This blog has moved!

Now that I have fewer Madison-specific posts (settling in!), I've consolidated my 3 blogs:

• Deb in Mad City (journal)
• ...because democracy... (political opinion)
• photos (favorite photography)

into one blog at WordPress. The new blog is at http://debh.wordpress.com .

If you have subscribed via email, no changes are necessary, I am just sending to the Yahoo group from FeedBurner instead of from Blogger.

Glad you're not here.

Postcard sent to reporter Jeffrey Rosen by Rear Adm. Harry Harris after Rosen's visit to Guantanamo Bay.


Read the full article at TNR.com.

Economist: No Child Left Inside

Environment awareness

No child left inside

Feb 8th 2007 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition

Put down that Xbox, young man

TO THE alarm of environmentalists and park managers alike, interest in the great outdoors seems to be tailing off among young Americans. The country's extensive system of national parks includes some of the most photographed and best preserved landscapes on earth—like Yosemite Valley in California, the crenellated Teton Range in Wyoming, Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park or the white edifice of Mount Rainier in Washington state. But attendance at the parks is falling. Between 1995 and 2005, overnight stays in them declined 20% overall, and camping and backcountry stays dropped by 24%, according to statistics compiled by the National Parks Service.

No park, it seems, is immune to the decline: even in Yosemite, one of the system's oldest parks and probably its best known, the number of visitors dropped 17% over the ten-year period. The number of visitors to Death Valley, an easy drive from vigorously growing Las Vegas, went down 28% over the same span. In some of the system's remoter parks, such as Lava Beds National Monument near the California-Oregon border, site of much fighting in an Indian war of 1872-73, the number of daily visitors is down to ten or fewer.

The importance of this decline can hardly be over-estimated for big environmental organisations such as the Sierra Club: they have depended on what one expert calls “a transcendent experience in nature”, usually in childhood, to gain new members and thus remain powerful lobbyists for environmental causes. “The political implications are enormous,” says Richard Louv, a writer whose most recent book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder”, describes the social, psychological and even spiritual ramifications of a dearth of outdoors experience for a generation raised on electronic, rather than natural, stimulation and entertainment.

To encourage environmental interest in young people, particularly non-whites who are much less like to visit parks than whites are, Martin LeBlanc at the Sierra Club manages 65 volunteer-led programmes around the country to bring inner-city children into direct experience with the natural world. “We don‘t need to be giving them propaganda about offshore oil-drilling, not when they're 13 years old,” he said. “We just need to get them outside.”

For its part, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) has had its “Ranger Rick” magazine and education programme for children in place for 40 years, but Kevin Coyle, the group's vice-president for education, thinks that the declining interest in the outdoors has spurred a feeling of urgency among environmentalists. “There won't be a conservation movement 30 years from now if there's no love for nature,” he says.

The NWF has created a new “green hour a day” programme to encourage families to spend at least an hour a day outside; a website with green-hour activities will go live in March. The group has also joined with traditional hunting and sportsmen's organisations, which are also experiencing declining membership and interest, to lobby state governments for more outdoor-education funding.

Mr Louv, the writer, has been busy as well, helping local, state and national groups bring America's children outdoors under a campaign he calls “No Child Left Inside”. He is pleased by the idea's wide appeal. “This issue has the power to pull people together from sectors you wouldn't expect. Environmentalists are traditionally liberal, but conservatives, too, are worried about children and nature,” he said. “It's a grass-roots movement in both the literal and metaphoric senses”.

NYT: Bush Is Not Above the Law

Bush Is Not Above the Law - New York Times

LAST August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney’s office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought.

More on Iran

From the Jan 20 Economist:

IN THE higher echelons of the Islamic Republic, people may be losing patience with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Informed Iranians do not think he risks losing his job. But plainly he is not as safe as he was. Conservatives in Iran's parliament and press blame his extravagance at home and braggadoccio abroad for Iran's worsening economic malaise and for the unpleasant sense of being ever more squarely in the Americans' firing line.

Irax

Is anyone else completely unnerved by the frequency with which Bush says "Iran" these days? My head says, "of course there's no way he could..." But what, after all, would rational thought have to do with it?

Quotes from last night's State of the Union:

• The United Nations has imposed sanctions on Iran, and made it clear that the world will not allow the regime in Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons. (Applause.) With the other members of the Quartet -- the U.N., the European Union, and Russia -- we're pursuing diplomacy to help bring peace to the Holy Land, and pursuing the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in peace and security.
  
• In recent times, it has also become clear that we face an escalating danger from Shia extremists who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East. Many are known to take direction from the regime in Iran, which is funding and arming terrorists like Hezbollah -- a group second only to al Qaeda in the American lives it has taken.
• In Lebanon, assassins took the life of Pierre Gemayel, a prominent participant in the Cedar Revolution. Hezbollah terrorists, with support from Syria and Iran, sowed conflict in the region and are seeking to undermine Lebanon's legitimately elected government.
• In Iraq, al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists blew up one of the most sacred places in Shia Islam -- the Golden Mosque of Samarra. This atrocity, directed at a Muslim house of prayer, was designed to provoke retaliation from Iraqi Shia -- and it succeeded. Radical Shia elements, some of whom receive support from Iran, formed death squads.
• If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides. We could expect an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists aided by al Qaeda and supporters of the old regime.
• The United Nations has imposed sanctions on Iran, and made it clear that the world will not allow the regime in Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons. (Applause.)
  

All this at a time when Iranians are flexing the democratic muscles that Bush supposedly values, and electing reform parties in opposition to their confrontational President. You won't hear much about that, though, in Bush's posturing.

I believe that if a Democrat appears to have a chance of winning the 2008 election, we will go to war against Iran before that can happen. I hope my cycnicism is unjustified, but I'm still holding my breath.

AlterNet: Recycled Christmas

"Though we really enjoyed coming together for a mid-winter celebration, the very thought of shopping ruined Christmas. Wasn't there another option? Didn't we have the right to reclaim the holiday and create our own family tradition?"

[Full article linked to title above]