patriot act: do you reauthorize it?

making this call takes no more time than the gossipy conversation you could be having in the staff lounge. and the person you're talking to isn't trustworthy anyway. she wants your job. so you may as well make this call. make the call. make the call!

from pen america:

As you probably already know, House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement on the USA PATRIOT Act's extension last week. The agreement would extend for four years Section 215, which permits secret warrants for books, records, and other items from businesses, hospitals, and organizations such as libraries. No changes were made to the standards for obtaining these orders, nor for those for obtaining National Security Letters (NSLs). Section 505 of the PATRIOT Act, authorizing NSLs, still has no sunset.

While we do appreciate that the conference report now sunsets Section 215 in four years instead of seven, this change is not sufficient to protect the privacy of library users from fishing expeditions by the FBI.

As the reauthorization approaches its 12/31 deadline, the White House is pressuring Congress to pass the inadequate "compromise" reauthorization bill. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has stated his support for a bipartisan filibuster in the Senate.

NOW is the time to call your senators! Please call your senators' Washington offices to ask them to:

1) Vote NO on cloture and SUPPORT a filibuster.
2) Vote YES for a three-month continuing resolution.
3) Vote NO on the conference report (if it comes to a vote).

We are particularly eager to generate calls to the following senators who have not indicated how they will vote:

Alaska: Ted Stevens (202) 224-3004
Arkansas: Blanche Lincoln (202) 224-4843 and Mark Pryor (202) 224-2353
Connecticut: Joseph Lieberman (202) 224-4041
Delaware: Thomas Carper (202) 224-2441
Florida: Bill Nelson (202) 224-5274
Idaho: Mike Crapo (202) 224-6142
Indiana: Evan Bayh (202) 224-5623 and Richard Lugar (202) 224-4814
Kansas: Sam Brownback (202) 224-6521
Louisiana: Mary Landrieu (202) 224-5824
Maine: Susan Collins (202) 224-2523 and Olympia Snowe (202) 224-5344
Montana: Conrad Burns (202) 224-2644 and Max Baucus (202) 224-2651
North Dakota: Kent Conrad (202) 224-2043 and Byron Dorgan (202) 224-2551
Nebraska: Ben Nelson (202) 224-6551 and Chuck Hagel (202) 224-4224
New York: Charles Schumer (202) 224-6542 and Hillary Clinton (202) 224-4451
Ohio: Michael DeWine (202) 224-2315 and George Voinovich (202) 224-3353
Oklahoma: Tom Coburn (202) 224-5754
Oregon: Gordon Smith (202) 224-3753
Rhode Island: Lincoln Chafee (202) 224-2921
South Dakota: Tim Johnson (202) 224-5842
Virginia: George Allen (202) 224-4024
West Virginia: Robert Byrd (202) 224-3954

Please also call the following senators to thank them for leading the fight against conference report:

Alaska: Lisa Murkowski (202) 224-6665
Colorado: Ken Salazar (202) 224-5852
Florida: Mel Martinez (202) 224-3041
Idaho: Larry Craig (202) 224-2752
Illinois: Dick Durbin (202) 224-2152
Massachusetts: Edward Kennedy (202) 224-4543
Michigan: Carl Levin (202) 224-6221
Nevada: Harry Reid (202) 224-3542
New Hampshire: John Sununu (202) 224-2841
Vermont: Patrick Leahy (202) 224-4242
West Virginia: Jay Rockefeller (202) 224-6472
Wisconsin: Russ Feingold (202) 224-5323

Thank you for your support!

tell your story

if you were abducted by aliens, the government wants to know about it.

chess: new gloss without the brilliancies

Levens, David. Basic Chess. Jan. 2006. Sterling Publishing. c192p. color illus. glossary. index. ISBN 0-600-60804-2. $7.95.

for Library Journal

David Levens’ latest book delivers exactly what it advertises: basic chess. Suitable only for novices, the work presents the fundamentals in the trademark bright tones that characterize the booming instructional book market. While his work proves somewhat thin on tactical practice opportunities, Levens lays out the game and its basic principles, moving into essential knowledge such as standard openings; piece strengths, weaknesses, and movement; pins, forks, and skewers; or common mating patterns. The surface gloss of chessic history, including the obligatory hat tip to famous players (Dickens, Nabakov, Duchamp, Amis, et al), adds little to the text. The pages would have been better allotted to more exercises, the key to improving any beginner’s games. Advanced beginners hoping for a new collection of tough puzzles or reviews of sophisticated lines of play would be better served by standbys like the lively Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide to Chess or the lesser-known 303 Perplexing Chess Puzzles by Fred Wilson and Bruce Albertson. Additionally, nearly all the information in this book is available on the Internet. Not recommended.—Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA

where i'm at

i love my country,
but i want to start seeing other people

look into my crystal ball: see before you the valley of ashes

i sit at work.
i am given pictures.
i write 'catchy' phrases.

