"The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point..."

"...Poor people do not shut down factories ... Poor people didn't decide to use 'contract employees' because they cost less and don't get any benefits."--Molly Ivins, 1997

I remember reading this piece when it first ran and it was hugely influential. When I first became ill, there were times her work made me laugh when little else could. Ms. Ivins wrote with a brio and intelligence sorely lacking on both ends of the ideological spectrum. Today she died of breast cancer at 62. God fucking damnit.

Molly Ivins R.I.P.:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/31/obit.ivins.ap/index.html

Stuff you need to know right now

1) CNN's Jeff Greenfield looks way too happy to be trotted out for pre-election commentary. As I write this, I swear, in his tete a tete with Wolf Blitzer, he looks a bit hard.

2) Hey, music publicists! The next one of you who practically humps my leg in order to get me to review your act and I show up at the club and my name is not on the list, I will hunt you down and shank you. Then teach you to write a press release without referencing Karen O. or Sonic Youth.

3) The Pernice Brothers' "Somerville" was the second best song of 2006. (The first, of course, was the LWs' "Hindsight". You can fight me on this. You will lose.)

Keep in mind I've seen "Grey Gardens" on Broadway

STW's production of Arthur Miller's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People" is one of the most powerful shows I've seen in years. Like most writers, I inadvertantly spend half my night in a theater dissecting the script and the production. By the second or third scene, though, I was so engrossed, that the critical portion of my brain relented and I absorbed the play strictly as an audience member. (Of course, if the script weren't seemless, this would have been impossible.) And I cried. In public. Which is something I almost never do. (Yes, I have a friend in the show. But, obviously, that's not why I'm writing about it.)

Details:

January 18 - February 17, 2007 $20

7:30 pm Thurs - Fri - Sat
purchase 4 tickets for the price of 3!
click here to purchase tickets online
or telephone (800) 838-3006
THURSDAYS PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN at the door

Richard Hugo House
1634 11th Avenue on Seattle's Capitol Hill

More:

http://www.strawshop.org/

Totally awesome unless they opt for indie bangs, too

It's invigorating when someone pursues what they love, regardless of the bullshit they might encounter. From today's New York Times:

Truly Indie Fans

By JESSICA PRESSLER

Published: January 28, 2007

WHEN Douglas Martin first saw the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a teenager in High Point, N.C., “it blew my mind,” he said. Like many young people who soothe their angst with the balm of alternative rock, Mr. Martin was happy to discover music he enjoyed and a subculture where he belonged.

Except, as it turned out, he didn’t really belong, because he is black.

“For a long time I was laughed at by both black and white people about being the only black person in my school that liked Nirvana and bands like that,” said Mr. Martin, now 23, who lives in Seattle, where he is recording a folk-rock album.

But 40 years after black musicians laid down the foundations of rock, then largely left the genre to white artists and fans, some blacks are again looking to reconnect with the rock music scene.

The Internet has made it easier for black fans to find one another, some are adopting rock clothing styles, and a handful of bands with black members have growing followings in colleges and on the alternative or indie radio station circuit. It is not the first time there has been a black presence in modern rock. But some fans and musicians say they feel that a multiethnic rock scene is gathering momentum.

“There’s a level of progress in New York in particular,” said Daphne Brooks, an associate professor of African-American studies at Princeton. She was heartened last summer by the number of children of color in a class she taught at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, where kids learn to play punk-rock standards.

There is even a new word for black fans of indie rock: “blipster,” which was added to UrbanDictionary .com last summer, defined as “a person who is black and also can be stereotyped by appearance, musical taste, and/or social scene as a hipster.”

Bahr Brown, an East Harlem resident whose Converse sneakers could be considered blipster attire, opened a skateboard and clothing boutique, Everything Must Go, in the neighborhood in October, to cater to consumers who, like himself, want to dress with the accouterments of indie rock: “young people who wear tight jeans and Vans and skateboard through the projects,” he said.

“And all the kids listen to indie rock,” he said. “If you ask them what’s on their iPod, its Death Cab for Cutie, the Killers.”

A 2003 documentary, “Afropunk,” featured black punk fans and musicians talking about music, race and identity issues, and it has since turned into a movement, said James Spooner, its director. Thousands of black rock fans use Afropunk.com's message boards to discuss bands, commiserate about their outsider status and share tips on how to maintain their frohawk hairstyles.

