What the prosecutor said

William C. Ibershof, lead prosecutor of the Weathermen, in a letter to today's New York Times:

As the lead federal prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 1970s (I was then chief of the criminal division in the Eastern District of Michigan and took over the Weathermen prosecution in 1972), I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child.
Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased to learn that he has become a responsible citizen.
Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago.
I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of “prosecutorial misconduct.” It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.

Bill Ayers vs. stock market crash vs. Alaska Independence Party

And the list goes on. If we play the guilt by association game, while Obama's connections with Bill Ayers seem pretty remote, Sarah Palin's husband belonged to the Alaska Independence Party for seven years, an organization which advocates the secession of Alaska from the United States and has established links with other state secessionist organizations, some of which promote white supremacy. And McCain in the past served on the board of directors of an organization affilited with the radical right wing World Anti-Communist League, described by the Anti-Defamation League as 'a gathering place, a forum, and a point of contact for extremists, racists, and anti-Semites.'

Meanwhile the stock market continues its alarming crash. I would really like to see the candidates spend the remaining weeks addressing this issue, rather than playing the guilt by association game. After all, why would McCain suspend his campaign for a few days to urge Congress to pass the bailout legislation yet ignore the exacerbating economic problems that have taken place since it was passed?

Novelist Elif Shafak to be tried for "Insulting Turkishness"

Novelist Elif Shafak is to be brought to trial in a Turkish court Sept. 21 for "insulting Turkishness", according to a report of PEN American Center. She is the third prominent Turkish novelist to be tried in just over a year. Shafak, who divides her time between Turkey and teaching at the University of Arizona, wrote her novel in English about two families, one in Instanbul and the other an Armenian family living in San Francisco. The offending passage in her book mentions Turkey's genocide against Armenians in the early 20th century. The Turkish version of her book is a bestseller in Turkey.

Kentucky school board nixes banning book

The Warren County School Board of Kentucky voted 3-2 against
banning a book the parent of a Greenwood High School student said was
"full of various types of immorality," according to Bowling Green
Daily News (Kentucky), Aug. 15. Here is an excerpt of the article:

Lee Ann Austin first complained last year about "Flowers for Algernon," by
Daniel Keyes, when it was one of the required books in her son's English
class.

The science fiction book, first published in 1966, focuses on Charlie
Gordon, a 32-year-old man with mental retardation who undergoes surgery
that turns him into a genius. Part of the plot involves the character's
sexualexperiences, which include his having sex with a former teacher,
as well as other women.

Austin objected to the school's inclusion of a book that portrays this, as
well as drug use and profanity...

"Flowers for Algernon" was 47th on the American Library Association's list
of the 100 books most challenged between 1990 and 2000...

Ocean acidification threatens marine life

Increasing acidification of the oceans from carbon dioxide emissions could cause mass extinction of marine life, reports Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology

When carbonic acid input is modest, sediments from the ocean floor can buffer the increases in acidity. But at the current rate of input--nearly 50 times the natural background from volcanoes and other sources--this buffering mechanism is overwhelmed. Previous estimates suggest that in less than 100 years, the pH of the oceans could drop by as much as half a unit from its natural value of 8.2 to about 7.7. (On the pH scale, lower numbers are more acidic and higher numbers are more basic.)

This drop in ocean pH would be especially damaging to marine animals such as corals that use calcium carbonate to make their shells. Under normal conditions the ocean is supersaturated with this mineral, making it easy for such creatures to grow. However, a more acidic ocean would more easily dissolve calcium carbonate, putting these species at particular risk.

Bush uses straw man fallacy

President Bush has been employing straw man arguments with increasing frequency as his popularity plummets, reports AP correspondent Jennifer Lovan:

When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what "some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

He typically then says he "strongly disagrees" - conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.

Stop big oil giveaways

Democrats in Congress will present legislation this week to require oil and gas companies to pay royalties to the federal treasury for drilling on public lands. American Chronicle reports: "taxpayers stand to lose at least $7 billion on oil and gas retrieved from federal lands, according to a report in the New York Times published today." Historically, oil and gas companies have had to pay royalties for drilling on federal lands, but since 1995 they have been exempt from such payments, despite their record earnings.

Seven billion dollars is alot of money, as much as the California state deficit. Another case of big business being allowed to profit off the destruction of our natural resources.

I am back

I apologize for the long delay in posting anything to this blog site. I don't know if anyone still reads it. But I plan to resume posting within the next few days, on issues concerning liberal values.