these pix generally depict sporty spice in various degrees of impractical fauxthleticism.

example one: crunchy gal in yummy fern-hued vest strolling toward big moody mountains. i write: storm warming.

example two: studly strongwoman wearing bright orange eye-assaulting shirt and playing ball with dog riverside. i write: fetching tops.

example three: holiday product shot of two fuzzy pullovers with scarves flung over them all carefree-like. i write: give fleece a chance.

and so on.

and all i really want to write -- all i really ever want to say these days -- to everyone who crosses my path all day long is: you are fucking doomed. the planet is self-destructing. and not only china. that's just easier to report than the fuck-all we're annihilating.

and it's your fault for buying that take-out ...

or yours -- see on your desk, that little plastic buddha? producing that required we release all sorts hideous VOCs into the air and leachate into the earth your very buddha sat his ass on ...

or yours for doing your nails in that ridiculous pink color and killing all the fish with the runoff going from the mississippi straight into the ocean and choking off all other flora with red algae and starving the fish and driving sharks inland to eat us ...

doomed. i mean you.

left alone

up on the wall, readable while i brush my teeth:

To Waiting

by W. S. Merwin

You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left along for long

bush @ eleven counts and counting

The 2005 International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration of the United States convened on Oct 21st & 22nd. Not sure what will come of it, but Not in Our Name sponsored the commission and members include Sam Hamill, Marcus Raskin, Ann Wright, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Ratner, Barbara Olshanksy, Howard Zinn, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Gore Vidal, Cornel West, and on and on and on ...

Read the indictments here.

all we are is left behind

We have more in common with Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout than we realize. Add that to the short title list of Mary Buchinger's What Tolstoy and Paleopathologists Have in Common.

good night, good luck, good man

George Clooney is my new celebrity boyfriend. Just went and saw Good Night, And Good Luck. So refreshing to watch a movie with an earnest, intelligent screenplay that perfectly telegraphs the tone of an era we remember as an hysterical American anomaly when really it bears a remarkable resemblance to our current state of affairs.

hollow howl holiday

1955. poet before his time.

A Supermarket in California

Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

fat's the new fit

President's Council on Fitness members include:

Coca Cola
Burger King
General Mills
Pepsico

from the Nation 8/29:

Less than a month after Cadbury Schweppes, the candy and soda company, gave a multimillion dollar grant to the American Diabetes Association, the association’s chief medical and scientific officer claimed that sugar has nothing to do with diabetes, or with weight.

when we pretend, our power lacks limits!

Know someone who drives an SUV? Tried to talk them into a hybrid or a newfangled Schwinn? Here's your chance to teach em a lesson with some quick, painless shock therapy! Enjoy. After all, how often do you get your anonymous domination on? Write them up. On the windshield, just like the evil meter stewards do it.

Thanks, Adbusters!

against futile melancholy

A woman I know went through a stage of deriding her husband for saving up his words. Her theory went: he'd been alotted a limited quantity to last a lifetime and was afraid of running out. Seems the man was onto a good thing. People should say less. And we should write even less than that. Or maybe I just struggle with what seems so obvious: we should think something through and write from a point of view, rather than reacting to any and all stimuli to come up with the chimera of meaning.

I recently read a blog that suggested the best thing we can do in response to Katrina & Rita is keep living our happy lives. Really, is that the best thing we can do? I don't know. How about reducing the amount of gadgets we buy, so we contribute less to the oceanic warming that spurred the tropical storms in the first place? Volunteering to rescue the survivors among 90,000 animals left behind? Determining to live with more grace, mindfulness, and action? We are mistaken to shrug shoulders at this natural disaster (made in the USA) and say, ‘Ah, the show must go on’ with a bittersweet glaze over our eyes.

gilbert's venue

Gilbert, Jack. Refusing Heaven. March 2005. Knopf. 200 p. ISBN-13: 978-1-40004-3-651. $25.95

for Prairie Schooner

By Wittgenstein’s watch, our eldest poets circle back to the theme of homecoming as inevitably as they age. Artists, the old fools, can only retire into the cult of yesteryear. The theory would have us believe what Philip Larkin wrote: those who dwell in memory’s "lighted rooms" must be hoping to screen out signs of the blank last "days of thin, continuous dreaming." Jack Gilbert, often retrospective in his slim fifth book Refusing Heaven (Knopf, 2005), may play into this proposition, but the work remains—provocatively—just beyond its ambit.