“They walk outside and they’re different,” Mr. Spooner said of the Web site’s regulars. “But they know they can connect with someone who’s feeling the same way on the Internet.”

More:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/fashion/28Blipsters.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Great moments in self-control

I did not laugh--or stick my hand through the partition and break his goddamned clavicle--when my Seattle cab driver told me, "I know a lot about New York. I watch 'Regis and Kelly' every morning."

"It makes it so much better touring when you don’t want to murder the other band"

Tonight I cede the floor to Joe Pernice:

http://www.pernicebrothers.com/

For Papou

Next week makes seventeen years since my grandfather died. If he were alive now, he'd be ninety-nine and today would be his saint's day. He was a captain in the Greek navy, fluent in four languages, and the depth of his knowledge was staggering. He was well-versed in all things Homeric and I think he would have been intrigued by the following.

From the BBC:

Drilling 'boosts Homeric theory'

The Mediterranean island of Kefalonia was probably once two separate islands, new geophysical studies suggest.

A British-led team is amassing evidence that indicates Kefalonia's western peninsula, Paliki, was only recently joined to the main landmass.

The team believes a huge in-fall of rock in the last 3,000 years may have built a land-bridge between the two.

If correct, the researchers say, it would support their view that Paliki was the real site for Homer's Ithaca.

The location was supposedly home to Odysseus, whose mythical 10-year journey back from the Trojan War was chronicled in the Greek poet's epic tale The Odyssey.

New results from a test borehole and other survey work in the region lend support to the Paliki hypothesis, the team claims.

More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6256807.stm

From today's New York Times: Skull Supports Theory of Human Migration

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: January 12, 2007

From a new analysis of a human skull discovered in South Africa more than 50 years ago, scientists say they have obtained the first fossil evidence establishing the relatively recent time for the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens out of Africa.

[State University of New York at Stony Brook Scientists used radiation absorbed by sand in this skull to find its age.]

The migrants appeared to have arrived at their new homes in Asia and Europe with the distinct and unmodified heads of Africans.

An international team of researchers reported yesterday that the age of the South African skull, which they dated at about 36,000 years old, coincided with the age of the skulls of humans then living in Europe and the far eastern parts of Asia, even Australia. The skull also closely resembled skulls of those humans.

The timing, the scientists and other experts said, introduced independent evidence supporting archaeological finds and recent genetic studies showing that modern humans left sub-Saharan Africa for Eurasia between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago; probably closer to 45,000 to 35,000 years ago for Europe.

Until now, however, paleontologists had been frustrated by the absence of fossils to test the hypothesis of most geneticists that the people of sub-Saharan Africa and in Eurasia at that time were one and the same — modern humans. The human fossil record in Africa from 70,000 to 15,000 years ago had been virtually blank.

Some scientists, on the other hand, have contended that the migration could have begun as early as 100,000 years ago and that in the intervening time, contact with more archaic populations like the Neanderthals could have produced recognizable changes in what became the modern humans of Eurasia. But no scientists in the migration debate have disputed that ancestors of the human species originated in Africa.

In a report in today’s issue of the journal Science, a research team led by Frederick E. Grine of the State University of New York at Stony Brook concluded that the South African skull provided critical corroboration of the archaeological and genetic evidence indicating that humans in fully modern form originated in sub-Saharan Africa and migrated, almost unchanged, to populate Europe and Asia.

Dr. Grine and his colleagues said in an announcement by Stony Brook that the skull was the first fossil evidence “in agreement with the out-of-Africa theory, which predicts that humans like those that inhabited Eurasia should be found in sub-Saharan Africa around 36,000 years ago.”

Ted Goebel, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University who was not connected to the research, said the skull opened the way to important insights about “the missing years of modern humans.”

Writing in an accompanying commentary in the journal, Dr. Goebel said, “Here is the first skull of an adult modern human from sub-Saharan Africa that dates to the critical period, and one that can speak to the relationship of early moderns from Africa and Europe.”

The new findings pivoted on fixing the skull’s age. When it was uncovered in 1952 near the town of Hofmeyr, South Africa, the cranium was almost complete, but the bone was degraded. Not enough carbon remained for scientists at the time to extract a radiocarbon date.

Using new technology, Richard Bailey and other researchers at the University of Oxford measured the amount of radiation that had been absorbed by sand grains that had filled the braincase since its burial. They calculated the yearly rate at which radiation had collected in the sand and checked this with data from a CT scan of the bone. In this way, they determined that the Hofmeyr skull belonged to a human who lived 36,000 years ago, plus or minus 3,000 years.

