global

I wanted to draw your attention to a new blog, World Community. Started by Rui Rocha, from Portugal, it's a global community, offering varying perspectives from all over the world. It's an interesting mix.

Although I was very flattered to be asked, I declined to join. You know me, I'd take the obligation to post in another blog too seriously, and it would become one more thing to stress over. There's still no Maple Leaf on this list, though. I thought maybe one of you would like to fill that spot.

freedom

My own, on a small scale.

It seems like a very long time since I've been able to take all four of my non-day-job days to myself. Since returning from Peru, I've been swamped with writing assignments, editing work, party preparation, a mom visit. It's been fun, and I'll never complain about having too much writing work - but I'm relieved to have turned in the last of it for a little while. I'm looking forward to some serious relaxing and productive down time.

Working three days a week instead of two is really making a difference in my writing life. Our last day-jobs in NYC, which we held for a very long time, were two 12-hour days. Now we both work three 12-hour days (in Allan's case, 13- and 14-hour days). In terms of both energy, time and connection to work, that third day is a real drag. Ah well, we knew we'd never see the likes of those jobs again.

Today's favourite search string:

Does getting a dual citizenship for Canada cause an American go loose his social security benefits

This person apparently spent a lot of time at wtmc. I hope it was helpful!

charity

I have problems with philanthropy. Certain kinds of philanthropy, anyway.

Gazillionaires who give away large sums of money to charitable causes don't make my list of heroes, no matter how many people benefit from their largesse. I'd rather live in a world without gargantuan extremes between have-nots and have-too-muchs.

I admire people who try to change the power structure and economic systems that keep so much of the world in various degrees of desperation - not those who, after exploiting the inequities of the system (that is, unchecked capitalism), find themselves with more money than they could ever spend in ten lifetimes, and dump some of it on the deserving poor.

I've done some fundraising, both in the arts and in activism. I know full well how important money is to worthwhile projects. People who say we shouldn't "throw money at problems" probably don't care if those problems are addressed or not. Money counts. You can't do much without it. We should all give as generously as we can, to whatever moves us. That's the responsibility of everyone who has just a little more than anyone else.

But Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are modern robber barons, not candidates for sainthood.

The Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations do a world of good, but none of it helps the people John D. and Andrew exploited - the businesses they forced to close, the unions they busted, the lives they devastated as they accumulated their vast wealth.

In Collapse, I just read about a hideous, brutal dictator who was also a tremendous environmentalist. He prevented the destruction of forests and rivers. He also tortured and massacred.

Without the Phillip Morris company, arts organizations in the US would probably shrink by half. But its donations don't negate the fraudulent advertising and corrupt marketing that contributes to the death of millions.

I'd rather Wal-Mart pay and treat its employees fairly than fix up the ballfields in communities they help impoverish. A foundation for sick children is less valuable than providing health insurance to the largest sector of employees in the US.

In the mainstream media - and in too many people's imaginations, I think - once someone unloads millions of dollars, he is an angel, and we need look no further. I disagree.

Ted Rall disagrees, too.

Factoid: the average member of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans has seen his income rise 3.5 times--from $800 million (adjusted to 2006 dollars) to $2.8 billion--in the last 20 years. Meanwhile, real income for more than half the population increased...zero. Nada. Zip.

To his credit, Buffett acknowledges the rising income disparity. "What has gone on in this country in recent years is a huge benefit to the very rich and not much that relief to those below," he told Fortune in 2005. But philanthropy won't slow the United States' slide into Third Worlddom. And it doesn't help the philanthropists' victims. All things considered, a $45 million lout like Ken Lay hurts America less than a $44 billion one like Bill Gates.

Consider a burglar who boosts your TV and then, thinking better of it, donates it to an orphanage. His act of generosity beats the alternative--keeping it for himself. But you'd probably prefer that he'd returned it to you, or better yet, never stolen it at all.

Read Gates and Buffett: 1000 Times Worse Than Ken Lay.

jellyfish

I've been so busy at work today, and now it's mid-afternoon and I haven't blogged. I'll take the easy way out: I'll let Greg Palast blog for me.

Why Democrats Don't Count
Lessons from the Un-Gore of Mexico
by Greg Palast

The Exit polls said he won, but the "official" tally took his victory away. His supporters found they were scrubbed off voter rolls. Violence and intimidation kept even more of his voters away from the polls. Hundreds of thousands of ballots supposedly showed no choice for president -- like ballots with hanging chads.