A master among us at seventy nine years old, Gilbert locates much of his new work in old haunts—Italy, the Greek islands, the lost hotels of Paris. With that in mind, we scan the subject matter—bridges made by memory, gazes held and broken, lives lived, loves lost, the incantatory effect of hard-won solitude—as just the airy nostalgia that might have raised the philosopher’s hackles. "But it’s the having / not the keeping that is the treasure," counters Gilbert. The close attention Gilbert lavishes on his slow, simple life resets the pace at which most of us might otherwise read, in effect doubling our return on his remembrance. Memory and the present state of mind work inextricably, the poems insist. Gilbert is chary of underestimating this link; he takes pain to trace it strictly, as if pressed to run live wire through dry brush. Having the Having begins with the principal metaphor for remembering, knots in string, but moves immediately into a catalog of what the knots cannot quite connote:

I tie knots in the strings of my spirit
to remember. They are not pictures
of what was. Not accounts of dusk
amid the olive trees and that odor.

Memories are not the pictures, not the trees, not the indeterminate odor. Gilbert continues: memories are not a woman’s body, not her memorable mouth, but at least they provide the imperfect means to it all:

They cannot describe, but they
can prevent remembering it wrong.

Where another poet might strain a single metaphor to bear a stock of memories (Jarold Ramsey’s The Tally Stick: "I have carved our lives in secret on this stick / of mountain mahogany the length of your arms"), Gilbert applies no such pressure, fires no false glaze to bond what Ramsey calls a life’s "lengthening runes." Gilbert’s figures for memory—knots, pictures, paths, blazons, bells—change over the course of the poem, an admission of the trouble we have tagging and retrieving what has mattered to us. We can’t help but strip memories with the sands of time. The final lines mimic the touch-and-go flux of the mind, returning to the metaphor with which the poem began:

Two more knots

This end of the line—three stressed syllables— is a small rhythmic swell. Then the simple fragment of held memory slides out of consciousness, felt in the words themselves as the slip of triple consonance falls loose below the last knot—at the end of just and then at the beginning of straight and string:

and then just straight string.

Burning (Andante Non Troppo) begins as elegantly as Having the Having ends. The title sets the pace, with the heat generated by burning tempered by the Italian andante non troppo, a participial phrase for moderate musical tempo. Gilbert scrambles haptic and auditory cues to slow us down; the poet writes against rapidity. To ignore Gilbert’s parenthetical counsel is to burn through the work and pillage for profundity. Trained as mercenaries after meaning, we still fall prey. Most reviews of Refusing Heaven to date carve out the same powerful passage, significance come by easily: "It is the pace of our living / that makes the world available."

Pulled from the poem, each neat phrase tastes good, keeps its own octosyllabic time, perhaps by design. Restored to their context, however, the complete lines vary, eleven and twelve syllables each, and fulfill a greater purpose—transitioning from brief abstraction into slightly longer lines that continue figuratively:

Regardless of
the body’s lion-wrath or forest waiting,

it is always brash self-sabotage that holds off "what the mystery of us knows," always "our gait of being that decides / how much is seen." Our drives and desires can obscure insight, as Gilbert emphasizes in an unexpected contrast between the architecture of old Italian churches and that of modern buildings:

The grand Italian churches are
covered with detail which is visible at the pace
people walk by. The great modern buildings are
blank because there is no time to see from the car.

The passive verbs in this passage lay us bare, demonstrate our complicity to development, our disregard for what we work so hard to build. Slowing down, Gilbert suggests, is an evolutionary precept antedating us by millennia, as old as the river rocks of Kyoto:

A thousand years ago when they built the gardens
of Kyoto, the stones were set in the stream askew.
Whoever went quickly would fall in.

Gilbert has a way of chiding us for forgetting: it is called a leisurely pace for a reason. The pleasure of pacing shapes the poem itself, with stacks of fricatives kept close together—stones, set, stream, askew—but the poet shuffles them mischievously, only hinting at an alliterative pattern (st-vowel, s-vowel-t, st-consonant, vowel-sk-vowel). He sets sounds as close and crooked as the rocks themselves.

Gilbert makes this kind of merry in his poems alone. His meditations draw their strength from the solitary surroundings, remote provinces from which stars can be spied, where nuthatches, finches, and chickadees constitute good company, and thoughts have room to be met and mastered. Wherever it is situated, each poem resounds with the "quiet that is the music of that place, / which is the difference between silence and windlessness." In such stillness, the poet does equal justice to both lost companions and the soul in solitude, but rarely addresses the living. We imagine Gilbert read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet early on, that he may have marked up the passage, "If you can bear it so, be dead among the dead. The dead are occupied." Gilbert, in fact, responded to Rilke ninety three years after the fact in a poem called "Guilty" from his 1996 collection, The Great Fires: "I’m already one of the dead among the dead."