Remembering my mother

My mother, Mary Denney, passed away last Sunday. She died peacefully, in her sleep at home.

One of my earliest childhood memories of mother was when she taught me the Lord's Prayer as I lay in bed.

She was not one who wore her religion on her sleeve, she did not come across as overly religious or sanctimonius. Instead, she lived her faith in her involvement with this church and in her relationships with others. I remember in my youth she told me how much she liked a book by the psychiatrist Eric Fromm, The Art of Love. The theme of this book was that love is where we find the meaning of our existence. God is love, my mother told me.

Mother took pride in whatever modest accomplishments I made in life. Even when I would thank her for dinner, she would comment on how thoughtful it was of me to thank her for having prepared the meal.

She also sought to expand her own horizons. When I was in high school, she began attending part-time the College of San Mateo, and then onto San Francisco State from where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with honors. She was a better college student than me.

After college she painted many pictures, and received some awards at local shows. We have many of them on the walls of my parents' home, along with paintings by her brother Richard, some of them are local landscapes, some of them are of people, including my mother's father.

Mother also began travelling around the world in the later years of her life. She went with travel groups to Europe, the Mid-East, China. I think she wanted to see as much of the world as she could before her life ended.

Mother worked hard on compiling a family history on both her and my dad's side. She did alot of research, visited the Mormon archives in Salt Lake City and various places in the midwest. The family history is a few hundred pages in a looseleaf binder, with many old photographs, and quite alot of fascinating detail. She managed to trace her ancestry all the way back to an emperor of Britain at the time of the Roman empire.

She took good care of herself, and looked young for her age. I recall in the early 90s she was told a few times that she looked like Hillary Clinton. And that was very pleasing to her, because she really liked Hillary, who was also someone from the midwest who grew up with strong values from the Methodist church.

The last years of my mother's life were very difficult for both her and my father who worked hard to take good care of her. She suffered from Alzheimer's and related problems. But even then she focused her mind on what was most important to her, her love for her family. Often, while visiting, I would be talking to dad about something and she would suddenly say, "I love William Julian Denney with all my heart, and I love my sons David and Stephen." Sometimes she would ask me about her grandchildren. Actually there were no grandchildren, but she wanted very much to believe that she had grandchildren. Sometimes she would just hold onto my hand for awhile, like when I would go out to the sofa to sit down and she would sit next to me. When it came time for me to go back to Berkeley, I would shake hands with dad, and by then mother would usually be laying down in bed or on the reclining chair, so I would lean over so she could kiss me on the head to say goodbye.

There are probably more stories I could tell about her, but the main thing I recall as her son is the strong love she had for her family, along with her sweet disposition and her caring and thoughtful attitude for other relatives and friends, and people she knew in church.

What Durbin and the FBI said

Since he has been denounced so harshly for his statement
on Guantanamo, it might be helpful to read what Illinois
Senator Durbin actually said that provoked the outrage.
The full speech can be found here.

The offending passage:

"..When you read some of the graphic descriptions of
what has occurred here-- I almost hesitate to put them
in the record, and yet they have to be added to this
debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw.
And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to
find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position
to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times
they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been
left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the
air conditioning had been turned down so far and the
temperature was so cold in the room, left there for 18-24
hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning
had been turned down so far and the temperature was
so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was
shaking with cold....On another occasion, the
[air conditioner] had been turned off, making the
temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees.
The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile
of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling
his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion,
not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely
loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been
since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot
in the fetal position on the tile floor.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was
an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners
in their control, you would most certainly believe this must
have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some
mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for
human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action
of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.."

In response to this, Chris Wallace of FOX news said:

"But what the FBI memo alleges, and it is an allegation,
is, you know, would be considered a day at the beach
in the Soviet gulag or Nazi ... I mean, what was so
horrific in the memo? And I'm not saying, you know, there
aren't legitimate questions there, is that someone is
chained to a floor and forced to defecate on themselves,
and has loud rock music playing. Excuse me? I mean, you know,
Auschwitz? Bergen Belsen? The Soviet gulag? I think
they would have been very happy to be allowed to defecate
on themselves."

I don't know any former prisoners of the Soviet Gulag or of
Nazi concentration camps, but I do know Vietnamese who were
detained in re-education camps that I think can be fairly
compared to the Gulag system, and the treatment described in
the FBI memo is actually a common form of mistreatment of
prisoners in Vietnam -- the shackling of hands and feet in
confined positions and exposure to temperature extremes.