And the officials in charge of this suspect election refused to re-count those votes in public. Everyone knew full well a fair count would certainly change the outcome.

You've heard this story before: Gore 2000. Kerry 2004.

But Lopez Obrador 2006 is made out of very different stuff than the scarecrow candidates who, oddly, call themselves "Democrats."

For six years now, I've had this crazy fantasy in my head. In it, an election is stolen and the guy who's declared the loser stands up in front of the White House and says three magic words: "Count the votes."

This past Saturday, my dream came true. Unfortunately, it was in Spanish -- but I'll take what I can get. There was Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador, presidential challenger, standing in the "Zocalo" -- the square in front of Mexico's White House, telling the ruling clique inside, "Count the votes!"

Most important, his simple demand was echoed by half a million pissed-off, activated voters chanting with him, "Vota por vota!" -- vote by vote.

And you know what? I think they are going to have to listen. I suspect that the rulers of Mexico, a vicious, puffed-up, arrogant elite, may well have to count those votes. But, for that to happen, someone had to ask them to do it -- in no uncertain terms.

Traveling the USA, I'm asked again and again 'Why don't Democrats stand up when their elections are stolen?'

The answer: for the same reason jellyfish don't stand up... they're invertebrates.

I'm beginning to find that answer a bit too glib (though darn funny). Because it's not about electoral cojones; it's about a devotion to democracy deep in the bone. Yet weirdly, candidates that call themselves "Democrats" seem kind of, well, indifferent to democracy.

Why? Elections are the radical tool of the working class -- the great leveler of the powerless against the too-powerful. But the candidates themselves, both Republican and Democrat, tend to come from the privileged and pampered class. Votes are just the surfboards on which their ambitions ride.

Right now in Mexico's capitol, nearly a million ballots sit in tied bundles uncounted. That's four times the "official" margin of victory of the ruling party over Lopez Obrador. Supposedly, they're "votos nulos" -- null votes, unreadable. But, not surprisingly, when a few packets were opened, the majority of these supposedly unreadable votes were Lopez Obrador's.

If you think that's a Mexican game, think again. Because that's exactly what happened in Florida and Ohio.

In Florida, 179,855 ballots supposedly showed no vote for President. A closer look by the US Civil Rights Commission statisticians showed that 54% of those Florida "votos nulos" were cast by African-Americans. Did Black folk forget to vote for President, couldn't make up their minds or, as one TV network implied, were too dumb to figure out the ballot? Not at all. Machines can't count some ballots. But people can. For example, several voters wrote in, "Al Gore," which the machines rejected as his name was already printed on the ballot. The write-in could fool a machine but a human has no problem figuring out that voter's intent.

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago reviewed all 179,855 "uncountable" votes and found the majority attempted to choose Gore. And they would have been counted -- but Florida's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, ordered a halt.

So Bush was elected not by counting the votes but by preventing their count. And he was reelected the same way in 2004 when a quarter million votes were nullified in Ohio.

But why fixate on Florida and Ohio? Here's a nasty little fact about voting in the Land of the Free not reported in your newspapers: 3,600,380 ballots were cast in the November 2004 presidential election that were never counted. In 2000, the uncounted ballots totaled just under two million.

And where were the Democrats? In 2004, behind the huge jump in uncounted votes was a mass challenge campaign aimed at poor, Black and Hispanic voters by the Republican Party -- pushing these voters, mostly Democrats, to "provisional ballots." They could have been counted, if someone had fought for it. Hundreds of lawyers were on stand-by but the head of the biggest legal team told me in confidence -- and in frustration -- that the Kerry campaign told them to stand down.

Recently, Al Gore was asked if the election of 2000 was stolen. "There may come a time when I speak on that, but it's not now," said the beta dog. (I suspect that if Al Gore were found bleeding in an alley, he'd answer the question, Who shot you? with "There may come a time when I speak on that...").

Lopez Obrador is of a different breed. At the rally last Saturday in Mexico City, he played video and audio tapes of the evidence of fraud on a screen eighty feet tall. Imagine if Gore had projected the "scrub sheets" of purged Black voters on a ten-story-high screen in front of the White House.

