Buttermilk & Molasses

EASTER IN THE GARDEN

Plants were a sporadic visitor in my childhood -- half-eggshells sprouting tufts of spring grass, carrots with lofty tops growing in cups of water, radishes and marigolds in the backyard. On Valentine's Day of 1980, my dad and stepmother, Amy, gave me a small Norfolk pine; several months later it toppled out my window to its death. Amy kept a small garden -- some tomatoes, peppers -- in large pots on the patio of their townhouse. Several years later, when they moved to North Carolina, I was introduced to farming. On two fronts.

My mother's old boyfriend, Kent, grew up in southside Virginia just outside of the small town of Burkeville. His parents continued to totter about the family farm -- homestead, really. It was there that I first learned to drive a tractor; struggled in summer heat as I dug into hot, red clay for potatoes; hung a dead snake on a fence. Kent taught me to make applesauce and grape juice from scratch -- with apples and grapes we picked ourselves. And for several years, I earned the first real money of my life selling Christmas trees harvested from a field Kent had planted years earlier.

Further south in North Carolina, my dad and stepmother settled into her own father's family farm. I heaved bales of hay onto trailers, pulled weeds in the garden and learned to can produce. Green beans, peas, tomatoes, potatoes, okra, asparagus, peppers, corn...

I listened and watched as Amy tended her mother's rock garden, as my dad planted new trees and took down old ones, as their home exploded with plants, produce and love.

In 1997, my dad died of lung cancer after a brief struggle. Exactly five years after his death, Amy was diagnosed with the same disease and died almost as swiftly. One of the last things Nikole and I took from their farm were two peony plants for our yard. Last month, close to the day that I sat in a hospital room and learned of my dad's diagnosis, one of the peonies, which we thought didn't survive, erupted from the ground.

NEWS FLASH: INTELLIGENCE BUNGLED

Links:
Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction

Washington Post

Dan Froomkin is one of a rare breed: a reporter who has his own WMD Commission webpage. Most people didn't even know there is such a commission. Hell, a lot of people still think there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Facts aside, the Commission is set to release its report on Thursday.

The verdict: The intelligence community did a lousy job of analyzing its facts, the White House did an excellent job of spinning its facts, and the new Director of National Intelligence has a lot of work to do. Here's Froomkin's take:

People who have had sneak peeks of the report suggest that it will be critical of the national intelligence apparatus, skeptical that much has improved since the invasion of Iraq, and cautionary when it comes to the idea of going to war again based on dubious assertions.

But the complete secrecy of the commission's deliberations -- it operated entirely behind closed doors -- raises questions about how avidly its conclusions will be embraced by the public.

Its members are unfamiliar to most Americans. (My WMD Commission page is one of the few places on the Internet you can find out anything about them.) Its process is a mystery. And we still have no idea how forthrightly its leaders -- an intensely conservative Republican and a centrist Democrat -- chose to deal with one of the thorniest but most critical pieces of the puzzle: The White House's role.

The bad news for the White House is that the report is said to be a harsh indictment of the intelligence community. The good news is that no one really cares, and accountability has never been important in this administration.

ROLF IS A NAZI

Link: Songs in the Key of Off

SongFight offers up a beautiful tribute to "The Sound of Music." If you do nothing else today, enjoy "Do Re Mi" as performed by Ken and the New Incredibles. [Stumbled across on Boing Boing.]

THE NEW, NEW FEDERALISM

Link: SLATE: Activist Litigators - By Dahlia Lithwick

I didn't wrestle with thoughts of posting last week during the media spectacle that has been the Terry Schiavo case. Part of my lack of dilemna comes from the fact that I was trapped in a living laboratory of my own, immersed in the psychological trauma of small group interventions at Georgetown. More germaine would be the simple fact that few of my gleanings really provided a legal reading I could (a) understand, and (b) sink my teeth into. Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick resolved the problem for me this morning, as the ink dried on legislation rushed into law by Congress and President Bush.