What results from such a stance is a collection that, even when doing the work of tender elegy for beloved dead, carries a sense of striking isolation. Gilbert’s linguistic restraint startles our social sensibilities, starkness magnified when we compare his work to that of his contemporaries. Here is the second stanza from Seamus Heaney’s Personal Helicon, in which the poet remembers peering into a favorite well:

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of the rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

While the well’s depth initially fails to reflect back what the poet hopes to see, we still feel the lush satisfaction in the child’s play. Elsewhere, Heaney alludes to anonymous elders who would keep him from the wells; he fringes the sites with ferns and foxgloves, waterweed, fungus, even a rat that slaps across his reflection; he slides in time to differentiate the young boy from the mild adult author he has become. Heaney populates his five stanzas to achieve a happy chaos against which we can fully see the "big-eyed Narcissus," the spell of his own image. Gilbert’s poem shares no such fascination with the self. It is five lines long, not five stanzas. It telescopes neither forward nor backward in time, but hovers over one well in a silent, isolated moment. A bucket is lowered, but we get none of the rich and rackety plummeting Heaney recalls. The Abandoned Valley asks only that we appreciate the desperation for contact that we must assume will be made:

Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?

Gilbert’s collection echoes with this relentless spirit of inquiry. In the title poem, Gilbert goes so far as to contest mortality if it means we must surrender all we have lived. The narrator chooses "against the Lord. He will not abandon his life." He remembers the mills "where he became a young man as he worked" and regrets:

The mills are eaten away, and eaten
again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them
even though they are gone, to measure against.

If we must submit to death, we will at least pack our memories with us. Such loyalty to this life seems only sensible, yet by Gilbert’s design the logic quickly fails. The poet measures his life against structures twice worn away, mills long gone. The narrator collapses into abstraction:

He is like an old ferry dragged on to the shore,
a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams
and joists ...

From these figures of destroyed glory and retired utility, Gilbert veers into some of his most spectacular language, images that sink brightly into the surreal. After dedicating much of the book to the treasures of having, the sacred remembered, the lost recalled, Refusing Heaven draws the eye to the illusion of thought and the unreliability of all we romanticize with our meager memorials. We cannot stop time. We cannot live in the now. We cannot refuse heaven, nor can we embrace life. The man’s interests in this poem are as impossible and absurd as:

… a wooden ocean out of control.
A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt.

Here is where the poem ends. Yet, if we return to the first piece in the collection, A Brief for the Defense, we remember what Gilbert said to begin with. We might be forgiven for permitting ourselves the brave little luxury of hope:

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.

Delight in the midst of hell on earth, despite fading memories, over rocky ground—Gilbert does not shy from the clichés that furnish memory’s rooms. It is the acoustics he alters in the rooms that, as Pound urged they must, make it new. Love, longing, loneliness—Gilbert’s is a common vernacular. But the poet arranges the mental venue to access what, after we have heard it, seems the only sustainable song, the "music despite everything."

ignoring the fema report: déjà vu

Shame, shame, shame ... why so much talk of shame?

Katrina coverage reminds me of the Keep America Beautiful campaign, when we spent millions guilting individuals into putting litter “in its place” rather than allocating that money to proper industry reform we knew we needed. Journalists today buy into this slogan of individual shame and syndicate that meme without reflecting on the implications. It is like antimuckraking, papering over an era of institutional negligence that led up to the catastrophe in the first place. Is it too complicated, too much legislative tedium to cover?

At least not for Paul Krugman. His op-ed trains the focus back where it should be, on George W. Bush—not during the crisis, but long before, when he unmanned the floodgates of an avertable, imminent disaster. Don’t we recall from September 11th that FEMA gave Conde a list? We knew from this list that the three most likely catastrophes threatening our country were a terrorist attack on New York, another major earthquake in San Francisco, and the third--and most deadly--a hurricane in New Orleans. So what did Bush do? He absorbed FEMA into HSA and reappropriated the budget (meant to repair the now broken levees) to general counterterrorism initiatives. Sometimes I wonder if he really cannot read. This is the only explanation for such blatant strategic ineptitude.