Lopez Obrador put political force behind his legal demands by calling on voters from every state in Mexico to march to the capital. Two million are expected to arrive this Sunday. The result: the word among the political classes is that the election may be annulled. Even the conservative Financial Times has warned Mexico's elite not to "fool itself" by ignoring the demand for a full vote count.

North-of-the-Border Democrats just don't get it. The Republican Party is pushing "provisional" ballots, pushing voter ID requirements, compiling secret challenge lists, scrubbing voter registries and selling us vote-nullifying ballot boxes: they get it completely. The GOP knows the key to their electoral domination is not in winning over their opponents' votes, but in not counting them.

The un-Gore of Mexico City has a lesson for the Blue-party gringos. Either the Democrats demand that all votes count, or the Democrats will count for nothing.

countdown

Wmtc reader Alex K sent me this: a day worth celebrating.

Order your bumper sticker now. NN: a great birthday, eh?

fantastic

Excellent news from Colorado!

search

I am often amused at the weird search strings by which some people find this blog. If you use StatCounter or some other tracking service you've probably had the same experience.

I've been saving the search strings for a couple of days. These are only searches from search engines - Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, MSN - not people who come to wmtc through a link at another blog or website. And I'm not listing standard ways to find this blog, like "how to move to canada" or "canada immigration".

I am often amazed at how many people really don't know how to use a search engine. Here are search strings for the last few days:

american girl married canadian in the u.s. wants to move to canada how do i do that

Korean schools built by Canadian soldiers

i'm from the US and planning to move in Canada, do Canada honor US drivers license

what noise do sheep make

picard peanuts [this pops up regularly: someone once mentioned it in comments]

Italian is similar to Spanish

unsigned cheque error remedies

RCN and the government scandal in St. John's Newfoundland

pearson educational measurement SAT essay scorer

smith and smith characters [also a perennial]

funny facts about trolls

what time is lcbo open to tonight [on Canada Day]

nice places to live in Mississauga

standard processing times for applications in Buffalo to move to Canada

words to the toronto song

donica patrick [a perennial, always misspelled; her name is Danica Patrick but someone misspelled it in comments once]

green eyes percentage usa

harold pinter clapton synagogue

robertson davies deptford trilogy chapter five

list of current CEOs fond of cricket

did the slaves travel through niagara falls

mcdonalds iced coffee [tons of these!]

ice capp recipes [lots of these, too - always written this way]

how to make iced coffee decaf drinks

if i take a car to canada, what will i have to show to cross the border?

so how can a american cross over to canada anyway

can i take my dog to canada

american defectors to canada celebration

macchu picchu altitude sick

rent a home in aguas calientes

nice cafes in lima [lots of people now find wmtc by searching for information about peru!]

rick mercer report [almost daily!]

MRI GTA ontario 24 hrs

18th century quebec personal conscience

co-worker moving to another country

What are some of yours?

boring

Random notes on a rainy Wednesday.

It's a pointless ritual in this era, but I dutifully watch the All Star Game every year, and dutifully cheer for my American League friends and enemies. We won, of course, making it ten in a row. Now, in my own ritual, I will savour the day off that completes The Break.

I hate the rain. Rain makes me feel bad, physically and mentally. It's raining. Incessantly. Although it was beautiful yesterday and it may be beautiful tomorrow, rain always feels incessant to me. (Yes, I know the plants need it. I am aware of plants' need for water.)

Theatre today, Ionesco's The Chairs. Soulpepper so far has been mediocre, sometimes good, but the performances are just not great. This one is also bad timing, as I have a Friday writing deadline.

I'm writing about Brooke Ellison, who is running for State Senate in New York. Ellison, 27 years old, Harvard graduate, public speaker, mover and shaker, is a vent-dependent quadriplegic. I wrote about Ellison some years back when Christopher Reeve made a TV movie about her. The movie was based on the book Ellison and her mother wrote about their lives, and premiered just two weeks after Reeve died.

Now I'm doing a follow-up story about her entry into the political arena. I write about disability issues, and don't have a sentimental attitude about it. But Brooke! Now she is an amazing person.

I confess I watched not one minute of World Cup play, although I always followed who won and who lost, and which countries were moving on. I find it really difficult to concentrate on any non-baseball sport during baseball season. I probably would have enjoyed some futbol if we had gone to a bar and watched with a crowd, but we weren't motivated to do that.

I did really enjoy seeing the Toronto area get into the World Cup, though - all the flags on cars, games broadcast in public in the middle of the day, people talking about results at work. I caught the excitement even though I wasn't watching.