Another member of the team, Katerina Harvati of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, made a detailed examination of the shapes, sizes and contours of all parts of the skull. She compared these three-dimensional measurements with those of early human skulls from Europe and with skulls of living humans in Eurasia and southern Africa, including the Khoe-San, commonly known as the Bushmen.

Because the Bushmen are well represented in the more recent archaeological record, Dr. Harvati said, they were expected to bear a close resemblance to the Hofmeyr skull. Instead, the skull was found to be quite distinct from all recent Africans, including the Bushmen, she said, and it has “a very close affinity” with fossil specimens of Europeans living in the Upper Paleolithic, the period best known for advanced stone tools and cave art.

“Much to my amazement,” Dr. Grine said in an interview, “the skull linked very closely with those from Europe at the time and not with South African remains 15,000 years on.”

Dr. Grine said these modern humans probably originated in East Africa, which is rich in fossils of ancestors of the species, and moved into Eurasia and also south to the tip of Africa.

“It would be nice,” he conceded, “if we had more than one specimen.”

Another report in Science describes one of the earliest occupation sites of modern humans in Europe, at Kostenki on the Don River, 250 miles south of Moscow. Its stone and bone tools and a human figurine appeared to have been made about 45,000 years ago, perhaps earlier than human sites to the west.

The lead author of the report was Michael Anikovich of the Russian Academy of Sciences. John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado, a team member, said the small figurine might be “the oldest example of figurative art ever discovered.”

Dr. Goebel said the new research, archaeology, genetics and the Hofmeyr skull should help explain when and how modern humans leaving Africa spread out to different environments, which, he added, “is one of the greatest untold stories in the history of humankind.”

Link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/science/12skull.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Did I miss a meeting?

When did all of us vote to bequeath ubiquity upon Justin Timberlake?

If someone could get back to me on this, I'd appreciate it.

L

Indie kids, what the fuck?

I'm not on MySpace so it's a moot point, but it would be super-cool if some lame-o band out of Tustin, California didn't have my name:

http://myspace.com/litsa

Also, it would be a different world today if whomever spearheaded Boat's campaign had run Gore's or Kerry's:

http://threeimaginarygirls.com/2006top.asp

And if ten Greeks say you're talking too much, shut up

"When I'm working, I have this little card over my desk that says, 'If nine Russians tell you you're drunk, lie down.' Because especially if you write and direct your own work, there's a danger that you have absolutely no perspective. For me, I feel quite clear and strong when I'm working, and then when I've made the film, I just desperately hope it will communicate something to someone else. [Laughs.] It's like you're a monk in the cutting room and a whore in the cinema."

--director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Breaking and Entering) to Entertainment Weekly

"Charlie Watts is my drum god!"

Years ago in Seattle, the independently owned record store chain, Cellophane Square, was much like Sonic Boom or Easy Street is today: a delicious place to lose yourself on a slate gray afternoon and staffed with true believers. (The last time I shopped at the University Avenue CS, I was perhaps the only individual on the premises not on work furlough.)

In college, my girl friends didn't care to hunt for a decent used cassette of Celluloid Heroes or an unscratched copy of Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, but my guy friends and I spent hours perusing Cellophane Square and other nearby music shops and knew our lives were richer for it. (I still have the NRBQ on vinyl my friend, Tony, bought for me during one of these expeditions.)

CS employees frequently wrote reviews or comments on the placards between CDs and albums and during a search for a zippered copy of Sticky Fingers, I discovered "Charlie Watts is my drum god!" scrawled on such a divider. The fellas adopted this as a not infrequent drunken rallying cry, so it is with great joy that I relay the following from the "Ask Blender" feature on p. 40 of the Jan/Feb 2007 issue:

Did Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer, really once beat the crap out of Mick Jagger?
Dominic Roth, Lincoln, Nebraska

Delightfully, yes. It happened in October 1984. The Stones had gathered in Amsterdam to discuss their next album and tour; Jagger, though, was more concerned with his solo career and was acting like a bit of a bastard. One night Keith Richards took Jagger out for some carousing--and by the time they stumbled back to their hotel at five in the morning, the singer was absolutely plastered. He called up to Watts, fast asleep in his own room, and started shouting into the phone. "Izzat my drummer, then? Where's my fucking drummer?"

