You may parse the term anti-American differently than I, and if it is truly that subjective, I think that only gives more cause to use the term sparingly. To me the terms signifies a general disdain for all things American: Americans, American culture, the actions and policies of the US government. I’m not convinced that is accurate in the case of Muqtada al-Sadr. When you can isolate the sentiment to some subset of those categories a more accurate term can almost always be found, or qualifiers need to be deployed.

One of the additional instances was on May 2. I posted a “tweet” shortly after I heard it. My recollection is that in this case it came from a presenter, not in the voice of a reporter in the field. I visited the NPR site and went through the Morning Edition stories for that day and I cannot find the use in the only story in that day’s archived line-up about Iraq. It was a discussion about an interview with a member of Sadr’s militia.

It seems most likely that I heard the use in the presentation of news headlines by Carl Kasell (the headlines are a part of the broadcast which is not apart of the show per se, and not publicly archived as thoroughly as the show itself). Less likely, but not ruled out (as stories do sometimes seem to get tweaked before they’re rebroadcast for the second time on the East Cast or for the West Coast), perhaps I did hear it in this story and it got edited out.

In fact, the May 2 story was a reasonable piece that judiciously used qualifying terms and appears to be an honest attempt at figuring out what the “Sadrists” are all about. It effectively pokes holes in the idea that Sadr or his followers are truly “anti-American.”

But then, this morning, May 5, I heard the term used again by Tom Bowman in a news piece (again, not archived with Morning Edition and only select audio eventually shows up in the “News” section of the NPR web site).

I’m sure there are more than these three instances in the span of time between Brian’s first notice of the use and today.

This may seem to be nit-picky, but I think this is symptomatic of a broader problem where motivation is ascribed to subjects without due qualification or substantive evidence. Sometimes it comes in the form of accepting stated motivation (say from official spokespersons) other times it comes in the form of the inaccurate use of language. Both phenomenon are, at best, lazy and at other times malicious.

In this case, given the evidence of the nuanced reporting that can sometimes be found in the more in-depth segments of the show, I’m going to go with “lazy.” It seems to be shorthand slang to fit into those seconds-long spots in the brief newscasts. But it is inaccurate. If we return to Brian’s comment, that Sadr is not “anti-American” but “anti-occupation”, we find in his complaint a solution — the equally short but more accurate term “anti-occupation.”

There’s another problem of inequity, which I don’t have time to get into: That of a general trend of accepting the stated motivation of certain actors — say President Bush — and not accepting the stated motivation of others — let’s say, Osama bin Laden, in spite of evidence that both are just as believable, or that the accepted position actually isn’t supported whereas the stated motivation not accepted might be the most supported by evidence. But that’s worthy of an essay of its own and I’m hardly the first one to highlight these issues.

This morning I found myself relating to issues brought up today in a New York Times’ article about Times Up! tactics and sites like MyBikeLane.com, which are responses to automobiles regularly disrespecting bike lanes.

It appears that MyBikeLane.com is, while New York City specific for now, intended to scale and eventually target other cities as well.

Here in Washington I’ve had similar experiences, albeit in less harried or intense surroundings than what I know exist in Manhattan and the commercial centers of the other boroughs of New York City. It is still unnerving to be forced to quickly pass into the main lane of traffic because of a vehicle sitting idle in the bike lane.

In addition to the idling delivery trucks and ignorant or disrespectful civilians double-parking, cars with diplomatic plates are repeat offenders in this city. They of course, have nothing to fear (except for the occasional bloody biker splattered across their rear window).

One post to MyBikeLane.com reminds us that cyclists can be “just as bad.” I’m probably guilty on this point too: Sometimes I’ve been forced on to the sidewalk by obnoxious drivers (often out-of-towners who don’t understand that bikes have just as much right of way as other vehicles, and in fact are obligated to ride on the street). I’m sure that appears intimidating to pedestrians. And, in general, I’m still getting my “footing” while biking the busy streets of DC.

DC, like New York and many other cities, has a monthly Critical Mass ride that is part activism and part recreation.

Overall CM still seems to be a well-intentioned asynchronous effort at promoting awareness about cyclists’ rights while crossing-over to issues about urban development and environmental sustainability. Sometimes some of the participants, with varying degrees of coherence, draw connections to poverty, corporate globalization and war in their rides.

They plan another lap to disrupt rush hour later, I’m told.

Meanwhile, BoingBoing has a post citing the New York Sun’s reporting on some speculation that American gas prices will have to be more in line with Europe’s (approaching $10 a gallon) sooner rather than later.

It seems to me that the federal government has a motley and incoherent collection of economic policies given it’s so-called “free” trade stance: Inefficient and exploited subsidies, hypocritical tariffs, and taxes or tax policies that don’t make sense. The US is hardly the only country guilty of this, but it does seem to have the most significant amplitude of noise compared to the signal of its ostensible free trade goals.

