future. There is no room for hate in our society."

The chairman of the county party, Marcus Kindley, said the Web site sought "to provide information for intellectual discussions on the moral war on terrorism."

Mr. Kindley said the party must do more research on the links to its site. "This slipped through the cracks," he said of the Muslim link.

I gotcha patriot right here

It began with a call to arms from one soldier to others: help one of our own fight Alzheimer's by writing of memories from another great battle.

The letters came by the thousands, from soldiers who survived World War II and the widows of those who did not. Some were personal notes, sharing stories of survival and redemption with a man they never met. Others offered thanks to a man who brought laughter in dark times.

The letters were to the cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who became the voice of the World War II infantry soldier with his characters Willie and Joe.

From 1940 until 1945, Mr. Mauldin drew the two disheveled riflemen who lampooned the military for Stars and Stripes and other military journals. Mr. Mauldin also fought alongside soldiers, earning their respect as one of their own. In 1945, at age 23, he won his first Pulitzer Prize, for Willie and Joe. He won the second in 1959 for an editorial cartoon in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His best-known postwar cartoon came on Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In it, a grieving Abraham Lincoln covered his face with his hands at the Lincoln Memorial.

Today, Mr. Mauldin, 80, no longer remembers his family, his career or his Pulitzer Prizes. But he remembers the war, and those who fought in it are helping him keep those memories alive with their letters.

One read: "From one old dogface to another. Thanks for the memories."

It started with Jay Gruenfeld, 77, who spent years wondering what happened to the man whose cartoons had made him laugh in a foxhole under fire in the Philippines. Mr. Gruenfeld was in an Army hospital when his father sent him a copy of "Up Front."

With most of his squad killed and his future uncertain, Mr. Gruenfeld was grateful for the humor. He marveled at how Willie and Joe really knew that the infantry did most of the fighting and the dying. They knew how young men felt so old.

More than five decades later, Mr. Gruenfeld self-published his memories of the war, in which he mentioned Mr. Mauldin's uplifting cartoons. He tried twice to send his book to Mr. Mauldin. Twice it was returned. The last thing he remembered hearing about Mr. Mauldin was that he had retired to New Mexico. He called a friend there and asked him to check a telephone book and see if any Mauldins were listed.

That turned up a son of Mr. Mauldin, Dave Mauldin.

"When he called," the younger Mauldin said, "I had to tell him Dad was not doing well."

His father was suffering from Alzheimer's, he said. The family does not want to disclose Mr. Mauldin's location, but says he is living in a care home in Orange County, Calif.

"I heard that and said, `Well, I have to go see him,' " said Mr. Gruenfeld, of Lompoc, Calif.

He spent hours with Mr. Mauldin, telling stories about the war and the life after. He took him his infantry patch and other memorabilia.

"He smiled this big, beautiful smile," Mr. Gruenfeld said. "He needed to know he wasn't forgotten."

Mr. Gruenfeld returned home from that trip last spring with an idea: Get other veterans to write letters and visit. He wrote to veterans organizations and contacted newspaper columnists. (Correspondence can be sent to 10061 Riverside Drive, Box 1014, Toluca Lake, Calif. 91602.) Soon Mr. Mauldin was receiving hundreds of letters a day.

For months, another Mauldin son, Nat, has been reading the letters to his father, standing at his bedside.

Mostly, the old cartoonist remains silent.

On a recent visit, Nat Mauldin, 49, picked through a stack of mail.

"Hey, Dad, this looks like a good one," he said.

The letter, postmarked Tucson, was from John S. Barker, a 78-year-old former corporal who served in Italy during the war.

Nat Mauldin read: "Dear Mr. Mauldin, I have half a dozen grandsons, all in their early 20's, and all members of that generation that guesses Dec. 7, 1941, is somebody's birthday, Anzio is a viral disease and Cassino is a card game. They've asked about the war, but I lack the skills to make it come alive for them."

Mr. Barker went on that he had recently began trying to explain his war experience to his grandchildren by using Willie and Joe cartoons.

Nat Mauldin put the letter down, looked at his father and asked if he was feeling O.K.