To me this is torture, in that it involves the infliction
of severe mental and physical pain. The defecating and
urinating on themselves, as well as the pulling out of hair
and shaking from extreme cold, is a byproduct of the
fact that these prisoners in Guantanamo were "chained hand
and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair,
food or water." This kind of mistreatment of prisoners in
the U.S. would be illegal, even against those
who committed the most heinous of crimes.

In reading this memo, Senator Durbin was not claiming that
overall treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo is comparable
to the Nazi concentration camps or the Soviet Gulag. He was
saying that the particular treatment of prisoners
described in the FBI memo is what we would associate with
the treatment of prisoners in these more extreme prison
systems. Maybe he was wrong to compare this kind of torture
to Nazi concentration camps. But on the other hand, I don't
think that the kind of torture described in the FBI memo would
be considered a "day at the beach" by many former prisoners,
including those who survived the Soviet Gulag system.

If someone had read the FBI memo to me, without the reference
to rap music or the FBI, I would probably think the memo was
describing a prison in Vietnam.

It seems that those concerned with the human rights have to walk on pins and needles when criticizing U.S. prison abuses in Guantanamo, Iraq or elsewhere. The Bush administration and its supporters will jump on the slightest hyperbole from those who criticize such injustices, but it is only a diversionary tactic. Their moral outrage goes in only one direction: against those who speak out against the inhumane policies they are carrying out.

Wendy's

I used to eat fairly often at fast food restaurants, and of those Wendy's seemed one of the better, or more healthy one. As I have learned more, I try to avoid fast food restaurants, but still Wendy's received a bad deal with this controversy over the finger in the chili.

Media reports suggest that the finger might have been placed in the chili by the person who claimed to have found it. Of course, I have no idea what is true, but the fact is that this kind of horrible event could happen at almost any restaurant. Wendy's has been badly hurt by the whole news story. I hope they can recover well, alhtough I know I won't be eating any chili there for a long time.

Terri Schiavo

The sad and tragic case of Terri Schiavo has captured the imagination of our nation. Much of the media portrays this as a religious debate, but there are also factual questions involved here -- namely is she really brain dead, and does she feel no pain as she slowly dies of thirst and starvation? Yesterday, a priest who is the spokesman for her parents said Schiavo smiled, raised her hands and made guttural sounds late Sunday while being visited by her father and a friend. Another report I read, from lifenews.com, said hospice workers have provided Terri morphine to be able to ease the tremendous pain that comes with dying from dehydration.

Are these people lying, or are they engaged in wishful thinking? If the answer to both is no, then why are we letting her die in this manner? It seems to me what we have here is de facto euthanasia, and with that decision made, it would be more humane to give her real euthanasia, so she could die more quickly and painlessly.

The other question that comes to mind is, why are her parents and siblings forced to stand by in protest while the decisions over her life are made by her husband of five years who is now virtually remarried to someone else with whom he has had two children? It seems at the beginning of life, pro-abortion rights advocates support the right of the mother to determine the future of the unborn child, but at the end of life they oppose the right of a Schiavo's parents to decide her future, instead letting that decision rest with her husband who is now sharing his life with another woman.

Whatever charges of hypocrisy may be leveled at the Bush administration, or other conservatives on this issue, I believe the above questions need to be addressed.

The cell phone

Yesterday, Easter Sunday, while driving on the Bay Bridge toward San Francisco, I noticed a burning smell. I looked at the temperature guage, and saw to my horror that the car was overheated, with the guage pointed at the extreme. With about a mile to go to Treasure Island, and smoke or steam coming out of the engine, I just made it to the turnoff. Fortunately I had a cell phone and Triple A (although I did not realize I had the basic service, meaning I had to pay $10/mile over five miles of towing). It was raining and the tow truck driver had some problems finding me, but finally he arrived and I had the car towed to a Berkeley repair shop. Now I wait today to find out what the damage is, in the meantime relying on foot or the bus for transportation.

This morning there was a news segment about how widespread the use of the cell phone has become. Some people might consider it a nuisance, but the car is one place where it is essential. Because I don't need to use a cell phone frequently, I have a Virgin Mobile phone, which allows me to just buy a card at various values ($20, $30, etc.), as opposed to having a monthly plan. The only precaution is that you have to keep the phone account at a certain level, otherwise you risk it running out of money. That almost happened to me yesterday, as I had only about $1.50 left in the account at the conclusion of several long phone calls. The charge is 25 cents per minute, 10 cents per minute after using the phone for 10 minutes in a day.