So, yeah there's crushing shame to be borne in our complicity, but the legitimate cause for shame is having elected Bush in the first place. He has now proven beyond a reasonable doubt that is ill-equipped for the job.

playlist for procrastinators

ambient wallpaper for the indoor day:

Bar Code 3:53 White Mud Free Way
Nothing Gold Can Stay 0:36 Robert Frost
A Song in the Front Yard 1:01 Gwendolyn Brooks
Paperweight 3:40 Eszter Balint
This Bouquet 2:28 Ani DiFranco
Speaking in Tongues 2:49 Eagles of Death Metal
...and Carrot Rope 3:52 Pavement
A Minha Menina 2:48 Band of Bees
Haiti 4:07 The Arcade Fire
War In Iraq 3:37 George W. Bush Singers
Conservative, Christian, Right-Wing Republican, Straight, White, American Males 3:17 Todd Snider
Absence of God 3:56 Rilo Kiley
Those To Come 4:24 The Shins
A Supermarket in California 2:17 Allen Ginsberg
The Secret 1:08 Denise Levertov
She Moves She 4:41 Four-tet

naked truth

Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Sept. 2005. Free Press. c240p. notes. index. ISBN 0-743249-89-5. $25.

for Library Journal

Female Chauvinist Pigs (FCPs), according to New York magazine columnist Ariel Levy, come in two species: the woman “open to a certain sort of attention” and her foul-mouthed female fan willing and able to objectify “like a man.” Levy rigorously argues that women not only participate in, but also perpetuate, today’s oversexed raunch culture. Levy challenges Christie Hefner, Sheila Nevins, and Jennifer Heftler, for example, as they position their brands—Playboy, HBO, and The Man Show, respectively—as the fun, ironic realization of post-feminist liberation. Community anecdotes abound, with butches and bois in the lesbian community disparaging their femme girlfriends and the straight dupes of the Girls Gone Wild juggernaut flashing for a branded hat. Levy views the drive to pole dance and dress in tiny, glittery swatches of fabric as a fear of being labeled uptight; she suggests the bad rap of early anti-porn feminists like Dworkin and MacKinnon precipitated a reactionary spring into exhibitionism. Insightful interviews in which preteens fail to distinguish between the desire for attention and sexual attraction reinforce Levy’s argument for comprehensive federal sex-ed programs. Recommended for all public libraries.—Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA

love your mothers

Just finished ordering The Kid when I sat down at my kitchen table and read that lesbian mothers are finally assured full parental rights in California. It's a good day.

Afterword on this one: The Kid was a hilarious book. Smart and sensitive, informative, real.

the astroturf riverbeds of puffy amiyumi

Most music videos are a snooze. In an instant, I can blast through the complete list of those I've actually enjoyed: Michael Gondry’s Bjorkish forest romps in Human Behavior and two devilishly clever spectacles directed by Spike Jonze—Fat Boy Slim’s Weapon of Choice with Christopher Walken and the narcotically rewatchable Sabotage for The Beastie Boys.

Well! After so many years, I’ve finally found a new addition to this very brief list: Puffy de Rumba. I discovered it on LinkTV, Music Video Block #161 for the ambitiously interested. A stationary set of Jpop stars gaze into the camera and synchronously swing their left arms (only) as their stock back-up tribe does same. They don't so much sing as dully intone, yet the rhumba makes it hypnotic. Meanwhile, the camera cuts to Jimi Hendrix, who stumbles through a Magic Garden-variety set and eats some glazed-looking, '70s-era, red-capped mushroom. He falls in a Wonka chocolate river. The dewy-eyed pretties discover him waterside. And that's not all. Find it, watch it. You will become problematically attached.

mother of slain soldier crashes bush's 49th vacation

Cindy Sheehan's son died last year in Iraq after unidentified militants attacked his unit with rocket-propelled grenades. Ms. Sheehan apparently hiked into the Prairie Chapel Ranch because she sought an explanation, a specific identification of the "noble cause" for which her son is said to have died. The President proved unable - or unwilling - to provide one. Odd to understand that recognizing her request would send the wrong message.

Crazies who decide they're against the war after all, Bush might attempt to articulate, will come out of the woodwork, hopping barbed wire, digging tunnels, flying in on their home-hammered tinfoil saucers. The strategy, instead of facing up to Sheehan, was to briefly acknowledge her freedom of speech and then hand it all over, have his publicists announce that the best aides could offer was a commitment to "pass her message along to the President." Her message remains the same.

"If he doesn't come out to talk to me in Crawford, I'll follow him to D.C., and I'll camp out on his lawn. I'll go to prison. I don't want to live in a country where people are treated this way ... I want to tell him that the only way to honor my son's sacrifice is to bring the troops home now."

See the full article on Truthout.org. Or there's always Salon. Oh, and the 8/12 Hendler post at mojoblog.