In case you can't tell, you've just read a "must post daily" post, a filler because I have nothing of substance to write about today, my head being filled with my own writing. Feel free to post your own filler (or substantial) comments as you see fit.

out

This is from today's Globe and Mail.

I rarely agree with Margaret Wente. I don't necessarily agree with her reasoning here - conspicuously lacking is any measure of the three-letter word, that substance that flows through the Central Asian pipeline.

But I do agree with her conclusion: it's not our fight.

No wonder Cpl. Boneca wanted out
by Margaret Wente

The 17th Canadian killed in Afghanistan didn't fit the heroic script we love when our soldiers fall in battle. Corporal Anthony Boneca was not at all happy to be fighting. In fact, he hated it. "He was misled," his girlfriend's father told the Toronto Star. "He was very mad about it."

Cpl. Boneca, who was on his second tour in Afghanistan, was a reservist. He never expected to find himself in a blistering hellhole, short of rations, being shot at by bad guys. His friends back home aren't playing by the script, either. Declared one: "It's not our fight."

The 21-year-old Cpl. Boneca was not the only one to be unpleasantly surprised at the reality of Afghanistan. Just three months after Britain's then-defence secretary chirpily speculated that British troops might be able to complete their mission without firing a shot, they're rushing in reinforcements; six of their soldiers have been killed in the past few weeks. For Canada, of course, reinforcements are not an option, since we have no extra troops to send.

On paper, the odds don't look bad. The Taliban or al-Qaeda or whatever they're called -- they're an ever-changing mix of religious fighters and men in the employ of various warlords and drug lords -- are said to number no more than 5,000. There are 28,000 American soldiers (some of whom will go home when NATO ramps up), and NATO forces will amount to 17,000. But the number of combat troops is just a fraction of the total deployment -- in Canada's case, about 550 in a total contingent of 2,200, although now our resupply troops are also seeing action. These soldiers are supposed to impose peace across a forbidding land the size of Texas, much of which is under the unofficial rule of mullahs.

The polite fiction is that, in NATO's mission, security and reconstruction go hand in hand. But, in most of Afghanistan, there's nothing to reconstruct. As for aid, you need an infrastructure to deliver it, and there isn't any of that, either.

Donor aid has been pouring in by the billions. But the main beneficiaries, as usual, are expensive international consultants and corrupt local officials, who've created a housing boom in Kabul but very little else. Only 6 per cent of the population has access to electricity. According to The Economist, not a single new dam, power station or water system has been built in the five years since the Taliban fell. Kabul has no sewer system. And Afghans are increasingly disillusioned at the West's failure to deliver security and services.

Meantime, Western governments and aid agencies have been shockingly naive about the task at hand. "The West has been guilty of applying Western precepts on an almost post-medieval economy," warns Lieutenant-General David Richards, the British commander of the NATO forces. "A quarter of children die by the age of 5. Worrying about civil service reform and gender rights are really tomorrow's problems." Everyone was surprised by the Taliban's resurgence. "We took our eye off the ball," says Gen. Richards. But NATO's strategy also looks naive. The plan is to establish secure areas as bases from which to inject aid into the surrounding region and build loyalty to the Western-backed government. That was the idea in Iraq, too.

There has been some progress. Some girls are going to school. The police are not quite as brutal as before. As Sima Samar, the head of Afghanistan's human-rights commission, says: "Everyone had to be tortured before. Now they do torture, but not everybody."

The insurgents, meanwhile, are armed with an endless supply of weapons and a bottomless well of opium money. They are largely trained in Pakistan, where NATO troops can't reach. And NATO is handicapped not so much by mission creep as by mission fuzz. Long-time Afghan hand Christina Lamb, writing in The Sunday Times, reports that one senior British military officer talks despairingly of "military and developmental anarchy." On top of that, there's the notoriously short attention span of the West, which wants results now without bloodshed.

Repairing Afghanistan is a noble cause. It's also mission impossible. I suspect that, before too long, more and more Canadians will decide that it's not our fight.

fourteen

There's been another development in this terrible story.

Five U.S. soldiers were charged in a rape and multiple murder case that has outraged Iraqis, as documents obtained by Reuters on Sunday showed the rape victim was a minor aged just 14, and not over 20 as U.S. officials say.