What happened next is one of the most remarkable moments in Stones history. The mild-mannered Watts, always the quiet one in the group, crawled out of bed. He shaved, put on a crisp white shirt and impeccably tailored suit, knotted his tie and slipped on some shoes. Then he calmly walked downstairs, opened the door, grabbed Jagger--and cold-cocked him right in the kisser. "Don't ever call me your drummer again," Watts sneered. "You're my fucking singer."

It must have been quite a scene. "Charlie punched him into a plateful of smoked salmon," Richards recalled in a 1989 Playboy magazine interview. "Mick almost floated out the window into a canal. I grabbed his leg and saved him." Jagger has tried to play down the incident: "He pushed me, but I don't think he actually punched me." But Watts, while discreet, has implicitly confirmed it. "It's not something I'm proud of," he said in 1997. "I was really pissed off."

Recap:

It began with two awful surprises and ended with two great ones.

I learned a lot and it was never dull.

On to 2007!

Best to you and yours,

L

From today's Seattle Times: Putting an end to homelessness "can be done"

THOMAS JAMES HURST / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Rosa, 43, who has been homeless most her life, is living in a makeshift shelter under the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle. "I'm staying right here for Christmas," she said last week. "It's too cold and wet out, and I don't have anywhere to go."

ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES

By Sharon Pian Chan, Seattle Times staff reporter

After lunch, Bill Block was crossing Fourth Avenue downtown when someone he knew brushed past.

"Hey, have you ended homelessness yet?" the man asked.

"Yeah, yesterday," Block said.

"Yesterday" is the punch line. But ending homelessness — Block is dead serious about that.

Not shelter it, feed it or clothe it. End it.

An intractable social problem — created by the economy, drug addiction, mental illness, domestic violence, the justice system, lack of health care — can be solved, he says.

That's his job. Until recently, Block was a high-powered attorney — responsible for negotiating some of the city's biggest real-estate deals. He is a former Sonics part owner and adept political player who decided to give up his law-firm partnership to head the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County.

The county has an estimated 8,000 homeless people, and Block is charged with finding a home for all of them.

Homelessness will end, the plan says, when we build a roof over every bed.

"It can be done," Block said. "We see it all over the country."

At its worst, the Ten-Year Plan is a naive campaign that gives false hope to society's most downtrodden and will inevitably end in failure. At its best, it is wildly idealistic and maybe crazy enough to work.

To accomplish its goal, the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, an alliance of government, business and nonprofits, must create 9,500 units of housing. Its members — who include King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels — have given themselves a deadline of 2015.

More:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003492880_billblock24m.html

"Q: Would you give us a peek into the future and reveal the next great Colbert-ism? A: Colbertainment."

Stephen Colbert accepts accolades as one of Entertainment Weekly's "Entertainter of the Year":

"For the first time ever, there's a lot going on in the world. I'm so lucky that this year was the year something happened in the world. Years before, this show wouldn't have worked. The world was just phoning it in."

More:

http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,1572526_3_0_,00.html

Also: Fat Jokes Linked to Douchebaggery

Last year I interviewed someone who views himself as assiduously indie and progressive, so I was surprised when he made fat jokes from the stage after our conversation. (My tip off that he's a bit of a douche should have been when he kept asking about Ben G., as if I would tell one interview subject stories about another interview subject. Of course, I don't.)

It's always struck me as obvious that obesity, like most major health problems, is complex in its origins. Research continues to bear this out. From the Associated Press:

Bacteria May Contribute to Obesity

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The size of your gut may be partly shaped by which microbes call it home, according to new research linking obesity to types of digestive bacteria.

Both obese mice -- and people -- had more of one type of bacteria and less of another kind, according to two studies published Thursday in the journal Nature.

A "microbial component" appears to contribute to obesity, said study lead author Jeffrey Gordon, director of Washington University's Center for Genome Sciences.

Obese humans and mice had a lower percentage of a family of bacteria called Bacteroidetes and more of a type of bacteria called Firmicutes, Gordon and his colleagues found.

The researchers aren't sure whether more Firmicutes makes you fat or if people who are obese grow more of that type of bacteria.

But growing evidence of this link gives scientists a potentially new and still distant way of fighting obesity: Change the bacteria in the intestines and stomach. It also may lead to a way of fighting malnutrition in the developing world.

More:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/12/20/obesity.microbes.ap/index.html

Living Off Rats to Survive in Zimbabwe

My father grew up under Nazi occupation in Greece and remembers villagers being so hungry and desperate that they picked lice out of their hair and ate them in order stay alive.