I don't know if Lithwick really has a keen judicial mind. But I do know that for the last five years or so, I've turned to her legal writings whenever I get confused about large issues of the law that have become popularized or blown out of proportion by the media. Or a crazed public.

Today, in the course of a few well-written paragraphs, Lithwick demonstrates her ability to strip an issue to its core -- and to simultaneously demonstrate passion and intelligence.

Lithwick's most compelling statement also provide an opening for a Democratic Party interested in reconnecting with normal people: "Republicans acknowledged this weekend that their views on "the sanctity of life" trump even their convictions about federalism."

The Founders (those red-cheeked men who wrestled our Republic from the arms of the Articles of Confederation more than two centuries ago) knew exactly how thin a line divided populism from governance. They opted for a nation that could be governed, correctly assuming that populism's ugly head could be restrained by a three-tiered system of federal governance that was strictly divided from the then-13 unique state governments.

No longer.

SPRING, SPLAT

This year's slow road to spring has had more ruts than I remember -- snow showers well into March, and only one or two warm days so far. It's been hard to find a lot of motivation for yard work, gardening or just taking in a bit of nature.

Part of my own slow start has been a result of our recent subscription to SPROUT, Richmond's organic, small farm cooperative. The dilemma is pretty straightforward: Beginning in May, we're going to be inundated with a weekly supply of rotating, farm-fresh produce. Deciding what to plant in our own garden is making me fidget.

What if we have too much!? What if there's a drought and the farmer goes bankrupt? How many tomatoes are too many tomatoes? What if I decide not to plant cucumbers and the organic farm's patch of vines is demolished in a hailstorm? These are some -- far from all -- of the questions gnawing at me as I begin to ponder the garden.

That, and the lack of warm weather.

I pretend that it's only February, and feel better. It explains the purple, wilted crocus that come back to life every afternoon as the temperature soars into the 40s. It explains the spare, scattered crop of daffadils that have been so slow to emerge. And it explains why, a week before Easter (which, granted, is about three or sixteen weeks early this year), there are no tulips, no forsythia blossoms. It's a start, but it's a slow start.

Saturday, I planted some seeds. Twelve little pods each of peas, beets and spinach are currently tucked inside a tabletop greenhouse. They all began sprouting today, which means they'll be getting into the garden by the end of March.

Most of the work, so far, has been in my head. The beds need weeding. Mulch needs to be spread. The roses and blackberries need to be pruned back. I'm mulling over moving the fig bushes, both of which have trebled in size in a year. The herb garden needs to be reorganized; acres of spearmint must be torn from its creeping roots. What to do with the blueberry bushes?

And the vegetables: Peas. Beets. Spinach. Carrots. Cucumbers. Beans. Tomatoes. Squash. Eggplant. We'll rely on SPROUT for the rest.

PRESIDENT WASHINGTON, SPACE JUNKIE

Link: Achenblog

Joel Achenbach smoothly blends three of his passions -- space, technology and George Washington -- in his talk at a recent space conference. He presents his notes for curious readers who found themselves perplexed to see George Washington's name used in the same sentence as the phrase "GPS satellites."

In fact I'm not sure the anyone has ever mentioned the Space Age and George Washington in the same sentence. That changes today, with my talk, titled, "George Washington and the Space Age."

I suspect that George Washington would have been an ardent supporter of Apollo and of the space program in general. I think he would like the Vision for Space Exploration. He would say of course we must go to the moon and Mars. But a cautionary note: Even George Washington sometimes got things wrong.

 

BACK TO THE STONE AGE

Links:
Guardian
Stop Bolton

Former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal takes to the pages of The Guardian to lay his body on the tracks of John Bolton's nomination as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton has often been grouped with the Bush admin's team of neoconservatives, but the reality is that John Bolton has friends, not allies, in the neocon wing of the Republican Party.