The trucker’s seemed to mainly be campaigning for expanded exploration and exploitation of domestic fossil fuels, rather than increased fuel efficiency. At the same time, it seems like we’ll need to internalize more costs, that are currently ignored (although more and more acknowledged, most prominently, the ecological cost that also affects our productivity). Insofar as the state exists, surely it has some role in at least defining that.

It seems that in spite of the protest, all will have to get used to the idea of European-sized gas prices and the affect that will have on the price of other goods. Whatever’s left of the free market will answer with efficient vehicles and more coherent transportation planning, as well more tempered consumption in general.

Many things are intertwined with this issue and changing just one facet, whether you take it in a more free-market or in a more socialized direction, will not fix things with out other components changing in concert. The more unilaterally factors are changed, without conscious education about the ripple effect, the greater the disconnect and the greater the hurt for those of us who can’t afford the consequences in the short term.

I got a little abstract there, but I’m no economist so I can’t quickly dig into the specifics and it seems at a high level this is common sense, whichever ideological line you toe.

That one visit, with me lurking in the back (as I always do when I show), made Refresh instantly valuable as a meaningful connection to a range of professional insights into a community I care about because I want to use the fruits of its labor (even more than I want to build it — I got into building it so that I could use it).

Tonight’s Refresh session was a panel discussion, with Jackson moderating. The topic was start-ups, and the participants ranged from just-out-of-college but-already-veteran partners of Publi.us, who started out with FantasyCongress.com, to a veteran who had seen many start-ups mature and is trying to create a new service, LaunchBox, to help others through the same process. Within that range there was Eric Rupert, who I met by accident as I greeted Jackson — and who turns out to be behind the re-launching of Odeo.com. Odeo, coincidentally, I got to try out early in its first incarnation via a long-time long-distance acquaintance Rabble was working on it in its very early days.

I’m not sure I have a point. This is the selfish trumpeting of a wallflower.

I have managed to plug a bunch of things I can say have piqued my interest at various points and that I’m keeping an eye on — but I’ve got no dramatic insight or particular endorsement to give. I’ll just echo that, anecdotally, DC is feeling like a pretty vibrant new media community. It’s gratifying, also, to see how simply paying attention and making connections can give even a gadfly or a bystander (I consider myself slightly more than that in this realm, but maybe not too much more) a unique insight as how incredibly small the world can be.

It also makes me think about how large the world remains for others, in other contexts. But that’s a heavy tangent to jump onto tonight and, for the moment, I’m weighed down by too much to really get and distill that perspective.

The New York Times quotes a Chinese Olympic official, Qu Yingpu, in response to the protests of the Olympic torch tour as saying “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”

His own apparent belief that he can say that with any authority is politics.

Never mind the inherent nationalism that is always present at the Olympics.

What is poorly articulated in the most well-intentioned statements of this sort is a widely shared desire for the Olympics to be a unifying experience, despite the nationalistic undertones, and generally not a polarizing sort of experience.

That’s great, but there is no getting rid of the politics.

I get the feeling that not all the statements are well-intentioned, and I don’t just mean the ones from Chinese officials this year. I think the Olympics are something of a business, and business is always political too.

That aside, it seems futile to to me to achieve an ideal by proclamation, attempting to exclude voices of the real controversies and atrocities of the world—particularly those in which the hosts, and implicitly more powerful than most other participants in the given year’s games, have a role.

So CBS News did an investigation - asking all 50 states for their suicide data, based on death records, for veterans and non-veterans, dating back to 1995. Forty-five states sent what turned out to be a mountain of information.

And what it revealed was stunning.

In 2005, for example, in just those 45 states, there were at least 6,256 suicides among those who served in the armed forces. That’s 120 each and every week, in just one year.

This comes during the same weekend as the group Iraq Veterans Against the War hold their Winter Soldier summit just outside of DC. Veterans who have signed-up with the group are gathering together to share with each other, and the media, critical anecdotes from their experiences in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Post story notes counter-demonstrators accuse the event of being too vague and unverified, but The Real News reports on IVAW’s verification process.

Meanwhile, a group called “Eagles Up!” brought a few hundred people to the National Mall in support of the wars. This coming week will bring anti-war demonstrators to the Capitol for a Wednesday rally on the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

It has been hard to write.

Many drafts with not just incomplete thoughts, but incomplete sentences, sit neglected in the queue right now.

In just this past week, I’ve been paying attention to Eliot Spitzer’s resignation from the office of governor in my home state; the security culture here in Washington as more CCTVs go up, as more allegations of three-letter agency abuses of power breaks (and with two false alarms in DC with an “airspace violation” and a bomb scare); and the state of independent media as Brian from Alive in Baghdad visited (he came to town to contribute material to IVAW’s “Winter Soldier” summit) and I host a Brazilian Indymedia filmmaker in my apartment today.

We’re also approaching the fifth anniversary of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. When the news broke 5 years ago, I was in downtown DC that night, and ran out of the Metro back to my internship at the Institute for Public Accuracy.