The other message from this experience is: do not stop on the Bay Bridge or other bridges and similar highway structures if you can avoid it; drive to the nearest turnoff instead. Better to risk the car's health than your own life.

Going on strike?

I attended a meeting of my union the other day, the Coalition of University Employees (CUE), which represents clerical workers in the University of California system (I am a library assistant, hence a clerical worker). It seems a strike is possible within a month. The leaders cited a report which said we employees should be paid significantly higher. We had a strike a few years ago, but that had a definite beginning and end, lasting just a few days. This strike, on the other hand, would be open-ended, meaning it could last several months. I don't want to cross the picket line, but on the other hand, I cannot afford to go indefinitely without a paycheck, and with questionable job security, especially after I have worked so many years for the university and am looking forward to retirement. I believe that is the situation of many other UC employees represented by CUE. Our pay is not great, but it is not like we are working at Walmart, which is the current job trend in our country. I wonder sometimes if the CUE leaders are just in that old 60s Berkeley mode, looking for a people's confrontation with the establishment.

Misrepresenting Howard Dean

In his careless misreading of a Cornell Daily Sun report on Howard Dean's speech at Cornell, columnist Robert Novak on CNN claimed Dean said that if left untended, over the years Social Security will lose about 80 percent of the benefits. The Republican National Committee thought so much of it that it posted Novak's comment on its website, with a link to the CNN video of Novak. However, what Dean said was that if left alone for 30 years SSI benefits would be reduced to 80 percent of what it is now. In other words Novak was off by 60 percent in his misrepresentation of Dean. Let us see how long it takes for the RNC or Novak to correct the error.

Update: The RNC website deleted the reference to Novak citing Dean within a day, but did not mention its error nor apologize. Novak was quoted by CNN's Judy Woodruff several days later as stating he had meant to cite Dean as saying SSI would be reduced to 80 percent of its current benefits, not by 80 percent. Media Matters for America, which commented in some detail on this whole issue, noted that (as of March 7) Rush Limbaugh was still citing Novak's original statement without correction..

Media scandal continues

Today's New York Times reports new developments in the unravelling scandal of fake news from the White House, as reported by Anne Kornblut:

"The comptroller general has issued a blanket warning that reminds federal agencies they may not produce newscasts promoting administration policies without clearly stating that the government itself is the source.

"Twice in the last two years, agencies of the federal government have been caught distributing prepackaged television programs that used paid spokesmen acting as newscasters and, in violation of federal law, failed to disclose the administration's role in developing and financing them.

"And those were not isolated incidents, David M. Walker, the comptroller general, said in a letter dated Thursday that put all agency heads on notice about the practice.

"In fact, it has become increasingly common for federal agencies to adopt the public relations tactic of producing 'video news releases' that look indistinguishable from authentic newscasts and, as ready-made and cost-free reports, are sometimes picked up by local news programs. It is illegal for the government to produce or distribute such publicity material domestically without disclosing its own role..."

In the same issue, Frank Rich comments that there are now at least six fake journalists who have either been on the payroll of the Bush administration "or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news." He continues:

"Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration's 'marriage' initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports ('In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting,' went the script) pretending to 'sort through the details' of the administration's Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such 'reports,' some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal 'covert propaganda' by the Government Accountability Office.

"The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the Armstrong Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public relations firm, Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds through subcontractors. A new report by Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has received $97 million of the administration's total $250 million P.R. kitty, of which the Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction. We have yet to learn precisely where the rest of it ended up.."

On the other hand, he notes:

"It is a brilliant strategy. When the Bush administration isn't using taxpayers' money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory, their own government. Paul Farhi of The Washington Post discovered that even at an inaugural ball he was assigned 'minders' - attractive women who wouldn't give him their full names - to let the revelers know that Big Brother was watching should they be tempted to say anything remotely off message."

Regrets in life

There are some people who can look back on their lives and say if they had to do it all over again, they would not do anything differently. I am not one of those.

Among the regrets I have in life, not necessarily in order of importance:

- That I never married and raised a family. My mother, now suffering from dementia, God bless her, is convinced she has grandchildren, and wants to know when she can visit the babies in the hospital. It doesn't matter how many times I tell her otherwise.