It pays to take a field trip to John Bolton's past -- his days as a player in Jess Helms' half-century, successful effort to stymie progress in North Carolina. From Helms' side, Bolton went to Reagan's Department of Justice before finding an uneasy resting place in the Department of State. It was at State that Bolton learned how to bring on da funk, bring on da noize:

At the state department, Bolton was Colin Powell's enemy within. In his first year, he forced the US withdrawal from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, destroyed a protocol on enforcing the biological weapons convention, and ousted the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He scuttled the nuclear test ban treaty and the UN conference on the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. And he was behind the renunciation of the US signature on the 1998 Rome statute creating the international criminal court. He described sending his letter notifying the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, as "the happiest moment of my government service".

Bolton's meddling in diplomacy on nonproliferation with North Korea and Iran guaranteed that the allies had no unified position and encouraged the Koreans and Iranians to play the nuclear card. Bolton's response to these crises has been to lead the charge to remove the UN head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. In late November, Bolton denounced the Blair government and the Europeans negotiating with the Iranians as "soft" for attempting "diplomatic means".

REVISITING THE VULCANS

Link: washingtonpost.com

The Washington Post's Terry M. Neal has been on the neocon beat since before the September 11, 2001, terror attacks transformed the language of America's foreign policy activists. It was clear long before September 11 that the hawkish holdouts from the Reagan Era (and before) would play a influential role in White House politics; Neal and his colleague John Lancaster wrote about the self-styled "Vulcans" (named for the Roman god of the forge, not the Star Trek first officer) in 1999.

While it was clear that the group -- academics, policy wonks and conservative government holdouts -- would play a dominant role in the White House, what was less clear in 1999 was how global events would transform the influence of the Vulcans. The group had their eyes set on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein during the Clinton administration, and crafted white papers for the Israeli government in the mid-1990s calling for a tranformational rollback of Arab nationalism, starting in Baghdad and Damascus.

The alignment of the Vulcan's influence in the White House and the pos-September 11 tidal shift in American public opinion paved the way for one of the most sweeping foreign policy initiatives in the history of the United States. Revisiting his earlier articles, The Post's Neal wonders if he misdiagnosed the neocon movement.

PAINFUL MISTAKES

Links:

AlterNet: Intelligence, Inc.

AlterNet: An Interrogator Speaks Out

Pratap Chatterjee takes a look at the consequences of the increasingly privatized U.S. intelligence business -- from interrogators at Abu Ghraib to the training of military intelligence agents. There are benefits and consequences of moving toward a more privatized contractor system, but perhaps the biggest negative is the loss of accountability in the system.

Bob Baer, the former CIA Middle East specialist and author of the book See No Evil, says the same phenomenon is happening within his former agency. "After 1997, practically all training is done by contractors," he says. "The CIA is even hiring contractors as station chiefs in other countries.

"I think it was by default — to get around personnel limits and to get rid of severance problems," Baer adds. "But these companies don't vet people, you cannot keep track of who they are working for and of course they are not efficient. They have lower standards. Their job is to make money, and so they will tell you whatever you want to hear. It's called 'customer satisfaction' — you want a convertible, you get a convertible."

Part of the problem with hiring private contractors, Baer believes, is the lack of checks and balances. "Now if you ask a private company to produce a report on Afghan opium production, they will produce the report, but it might not be the truth. If you ask a CIA nitwit to write the report, he will care about getting it right, although he will probably get it wrong. But at least his motivation is correct."

INFIDEL ISO GOOD TIME

Link: The Morning News - Craigslist in Baghdad: Missed Connections

Jamie Allen ponders the collision of Craig's List and life in Baghdad.

At the infidel café—f4m (Suq al Ghazi)

You: Tall, lean, brave yet frightened, with a bomb strapped to your abdomen. I saw you enter and our eyes locked in a meaningful gaze. But then the look in your eyes changed. Did you have second thoughts? About our destinies together? You dashed out the door, and only the explosion a few moments later told me which direction you had run. Just wanted to know if you are alive. Email me.