Days after former private Steven Green was charged as a civilian in a U.S. court with rape and four murders, four serving soldiers were charged with the same offences, the U.S. military said in statement that did not name the troops.

. . . .

Those court documents gave the raped daughter's estimated age as 25, though U.S. military officials in Iraq say their documents have her as 20.

Her identity card and a copy of her death certificate, however, show she was just 14.

Local officials and relatives had said she was 15 or 16.

Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi was born on August 19, 1991 in Baghdad, according to the identity card, provided to Reuters by a relative. Issued in 1993, it features a photograph of her at 18 months, wide-eyed and with a lick of dark hair over her brow.

A copy of her death certificate, dated March 13, gives the same birth date. She was found at home by a relative on March 12 and had died from "gunshot wounds to the head, with burns", that document, signed by doctor Wael Habib and a registrar, asserts.

With five Americans now facing the death penalty in the case, the fact the rape victim was a minor could be a factor in sentencing in the event of any convictions. Abeer's sister Hadeel was just six when she died of "several gunshot wounds".

The killers tried to burn the bodies and house to cover their tracks, relatives and local officials have said.

I hesitated to post this. If Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi had been 20, 30, 40 or 50 years old, the crime would be no less awful. She would have suffered just as much.

I realize that there is something particularly horrific about a young girl, a child, being raped and murdered. Believe me, I understand that. But an adult woman is no less important than a child, no better equipped to endure such a horror. The flip side of recoiling at the knowledge that the victim was 14 years old is not recoiling enough if she were 24, or 34.

The important point in this revelation is that the US Army lied about the victim's age, in order to make the crime seem a little less worse.

relations

I've been cruising the blogosphere, reading Canadian bloggers' take on the recent meeting between Stephen Harper and the Resident. Predictably, lefties feel Harper is kissing up to his mentor, that he's a puppet, and that any day now Canada will be in the full thrall and command of the Cheney Regime. Conservatives are relieved relations with the US have thawed, and that more money will be spent wasted on the military.

Try as I might, I didn't see any fawning on Harper's part. I agreed with this assessment in the Globe and Mail that Harper was careful not to appear too buddy-buddy with the least popular US president in decades, that he was cordial, but not fawning. (I don't agree with the G&M's position on Afghanistan; I'm only referring to the tone and demeanor of the meeting.)

Liberal Canadian bloggers seem to forget that most of Paul Martin's tough talk about the US was just that: talk, calculated to resonate with voters. On international affairs, the actual policy differences between Liberals and Conservatives are slight. (I don't want to say nonexistent, as there might be minor differences that I'm unaware of.) Bill Graham's warning to Harper is a lot of hot air, given Harper said he doesn't intend to re-open debate on missile defence.

Don't get me wrong. I don't like Harper. I want to see Canada pull out of Afghanistan, I want to see a serious child-care program crafted and enacted, I want money and attention put into social programs like housing, education and health care. I don't want the government dangling tax cuts in front of voters' faces like catnip. But I still don't see Harper as a puppet of the US.

If he's biding his time, lying low until he comes back with a strong majority, and then he'll turn Canada into the 51st state, well, that's an excellent reason to get a strong Liberal leader and turf these guys out.

All the anti-Harper sentiment out there really makes me want proportional representation. If we could gather all that feeling together, we could really get somewhere.

still

I still miss Buster.

It's been eight months since we lost him, and I still miss him so much.

I don't miss the enormous effort it took to keep him alive and healthy, and away from other dogs. I'm enjoying having one easy-going, low-maintenance dog. There's no doubt that our lives are much easier now. Doesn't matter. And I have no regrets; I know we did the right thing. Doesn't matter. I still miss him.

I don't even particularly want another dog (yet). As Cody ages, it won't be fair to introduce another dog into the pack. So we may have a small window in which to make that decision, and I think we're letting it shut. I can't imagine how empty it's going to feel when Cody's gone. But still, I think we're enjoying the easy life too much to make any changes.

So it isn't that I miss having two dogs. I just miss Buster.

I miss his fierce love, his intensity, his constancy. Cody loves us in her sweet, quiet, low-key way. Buster loved us like the whole universe was at stake.

for rent

More so than in New York, people in the Toronto area own their own homes or condos. People I meet assume everyone should own a home, and assume we want to, as well. On hearing that we rent a house, people immediately ask, Can you buy it?