Jeff Koinange is a prescient journalist--his reports from the African continent are among the finest aired in our country--and he bravely and consistently works to impart attention to the poorest regions of the world. Countries afflicted with "stupid poverty", as Bono calls it.

In his latest piece for CNN, Koinange unveils how citizens of Zimbabwe are eating rats because their food supply has evaporated:

Living Off Rats to Survive in Zimbabwe

By Jeff Koinange
CNN

(CNN) -- Twelve-year-old Beatrice returns from the fields with small animals she's caught for dinner.

Her mother, Elizabeth, prepares the meat and cooks it on a grill made of three stones supporting a wood fire. It's just enough food, she says, to feed her starving family of six.

Tonight, they dine on rats.

"Look what we've been reduced to eating?" she said. "How can my children eat rats in a country that used to export food? This is a tragedy."

This is a story about how Zimbabwe, once dubbed southern Africa's bread basket, has in six short years become a basket case. It is about a country that once exported surplus food now apparently falling apart, with many residents scrounging for rodents to survive.

More:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/12/19/koinange.zimbabwe/index.html

Jeff Koinage's CNN bio:
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/anchors_reporters/koinange.jeff.html

And now, the estimable Mr. Estey:

My friend, Chris Estey, has two crackling pieces out now.

In his Three Imaginary Girls review of the Decemberists' The Crane Wife, he wisely observes:

"Both of these comments are just angles hacks take to avoid spending more time with the music, absorbing the admittedly convoluted but compelling storytelling of bandleader Colin Meloy, in language not all that much more 'literary' than anything on a Bob Dylan or an Elvis Costello album. Okay, so the combination of more obscure words and faintly archaic musical forms may suggest some sort of complicated nostalgic aesthetic on the band's part, but to me it's no less organic than the Pogues. There's just a little less male prostitution and getting kicked in the nards by the cops."


In his Shorthand for Epic profile in the Stranger, he elicits my new favorite music-related quote:

"Beau, my roommate, who took the picture, and brought Larry into the band, is against that idea of four rogues smoking, leaning up against the wall of the building. You know what? You're not a street gang. Unless you're scary motherfuckers like Suicidal Tendencies, stop looking like it! And you're not fashion models. You're playing music."


Bravo, Chris!

Keep readin':

http://www.threeimaginarygirls.com/decemberists06nov.asp

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=118747

"Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball."

Jeff Stein's Congressional Quarterly piece on U.S. governmental and systemic ignorance of Sunni and Shiite beliefs and alliances is journalism at its most useful:

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY – SpyTalk
Dec. 8, 2006 – 7:43 p.m.

Democrats’ New Intelligence Chairman Needs a Crash Course on al Qaeda

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Forty years ago, Sgt. Silvestre Reyes was a helicopter crew chief flying dangerous combat missions in South Vietnam from the top of a soaring rocky outcrop near the sea called Marble Mountain.

After the war, it turned out that the communist Viet Cong had tunneled into the hill and built a combat hospital right beneath the skids of Reyes’ UH-1 Huey gunship.

Now the five-term Texas Democrat, 62, is facing similar unpleasant surprises about the enemy, this time as the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

That’s because, like a number of his colleagues and top counterterrorism officials that I’ve interviewed over the past several months, Reyes can’t answer some fundamental questions about the powerful forces arrayed against us in the Middle East.

It begs the question, of course: How can the Intelligence Committee do effective oversight of U.S. spy agencies when its leaders don’t know basics about the battlefield?

To his credit, Reyes, a kindly, thoughtful man who also sits on the Armed Service Committee, does see the undertows drawing the region into chaos.

For example, he knows that the 1,400- year-old split in Islam between Sunnis and Shiites not only fuels the militias and death squads in Iraq, it drives the competition for supremacy across the Middle East between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia.

That’s more than two key Republicans on the Intelligence Committee knew when I interviewed them last summer. Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., and Terry Everett, R-Ala., both back for another term, were flummoxed by such basic questions, as were several top counterterrorism officials at the FBI.

I thought it only right now to pose the same questions to a Democrat, especially one who will take charge of the Intelligence panel come January. The former border patrol agent also sits on the Armed Services Committee.

Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week. Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East.

We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorism’s major players.

To me, it’s like asking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: Who’s on what side?

The dialogue went like this:

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.

That’s because the extremist Sunnis who make up a l Qaeda consider all Shiites to be heretics.

Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots account for its very existence. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe the Saudi Royal family besmirched the true faith through their corruption and alliance with the United States, particularly allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil.

It’s been five years since these Muslim extremists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center.

Is it too much to ask that our intelligence overseers know who they are?

Civil War

And Hezbollah? I asked him. What are they?

“Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah...”

He laughed again, shifting in his seat.

“Why do you ask me these questions at five o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?”

“Poquito,” I said—a little.

“Poquito?! “ He laughed again.

“Go ahead,” I said, talk to me about Sunnis and Shia in Spanish.

Reyes: “Well, I, uh....”

I apologized for putting him “on the spot a little.” But I reminded him that the people who have killed thousands of Americans on U.S. soil and in the Middle East have been front page news for a long time now.

It’s been 23 years since a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed over 200 U.S. military personnel in Beirut, mostly Marines.

Hezbollah, a creature of Iran, is close to taking over in Lebanon. Reports say they are helping train Iraqi Shiites to kill Sunnis in the spiralling civil war.

“Yeah,” Reyes said, rightly observing, “but . . . it’s not like the Hatfields and the McCoys. It’s a heck of a lot more complex.

“And I agree with you — we ought to expend some effort into understanding them. But speaking only for myself, it’s hard to keep things in perspective and in the categories.”

Reyes is not alone.

The best argument for needing to understand who’s what in the Middle East is probably the mistaken invasion itself, despite the preponderance of expert opinion that it was a terrible idea — including that of Bush’s father and his advisers. On the day in 2003 when Iraqi mobs toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Bush was said to be unaware of the possibility that a Sunni-Shia civil war could fill the power vacuum, according to a reliable source with good White House connections.

If President Bush and some of his closest associates, not to mention top counterterrorism officials, have demonstrated their own ignorance about who the players are in the Middle East, why should we expect the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee to get it right?

Trent Lott, the veteran Republican senator from Mississippi, said only last September that “It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people.”

“Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion?” wondered Lott, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after a meeting with Bush.

“Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference?

“They all look the same to me,” Lott said.

Haunting

The administration’s disinterest in the Arab world has rattled down the chain of command.

Only six people in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad are fluent in Arabic, according to last week’s report of the Iraq Study Group. Only about two dozen of the embassy’s thousand employees have some familiarity with the language, the report said.

The Iraq Study Group was amazed to find that, despite spending $2 billion on Iraq in 2006, more wasn’t being done to try “to understand the people who fabricate, plant and explode roadside bombs.”

Rare is the military unit with an American soldier who can read a captured document or interrogate a prisoner, my own sources tell me.

It was that way in Vietnam, too, Reyes says, which “haunts us.”

“If you substitute Arabization for Vietnamization, if you substitute . . . our guys going in and taking over a place then leaving it and the bad guys come back in. . . .”

He trails off, despairing.

“I could draw many more analogies.”

Yet Reyes says he favors sending more troops there.

“If it’s going to target the militias and eliminate them, I think that’s a worthwhile investment,” he said.

It’s hard to find anybody in Iraq who thinks the U.S. can do that.

On “a temporary basis, I’m willing to ramp them up by twenty or thirty thousand . . . for, I don’t know, two months, four months, six months — but certainly that would be an exception,” Reyes said.

Meanwhile, the killing is going on below decks, too, within Sunni and Shiite groups and factions.

Anybody who pays serious attention to Iraq knows that.

Reyes says his first hearings come January will focus on how U.S. intelligence can do a better job helping the troops in Iraq.

It may be way too late for that.

“Stop giving me tests!” Reyes exclaimed, half kidding.

“I’m not going to talk to you any more!”

Next: More on intelligence topics from my interview with Rep. Reyes.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Link:

http://public.cq.com/public/20061211_homeland.html

As my dad calls them, "those fellows in the Cab you wrote about"

Two of my guy friends once challenged themselves to come up with one thousand synonyms for "penis" during the course of a forty-eight hour road trip. (Both of them had recently become engaged to their longtime girlfriends. When I asked if they'd interrupted the cock talk to discuss said relationships, they totally cracked up.)

Anyway, last night's DCfC show at the Key Arena blazed so fucking brilliantly, that if I were so inclined, I could concoct one thousand synonyms for "awesome" and it would still be insufficient. And I saw it with C and T, two of my closest friends for the past twenty years. I'm holiday-neutral, but last night felt like a celebration.