Bohemian Mama

Terry Kirsch, a Vietnam veteran from Canby, Ore., said he later tried to use a ticket to get into the event, but was told the fire marshal had closed the site.

"It was very disheartening to me as someone who fought in the war and was wounded in the war, and now I'm not allowed to hear my government speak," Kirsch said.

Kevin Mannix, chairman of the Oregon Republican Party, said the decision to close the event had to do with safety, not politics. He also dismissed complaints by Kirsch and other Kerry backers about access to the rally.

"This was a rally for Bush-Cheney supporters," Mannix said. "If people have already made up their minds to support John Kerry, then they are welcome to attend John Kerry's rallies."

It began with a haircut after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. David W. Johnson, a man with orange dreadlocks who had struggled to recover from drug addiction, chose to straighten up and give back to his country.

He joined the Oregon National Guard and was deployed to Baghdad as part of the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry. In May -- adding to his transformation -- the cook-turned-gunner was baptized by a chaplain at the base in Taji, Iraq.

Saturday morning, Johnson, 37, was killed in a roadside bombing northwest of Baghdad. The specialist was riding in the turret of the last Humvee in a convoy to Taji during a supply run. He will be promoted posthumously to sergeant.

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less -- mainly Black -- were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.

New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city's poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the "large group…mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods" who wanted to evacuate but couldn't.

Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome.

On the fortieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United States seems to have returned to degree zero of moral concern for the majority of descendants of slavery and segregation. Whether the Black poor live or die seems to merit only haughty disinterest and indifference. Indeed, in terms of the life-and-death issues that matter most to African-Americans -- structural unemployment, race-based super-incarceration, police brutality, disappearing affirmative action programs, and failing schools -- the present presidential election might as well be taking place in the 1920s.

But not all the blame can be assigned to the current occupant of the former slave-owners' mansion at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The mayor of New Orleans, for example, is a Black Democrat, and Los Angeles County is a famously Democratic bastion. No, the political invisibility of people of color is a strictly bipartisan endeavor. On the Democratic side, it is the culmination of the long crusade waged by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to exorcise the specter of the 1980s Rainbow Coalition.

And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.

More than 130 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq, and at least 26 of them have been killed. Many more Iraqis have also been seized in the chaos since Saddam Hussein was ousted last year, in many cases for ransom.

In new violence Wednesday, a suicide attacker detonated a car bomb outside a photocopy shop in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Al-Jamiyah where Iraqi National Guard applicants were readying their papers before heading to a nearby recruiting center. The blast killed at least six people and wounded 54, authorities said.

Bloodied bodies, shattered glass and debris littered the street. Residents and relief workers collected human remains and put them into plastic bags.

"9 out of 10 terrorists agree: Vote Kerry/Edwards 2004"

Sue Niederer wore a shirt with a photo of her son, Army Lt. Seth Dvorin, that read "President Bush You Killed My Son." Dvorin died in February, and Niederer said she asked the first lady why her daughters and the children of other politicians weren't serving in Iraq.

"At that point, it became chaotic and I was pushed and shoved," said Niederer of Hopewell. "They engulfed me. It wasn't plain, ordinary folks but people in suits with earphones."

The crowd chanted "Four more years" as secret service agents surrounded Niederer and escorted her outside. Once outside, Niederer said she was handcuffed and placed in a police van after trying to speak to reporters. She was charged with trespassing.

Back in February, FoxNews reported that President Bush acknowledged the troublesome job market:

"There are still some people looking for work because of the recession. There are people looking for work because jobs have gone overseas. And we need to act in this country. We need to act to make sure there are more jobs at home, and people are more likely to retain a job," Bush said.

Apparently the RNC hasn't taken Bush's words to heart. Last Friday, Robert X. Cringely wrote in a column in InfoWorld:
It seems the Republican National Committee is such a staunch believer in outsourcing that it used a firm in Maharashtra, India, to create its database of approximately 165 million registered voters.

For the record: The Dems’ voter database was developed by a company, Plus Three, based in a distant suburb of New Delhi, India, called Washington, D.C.

One detail Cringley missed: The DNC's voter database is also bigger than the RNC's — by a margin equal to the population of another distant New Dehli suburb called New York City.

"Mr. president, Colin Powell told you about this war that 'if you break it, you own it.' And now you're going around talking about an 'ownership society.' Well, Mr. President, let me tell you what you own. A million jobs lost. You own that. A thousand soldiers lost. You own that. 1.4 million new people living below the poverty line. You own that. 1.2 million less people covered by health insurance. You own that. A seventeen percent medicare increase. You own that. Health care costs skyrocketing. You own that. The tax burden increasing amongst the middle class. You own that. Mr. President, if you want to talk about an ownership society, let's talk about what you own."

Barring any last-minute hitches, workers will drain the nerve agent from one of those rockets and send the emptied weapon into a 1,050-degree incinerator today, Army spokeswoman Mary Binder said. The drained sarin will be stored until the Army gathers enough to fire up a different incinerator for liquid chemicals, perhaps in a month.

A gradual start could see perhaps five more rockets drained and burned through Friday, said Dennis Murphey, who oversees Umatilla for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

[...]

After checking with the systems' manufacturers and workers at other chemical weapons incinerators, Umatilla workers determined that it is normal for the monitors to detect traces of such chemicals in the plant's air, Binder said.

"They're (chemical) levels that people breathe every day," she said. "You just don't measure them in your everyday life. Here, we do."

Allison's account corroborates a Washington Post investigation in February that found no credible witnesses to the service in the Alabama National Guard that Bush maintains he performed, despite a lack of documentary evidence. Asked if she'd ever seen Bush in a uniform, Allison said: "Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way." Allison also confirmed previously published accounts that Bush often showed up in the Blount campaign offices around noon, boasting about how much alcohol he had consumed the night before. (Bush has admitted that he was a heavy drinker in those years, but he has refused to say whether he also used drugs).

"After about a month I asked Jimmy what was Georgie's job, because I couldn't figure it out. I never saw him do anything. He told me it basically consisted of him contacting people who were impressed by his name and asking for contributions and support," Allison said.

C. Murphy Archibald, a nephew of Red Blount by marriage and a Vietnam veteran who volunteered on the campaign from September 1972 until election night, corroborated Allison's recollections, though he doesn't recall that the Bush name carried much cachét in Alabama at the time. "I say that because the scuttlebutt on the campaign was that Allison was very sharp and might actually be able to pull off this difficult race" against the incumbent Democrat, Sen. John Sparkman, Archibald said. "But then no one understood why he brought this young guy from Texas along. It was like, 'Who was this guy who comes in late and leaves early? And why would Jimmy Allison, who was so impressive, bring him on?'"