This must be in part because - believe it or not - housing is very affordable in the Greater Toronto Area than in New York. Most working stiffs in New York can't afford to own. Some people move far, far out of the metro region in order to buy a home, and many other New Yorkers own tiny condos, which is way more expensive than renting. In the Toronto area - and elsewhere in Canada, I assume? - people earning salaries similar to ours expect to own homes. That's not the case in New York.

The fact is, Allan and I have no interest in buying a home, and that's not likely to change. The common wisdom about home ownership just doesn't work for me. I know all the usual complaints against renting. Supposedly, I'm throwing my money away on rent, I need equity, it's better for tax purposes, you can make a lot of money in real estate. And then, simply, owning is good. Many people like the fact of property ownership for its own sake.

I see it differently. I don't pay property tax. I don't owe money on a mortgage. When something breaks, I call the landlord. I'll never need to replace a roof, or a furnace, or buy a washing machine.

Although it's possible we could finance a home with a mortgage equal to what we now pay in rent, I doubt it - certainly not in any location we'd want to live. Then there's property tax, and a downpayment. That's money better spent seeing the world. If we did find a home we could afford, we'd have to maintain it, which costs money and time. Time we'd rather spend doing other things.

It's true that many people turn a profit by selling their homes. But many people don't. In any case, in the US, profit made through real estate must be reinvested in real estate until you reach retirement age, or you lose most of it to taxes. So selling one home, no matter how profitable, doesn't lead to a big pile of cash: it leads to buying another home. [Update: I've been informed that this is no longer the case in the US. (See comments.) I'm sure someone will tell us about Canadian law soon.]

Many years back, good friends of ours were once told by a therapist that their lack of interest in home ownership was really a fear of commitment! One of them has since died. The survivor looks back on their time together, and feels grateful and appreciative that they didn't waste it shopping for a house, buying it, maintaining it, and selling it. Instead, they paid rent and left the work to the landlord.

I'm not saying all you homeowners out there aren't doing the right thing for your own lives. There are clearly advantages for some people. But there are drawbacks, too - drawbacks that no one seems to acknowledge. Renting is frowned on as foolish, and buying is both wise and preferred. And I just don't see the point, for myself.

The only home I want to own is on wheels.

spiderman

I've wanted to link to this for days, but it seemed too far off topic. But hey, what's the point of blogging if you can't post whatever you want?

Check out this video clip. Whether or not you appreciate the game of baseball, you can marvel at what this man does. It's as great a catch as you'll ever see.

Gary Matthews Jr. steals a home run.

Here's the catch Redsock is comparing it to. Another view of it is here, with Japanese audio. It saved the game.

my hometown, part 2

Orc - disaffected American, trainspotter, packrat and friend of wmtc - has an excellent take on the recent (illogical, bigoted) New York State Court of Appeals decision.

my hometown

I received this email yesterday from Rachel, who I used to work with in the Haven Coalition.

Dear Friends,

I have wonderful news and bad news. The wonderful news is that Sally is pregnant, and we will be parents in late October, keynahora.

Before you hit reply, I want to tell you the bad news.

The bad news is that the highest court in New York has found our family to be of no value. The Court of Appeals ruled today that the state may rationally favor opposite-sex couples in marriage, because they can procreate more easily. A gay couple's deeply considered decision to raise children is insufficient to obligate New York State to protect their family equally. To quote from Robert Smith's decision: "A person's preference for the sort of sexual activity that cannot lead to the birth of children is relevant to the State's interest in fostering relationships that will serve children best."

Rather than email me to say mazel tov, it would be much more meaningful if you would join me tonight . . . to demonstrate your opposition to the anti-marriage ruling.

From the New York Times:

New York's highest court rejected yesterday a broad attempt by gay and lesbian couples across the state to win the right to marry under state law, saying that denying marriage to same-sex couples does not violate the State Constitution.

By a 4-2 majority, the Court of Appeals found that the State Legislature, in laws dating back nearly 100 years, intended to limit marriage to a union between a man and a woman, and that the Legislature had a rational basis for doing so.

The court said it would be up to lawmakers to decide whether same-sex marriage should be permitted, and the ruling had politicians and others mobilizing immediately for a fight in Albany.

The majority decision, written by Judge Robert S. Smith, found that limiting marriage to couples of the opposite sexes was based on legitimate societal goals, primarily the protection and welfare of children. It could well be argued, he said, that children are better off raised by a biological mother and father, rather than by a gay or lesbian couple.