"Yeah," Bill Mauldin said.

The son beamed at the first word he had drawn from his father in months. It was one of four responses that day as the elder Mr. Mauldin heard more veterans' letters.

Later, Nat Mauldin pondered whether it was just a brief moment of clarity or whether, as "a part of me wants to believe," the letters, the memories, helped break through.

"Whatever it was, I'll take it," he said.

-----



Just give me the aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart.

-----

In 1945, he won his first Pulitzer Prize for newspaper cartooning, and published his first book - Up Front, which reprinted dozens of Willie & Joe cartoons, accompanied by Mauldin's comments on the real-life situation his fictional characters were in. It has remained in print for decades, and even now stands as one of the most vivid and true-to-life accounts of the typical American soldier's life during World War II.

More books followed - Back Home (1947), Bill Mauldin in Korea (1952), The Brass Ring (1971), and several others. He also wrote a few short stories, and appeared in the 1951 movie, The Red Badge of Courage. He won a second Pulitzer in 1959, so it was almost an anticlimax when, two years later, he took home The National Cartoonists' Society's Reuben Award, as Cartoonist of the Year.

By that time, he was working as editorial cartoonist for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. United Feature had found his cartoons hard to sell in many markets, because of his tendency not to pull punches when cartooning about McCarthyism or The Ku Klux Klan; and he'd been so discouraged that for a few years during the '50s, he'd actually given up cartooning altogether. It was a mistake he didn't make again - but he did find larger urban areas, where a wider range of opinion has always flourished, more receptive to his viewpoints.

-----



Let that one go, He says he don't wanna be mah equal.

-----

After the war Mauldin was a political cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and later the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was noted for his biting cartoon attacks on racial segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. He covered the war in Korea, won another Pulitzer in 1959 and published a number of books. But he was never again quite as famous as he'd been in World War II. He retired in 1991.

And now, at age 80, he's fallen on hard times. Severely burned in a household accident while visiting here from his native New Mexico last year, Mauldin's physical health is waning - and perhaps even worse, his mental capacities are diminished. Lying on his bed in the Orange County nursing home, he sometimes goes days without speaking, locked away in his own world.

Don't misunderstand: The famous Bill Mauldin hasn't been abandoned. Thrice married, with eight children, he has family members who love and support him, and he's in a good private facility. But he needs something more. That's where his old Army buddies of long ago, even ones who never met him personally, can help. And maybe you are one of them.

Staff members at the nursing home have noticed that when Bill has been visited by World War II veterans, especially those who served with him in the fight against Nazi Germany, he seems to light up. World War II was the most important time of his life, and it's as if hearing stories of those days in Sicily and Italy and France, even from a stranger, somehow reconnects him to the world. He may or may not be able to talk back, but for those moments his eyes come alive again.

The problem is, Bill's family members and health-care providers haven't been able to arrange for enough World War II guys to visit him. They don't want flocks of people coming in to see him unannounced - that's why I'm not saying which care facility he's in - but they would like World War II vets to volunteer for scheduled visits. They think it would improve Bill's life.

So with their permission, I'm making this request: If you're a World War II veteran, especially if you served in the European Theater, and you're willing to spend a few minutes with Bill Mauldin, give me a call at the number below. Or if you're just someone who remembers him and liked his cartoons, and you want to send him a card, send it to me care of the Register and I'll make sure he gets it.


Once again, I don't want to make it sound worse than it is. According to his family members, Bill was always a proud man, and he's had a long and colorful and successful life. He wouldn't want anyone's pity.

Still, the GIs of World War II were always important to him. And it seems only right that before he leaves this life, Bill Mauldin should get to spend a little time with the guys who used to be Willie and Joe.

Contact Gordon Dillow at (714) 796-7953 or e-mail gldillow@aol.com

-----

>

Sometimes you had to put your trusty mount out of its misery.