- That I did not find a better way of dealing with my disease. For over 30 years I have had ankylosing spondalitis, a form of rheumetoid arthritis where the joints of the vertebrae gradually fuse together. It started probably when I was around 17 or 18, because at that time I experienced occassional back problems, but did not become really noticeable, and properly diagonosed, until I was 27.

- That I did not have a greater sense of purpose in pursuing my education and career choices.

Much of this goes back to choices I made in my youth. When I was in high school, I was very shy, afraid even to try to eat lunch with the various cliques on campus, but my participation in sports as a distance runner became my main focus of energy and time. And the few friends I had were fellow distance runners. I put much more of myself into the sport than into trying to develop some kind of social life or mastering the subject matter of my classes. If it were not for my disability, I might still be running today, in fact I would have competed seriously (although I was never that good) probably until I was 30. But now I wonder, if in retrospect, the running might have contributed to my disease, and that if I had not gone out for sports, maybe I would be healthy today. And I also regret, that after my diagnosis, I did not more agressively resist the natural progression of the disease, through proper exercise and maintaining straight posture.

I know we can't relive the past, but still I regret that in high school and college, that I did not have a better sense of connection between what I was studying at the time and what practical benefits my acquired knowledge would serve out there in the real world. I wish I had taken some shop and particularly auto mechanics classes, but those were frowned upon at the time by those who wanted to pursue the college prep route. And I wish I had taken some business classes too. I also wished I had stayed on top of math and kept at it through calculus, and that I had become fluent in some foreign languages like Spanish and French.

In college I majored in history, but in truth I was just taking whatever classes interested me; some classes I still remember well, such as a Writings of C.S. Lewis course and a Black Existence in American Life course. But overall, if I was going to major in history, my course selection should have been more comprehensive. Better yet, would have been to major or at least minor in something more practical like Business Administration.

I went back to grad school to get a teaching certificate and then Masters degree in teaching high school social studies, but the job market for applicants in this area was so bad that I never got past substitute teaching, which I hated. With spare time on my hands, and new friendships with some Vietnamese refugees, I developed an interest in human rights in Vietnam, first publishing a newsletter, and later working at the UC Berkeley Indochina Archive, where I worked from 1983-2002. But during all those years I worked at the archive, I was paid a small clerical salary, and in fact for many of those years was paid only part time, even while working full time.
Now I work at the main library of the university, cataloging books. But I regret that I did not pursue a different route in graduate studies, perhaps to law school, to business school to get an MBA, or to library school to get a Masters degree in library science. The latter probably would have been the most suitable choice.

Of course I could not live through all my years looking at life through the prism of a middle aged man. It might be boring, But if I were to advise young people today, I would tell them to try to understand how valuable education can be for their lives and to develop a plan for the goals they eventually want to achieve. Maybe not to become a famous movie star or politician, but just to find a decent job, to raise a family and live in a nice home. I think it today's society, with all the cutbacks in public education and outsourcing of jobs, it is more difficult than before, but the goal is still attainable if you work for it.

Protecting Halliburton

In his State of the Union address, President Bush said the U.S. economy has been held back by "irresponsible class actions and frivolous asbestos claims," and urged Congress to pass reforms to limit such lawsuits. It is strange that the President would come to the defense of those who spread a major cause of cancer in this country, in the State of the Union address, no less.

But perhaps it is not so strange when we learn that his vice-president's company Halliburton has just lost a $30 million lawsuit on this very issue. As reported by the Seattle Times:

The Halliburton Co. settled legal claims with about 120 families of asbestos victims in the Pacific Northwest this week, agreeing to pay out $30 million and to create a fund for future victims of the deadly fiber.

The local settlement was part of a $4.3 billion national settlement involving about 250,000 plaintiffs who had sued the company in connection with exposure to asbestos products distributed by Halliburton subsidiaries.

Matthew Bergman, attorney for the local families and one of seven lawyers involved in negotiating the settlement, said Dresser Industries, a Halliburton subsidiary, knew since the 1930s that asbestos was harmful, yet issued no warnings. Locally, asbestos products were widely used in shipyards, pulp mills and power plants.

Many of Bergman's clients worked at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, he said. Some were civilian workers and others were sailors, some of whom remember sleeping in bunks beneath pipes insulated with asbestos, he said.

Our moral values president in action, working to protect companies that destroy the health of the American people.