"Plaintiffs have not persuaded us that this long-accepted restriction is a wholly irrational one, based solely on ignorance and prejudice against homosexuals," Judge Smith wrote in his 17-page opinion.

The court's chief judge, Judith S. Kaye, issued a sharp dissent, warning that future generations would look back at yesterday's decision as "an unfortunate misstep."

She said that barring gay marriage was tantamount to barring interracial marriage, as laws formerly did.

"The long duration of a constitutional wrong cannot justify its perpetuation, no matter how strongly tradition or public sentiment might support it," Judge Kaye wrote in a 27-page opinion, in which she was joined by Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick.

Gay and lesbian groups viewed the decision as a setback, though it was not unexpected. "Today is a sad day for all New Yorkers who believe in the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under law," said Roberta A. Kaplan, lead counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union for the plaintiffs in one of four cases consolidated in the same ruling.

From Gay.com:

The 17-page ruling by Judge Robert Smith was noteworthy for its circular reasoning and lack of rigorous analysis.

Matt Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force called the majority decision "tortured and intellectually strained."

. . .

Smith applied the lowest standard of judicial review to justify the discrimination in New York's domestic relations law, finding that the state had a legitimate interest in favoring heterosexual couples for two main reasons:

First, since only heterosexual couples can have children by accident or impulse, the state could reasonably seek to encourage such couples to procreate in the context of a stable institution like marriage.

Second, the state could reasonably prefer that children be raised in a household with a male and a female parent.

"Intuition and experience," wrote Smith, "suggest that a child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like."

The standard of review also requires that the law or policy under review be "rationally related" to the state's legitimate interest. Arguably, since gay couples have children, since the denial of marriage rights to gay couples in no way increases the number of children raised in opposite-sex households, and since many heterosexual couples are childless, the connection between the two rationales and the bar to same-sex marriage is unclear. In one of the weakest areas of the decision, Smith breezed over the logical impasse with minimal explanation.

Writing in dissent, Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye chided the majority for dodging the essential question in the case. "The issue is not whether the state has a legitimate interest in stable heterosexual families, she wrote. The issue is whether the state has a legitimate reason for blocking gay families from the institution of marriage." [Emphasis mine.]

Kaye wrote that future generations will look upon the decision "as an unfortunate misstep." She argued that marriage is a fundamental right, obliging the court to hold the state to the toughest, not the easiest, legal test.

"It is uniquely the function of the Judicial Branch to safeguard individual liberties guaranteed by the New York State Constitution, and to order redress for their violation," she wrote. "The court's duty to protect constitutional rights is an imperative of the separation of powers, not its enemy."

In fact, no one disputes that marriage is considered a fundamental right under the due process clause of the Constitution. But to escape the legal implications of that piece of settled law, many courts have defined the right at stake not as the fundamental "right to marry," but as the nonfundamental "right to marry a same-sex partner."

Smith and his majority did just that, again with sketchy reasoning.

Kaye also argued that homosexuals meet the definition of a suspect class, a group "whose defining characteristic is so seldom relevant to the achievement of any legitimate state interest, that laws grounded in such considerations are deemed to reflect prejudice and antipathy." As such, she wrote, the question of marriage equality also deserved heightened scrutiny by the court under the equal protection clause.

By contrast, Smith seemed to imply that laws "governing marriage and family" can almost automatically discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation without such legal consequences.

"It's a sad day for New York families," said plaintiff Kathy Burke of Schenectady, who is raising an 11-year-old son with her partner, Tonja Alvis. "My family deserves the same protections as my next-door neighbor's."

Plaintiff Regina Cicchetti said she was "devastated" by the ruling. But the Port Jervis resident said she and her partner of 36 years, Susan Zimmer, would fight on, probably by lobbying the Legislature for a change in the law.

"We haven't given up," she said. "We're in this for the long haul. If we can't get it done for us, we'll get it done for the people behind us."

A little later, Rachel forwarded to me an emergency email that was sent to Haven Coalition membership. A married couple, both 17 years old, needed a place to stay. They had traveled to New York City to terminate a pregnancy, but were turned away from hotels because of their young age.