-----

Sitting by Mauldin’s bedside talking to him, I had to wonder if he hears it all, way in there, or if maybe he’s already in a better place and words are just warm mush in his ears. If you’ve sat with family members through their last days, you know how it is, and you also know how such particulars scarcely matter. The only thing you really need to carry out of this life is the knowledge that you’re loved, and I feel certain that’s getting through to Mauldin. Folks at the nursing home say he does brighten when all the vets come in with their stories. And, unlike me, who gets to pat myself on the head in print for it, they’re doing it just because it’s the right and thankless thing to do.

Thankless isn’t quite the term because they get to do the thanking. I’m glad I got a chance to, since a large part of whatever small good I might be at mixing humor, ethics and life in print comes from Mauldin being such an influence on me as a kid. It took almost no time to tell him that, and lacking any old war stories, I didn’t have much else to say. He has been getting far more mail than people have time to read to him, so I read through a pile of that for him.

Fifty-eight years ago, he doubtless never envisioned his cartoons having such an abiding effect on people: old soldiers recounting how his drawings and observations "saved my soul in that war," "kept my humanity alive" or just gave them the only laughs they found amid the blood and frostbite. There were letters from war widows thanking him for making their dead husbands’ lives a little brighter before they were killed. There were letters from old men recounting their war experiences at length because they had no one else to tell them to.

And there were letters appreciative of Mauldin’s postwar battles. When he returned to civilian life with a Pulitzer Prize and universal acclaim, papers were anxious to print his observations on American life until they found they had a principled gadfly on their hands. He didn’t have to do too many cartoons targeting racism, Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and such before papers started dropping his work. While always pro-soldier, Mauldin became anti-war as only a person who has seen war can: one cartoon pre our involvement in Korea shows two rich old men at their club in comfortable leather armchairs, with one proclaiming, "I say it’s war, Throckmorton, and I say let’s fight."

Mauldin persevered and became one of our most respected political cartoonists, garnering a second Pulitzer. For many people, the symbol of America’s grief after JFK was assassinated was Mauldin’s simple poignant cartoon showing Lincoln’s statue weeping. He kept working up through the 1980s, never losing his insight or humor.

He supported George McGovern and other lost causes, but I don’t know if he would have wanted to be called a leftie. He once summed up his political beliefs thus: "I’m against oppression by whomever."

I think about that when I ponder the hate-flecked cartoons of the Times’ Michael Ramirez, who unflinchingly sides with entrenched power. When the last tree falls to the timber company’s axe and the last squirrel is running for cover, Ramirez will likely be there taking pot shots at it.

I would love to know what Mauldin would make of our nation’s current challenges. But I don’t know and wouldn’t presume. He has seen enough of war, from Anzio to covering our first tangle with Iraq, and I hope it is the farthest thing from his mind now.

I’ll likely go back and read him some more letters. If your life has been touched by Mauldin’s work, I’d recommend you do the same. (You can write to him or see about visiting via the Register’s Dillow, who has been doing an earnest job of it. Try gldillow@aol.com, or write via The Dreaded Register, 625 N. Grand Ave., Santa Ana, CA 92701.)

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I'm the last to have this

but here's the infamous disappearing CNN/Time Warner poll.



It's not just you. It's practically everyone but the people the four or five corporations that control the media talk to.

Now if only they'd vote.

OK, who has this? Blah3 and Bartcop and Mark Kleiman says he got it from Liberal Oasis and Kos has it and so does Interesting Times, who posted the graphic. MYDD has another, similar poll, also not being covered. Counterspin got it from Atrios. HNN has it, and notes that Instapundit doesn't. Roger Ailes (no, not that one) found pieces of it (the least disturbing pieces if you're the administration) posted. Skippy, the totem marsupial of blogtopia (which term, conveniently, he coined, on dit) discussed the situation.

As near as I can tell, Liberal Oasis had it first.

Have you seen it in the paper? On TV? Heard it on the radio?

Liberal media bias is not a real effective monolithic force, is it?

Edit: I am reminded that not everyone has seen this (ironic, isn't it).

It's a CNN-Time poll which appears in their year end issue and was not put on their website or announced on TV (although a piece of it, the piece about the President's advisors, did appear on the website, with a glowing headline).