I have been able to take photographs. That’s been easier and more natural. I don’t share them all, but some. The most significant ones this week are of a tragedy in my neighborhood. A large apartment building, a home to mostly immigrant tenants went up in flames. Allegations of neglect by a landlord eager to convert to condos are swirling about, and don’t seem far-fetched. Whatever the cause and contributing factors, about 200 people (maybe many more) are without a home.

Mostly fond and polite remembrances were aired across the media.

But in an often included common clip, which I heard it on NPR and others heard or saw elsewhere, was an excerpt from a debate between Buckley and Noam Chomsky on Buckley’s Firing Line program.

Chomsky’s voice, and voices of those who share overlapping views in their analysis of United State government policies and actions, are simply rarely heard in Western public and commercial news media today. But plenty of Buckley’s intellectual progeny are on the air all the time.

There are many instances of marginal progress to be cited in the United States and around the world. We’ve inched forward in many ways in the past half-decade or so. But in the sense of diverse, open debate on the media most people have the most access to we have reverted.

I’m not ignoring the potential and the great examples that can be found, usually after hunting, on the Internet in that statement. It’s my understanding that most working class people get their news from radio and television still, and media access and media content does not usually speak directly to “them” (I say them, I might say us — but I’ve probably broken out of any sociologists definition of the classes).

15 Feb 2008 Update: And that’s been fixed. So let’s see if we can’t sort some stuff out in whatever spare time comes my way.

16 Feb 2008 Update: And yes, first thing I do is not integrate features that leverage XML::Parser, but rather just change live mark-up so that style sheet begins to break.

Hey, listen, this isn’t a high priority yet … any movement at all is a good thing here.

Catholic anti-war demonstrators marched on the White House today, setting off at noon from St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Today’s action was part of their observation of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent and a tradition with a theme of repentence.

A flyer being handed out quoted Pope Benedict XVI as saying “Christ needs apostles ready to sacrifice themselves. He needs witnesses and martyrs.” This kind of quotation seems to be in line with other citations of church authority and scripture that this group uses to explain its non-violent activism.

Many of the participants also participate in a weekly Friday mid-day vigil outside the White House that has gone on since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

They were led by Art Laffin, a long-time activist and organizer with the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker. I’ve spoken with Laffin on a couple of occasions, including while doing a piece for Free Speech Radio News on the Friday vigil and the 3rd anniversary of the Iraq War, and I later witnessed him take part in a large march to the Pentagon that week. Laffin recognized and greeted me as he passed.

I encountered the march returning to my office during my lunch break. I was leaving the vicinity of the Lafayette Park as they approached, so I did not witness what happened after they arrived. Often this group engages in civil disobedience (I witnessed them engage in CD more than once, including during the previously mentioned march and on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombings this year), but I hadn’t heard of any such plans this time around.

In Lafayette Park, on the North side of the White House, you could see signs of the processions imminent arrival if you knew what to look for. The uniformed Secret Service and Park Police seemed to have a few extra personnel on Pennsylvania Avenue and around the park. An elderly man sat down on a bench. He wore jeans and a reasonable jacket, but carried a priest’s cassock to pull over his other clothes, presumably to join the demonstrators.

Today he posted a brief analysis of the current conflict in Chad, starting with recent (but to some, long-forgotten) history of “development” efforts made by transnational corporations (ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco), backed by the World Bank, in concert with an obviously corrupt government.

Analysis like this is part of what journalism should be: Giving credit where credit is due and identifying the disparity between the asserted policy, the allegedly intended cause and effect and what the evidence suggests the actual cause and effect may be and, depending on how policy-makers act in the face of the evidence, what actual policy may be despite rhetoric.

Complementing Silverstein’s more wizened and first hand observations regarding this conflict, I had my own brief anecdotal encounter with the issue. One Friday evening last August, leaving the Press Building, I encountered a small demonstration by Chadians of their Ambassador at the National Press Club. Here are a couple of shots and a summary of what I learned from them.

Nothing else was shown of what this individual said, so perhaps he had a more nuanced view. But I wonder why people say things like that and I wonder why the press focuses on that. It seems like elections would be much more functional, primary elections especially, if you lined up behind the candidate who most represented your concerns and then voted for them—and then you found out who the leader was.

And if you were a “good” party member, you then supported that leader.

Instead people are encouraged to hedge their bets and pick a winner—before they actually pick a winner based on something meaningful.

Of course this has been the case for many election cycles now, so its probably a self-fulfilling habit: There probably is not anyone these people would really want to line-up behind based on the full portfolio of their issues or a close analysis of their credibility. For me, despite all the talk of “hope” and “change” (cliches that, coming from DLC Democrats, are oxymorons without being compound words), that sentiment applies across the aisle.

There’s a problem when people feel there are no good candidates and no clear leader, even the “clarity” presented by not having to deal with actual issues.

Of course, there are people who have looked closely at this kind of failure of democracy. And the dysfunction of horse race politics, poorly moderated debates and media myopia are not the only problems. Take a look at the work of non-profit endeavors like Fair Vote and Open Debates.