A Haven member had responded, "Maybe Robert Smith would like to host this fine young couple in his home."

charged

Lt. Ehren Watada, the first US officer to refuse deployment to Iraq, has been formally charged by the Army:

Today, July 5, 2006, First Lieutenant Ehren K. Watada was formally charged with three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice: missing movement (Article 87), two counts of contempt towards officials (Article 88), and three counts of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman (Article 133). If convicted of all charges by a general court-martial, Lt. Watada could be sentenced to over seven years in a military prison.

Lt. Watada's lawyer, Eric Seitz, said this morning: "We expected the missing movement charge, but we are somewhat astounded by the contempt and conduct unbecoming charges. These additional charges open up the substance of Lt. Watada's statements for review and raise important First Amendment issues. We are delighted that the Army has given us the opportunity to litigate these questions." Most previous prosecutions of Article 88 took place during the Civil War and World War I, and the last known prosecution was in 1965 (Howe vs. U.S.). Lt. Howe was protesting the Vietnam War.

On Thank You, LT, you can see photos and read reports from the recent National Day of Action in support of Watada. Turnout was small, but the actions were widespread and fervent. I'm pleased to see there are reports from both Vancouver and Toronto.

Please check out the website and do what you can to support resistance to this immoral and illegal war.

parallels

A few days ago, on our way to watch Canada Day fireworks, we drove on Mississauga Road, where the true McMansions of our area are found. The homes are huge - and most, in my opinion, are monstrously ugly. In typical McMansion fashion, the owners have built on the entire lot, so the houses are crammed in, one next to the other, each one bigger and uglier than the next.

Of course the homes of Mississauga Road are shacks compared to many wealthier areas. On the front page of the New York Times online, I happened to notice an item from the Real Estate section, about the burst of mansion-building in Beverly Hills, where 11,000 square feet is considered cozy. In New York City, excessive wealth is a little more hidden, in penthouse apartments overlooking Central Park, although not, I would imagine, in the owners' second and third homes.

Contrast this with a recent report from what's left of the city of New Orleans.

Katrina shocks New Orleans visitors 10 months on

Bill Friend thought he was ready to go home again. He had read the newspapers, watched TV and talked with friends about the devastation wreaked on New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.

Still, he was shocked.

"You go down street after street after street and see nothing -- wreckage," said Friend, 80, who grew up in New Orleans and now lives in the Washington area. "The overall impression of it is how much of it there is."

Katrina hit New Orleans on Aug. 29, flooding 80 percent of the city and killing more than 1,500 from Louisiana in one of the worst natural disasters the country has seen. So far, only about half the population has returned and vast stretches of the city are nearly deserted and still full of debris.

Here are snips from the discussion that followed when the above story was posted at Democratic Underground:

[from post] My son was in NO in Feb. He said the devastation was worse than anything you could imagine, FAR, FAR WORSE THAN WHAT YOU SEE ON TV. He brought home pictures...pictures that he took while driving through...miles and miles of nothing but wreckage...total wreckage, like a bomb had destroyed the entire city.

[from post] I was in New Orleans last month. I agree, nothing on tv prepares you for the destruction. I was shocked that so much was still in shambles. I guess having a pile of debris in front of a house is a good sign - at least the house has been cleared out. The houses still piled with stuff, wet moldy, decaying stuff, are where the problem is. Families are away or can't bring themselves to gut the houses. Even on Canal St there were burned our businesses, unopened businesses, boarded up hotels and shopping areas. A City of New Orleans building was boarded up and still damaged. Words cannot describe the devastation that still exists.

I mentioned recently that I'm reading Collapse, by Jared Diamond. In failing societies, it seems the elite continued to spend lavishly, often competitively, while the common people struggled and scraped for resources that were increasingly scarce. In ancient societies, as today, lavish spending often was expressed by building. In ancient Mexico, the Mayan elite built more and more elaborate temples, while farms were failing and warfare for ever-dwindling resources was raging. On Easter Island the elite were still competing to build larger and larger statues, while the people were starving to death.

symbols

Happy Fourth of July to my US friends. Check out Cody's friend Noah.

A long time ago, I thought about my different reactions to the Stars and Stripes and the Maple Leaf. (If you go back to that post, don't miss the comments.)

Howard Zinn (ever my hero) has been thinking about this, too. This Fourth, Zinn suggests we put away our flags - and helps explain the difference between patriotism in a country like Canada and nationalism in the US.

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession."

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day."

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government's lies.

How many times have we heard President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail last year that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

letter

I have a letter in the Toronto Star today. Nothing you haven't heard from me before!