Buttermilk & Molasses

APOLOGIA & TORTURE

The comic crowd at Too Stupid To Be President is at it again after a long hiatus from creating painfully amusing Flash animations that take mean-spirited digs at the President. This week, you can find TSTBP's take on Cheney's quail-hunting fiasco (focusing on the absurdity of a man shot by the Vice President actually apologizing for getting in the way of the shot) and Alberto Gonzales' recent testimony that George Bush's record on torture pales in contrast to that of George Washington, or that rat bastard Abraham Lincoln...

WE'RE STILL LOSING

John Brennan, former head of the National Counterterrorism Center and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, and Paul Pillar of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University were hanging out at the washingtonpost.com Online site taking questions about their recent articles in the Post's Outlook section.

Brennan's commentary in Sunday's Post is not an unfamiliar argument, though it is one that continues to get lost in rhetoric and has not been particularly popular in the nuance-free zone that has been the Bush White House. Brennan's basic argument: Osama bin Laden's strategy continues to gain ground against our lead-footed efforts to stamp it out. The problem, Brennan argues, is that we've engaged bin Laden almost exclusively in the tactical arena, and have ignored his broader strategy -- the ascendancy of Sunni extremism:

Hibernating securely somewhere along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, bin Laden and his Egyptian sidekick, Ayman al-Zawahiri, must be deriving warmth from the fact that the Iraqi insurgency has taken on a decidedly Sunni extremist coloration; that Hamas has successfully exploited political opportunities in Palestine; that radicals within Europe's Muslim communities are gaining strength and destructive force; and that caricatures of the prophet Muhammad have led to violence even among Muslims not inclined toward terrorism.

Terrorism, in bin Laden's strategy, is only a tactic, a means to achieve what he believes is a providentially ordained objective -- global domination by an Islamic caliphate. Yet dangerously, the United States is focusing on countering that tactic, missing the growth of the extremist Islamic forest as we flounder among the terrorist trees. Maybe it's because we have led ourselves to believe that the term "al Qaeda" means "Kill Americans." It doesn't. It means "foundation" or "base" in Arabic. Bin Laden chose the word intentionally and cleverly. He knew that his battle-hardened core of veterans from the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s would serve only as the foundational wellspring to irrigate fields of political, social and economic discontent among the Muslim masses.

Pillar's commentary contains a useful bibliography of books and articles that go beyond the one-dimensional, scary monster view of bin Laden to explore some deeper aspects of al Qaeda's agenda and bin Laden's vision.

BELIEF

Rhett Miller's myspace site currently has his entire new CD -- The Believer -- available for your listening pleasure. It's a fine piece of pop from the Old 97's frontman.

MAIN SITE REVAMPED

Skip on over to floricane.com for a quick snapshot of Buttermilk & Molasses' parent company, the media empire known as Floricane. In addition to the content available on the main Buttermilk & Molasses weblog, you'll find:

• Garden of Words: I've finally updated (and completely reworked) the poetry section, as well as much of my non-poetic writing from my days of journalism. This also is the nesting place of the Garden of Words weblog.

• Caffeine Magazine: It's been 12 years and I still don't have all of the content online. But I have managed to post the salvaged content from every issue, except for Issues 1, 6 and the Lost Issue of Caffeine.

PAGE-A-MATIC

In the past few weeks, I've had three different people ask me about easy-to-use web publishing tools -- two painters and a musician, none particularly tech-savvy. Until this weekend, I didn't know what advice to offer; in fact, I've spent the better part of two months looking for some easier ways to design, edit and revise portions of my own ridiculously extensive website.

I got my hopes up in January, when Apple released iWeb. But iWeb proved to be an absurd excuse for mainstreaming the Internet -- not particularly intuitive, pretty damned inflexible and very limited.

Lifehacker describes the new Google Page Creator dynamic web page editor and gives it a thumbs up. I spent a few moments on it this morning, and found it to be everything iWeb is not. The major negative is that pages are stored at googlepages.com; it doesn't seem possible to port them to your own server.

If you're wondering who is winning the content war -- Yahoo! or Google -- check out Google Pages and wonder no more.

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES VIDEOS GO LIVE

Google Video is now hosting old archival video from The National Archives, including  United Newsreel productions from World War Two and a selection of motion pictures from the Department of the Interior.

NARA announced the partnership in a news release this past Friday, and Google Video has posted more than 100 NARA productions for free viewing:

The pilot program undertaken by the National Archives and Google features 101 films from the audiovisual collections preserved at the Archives. Highlights of the pilot project include:

• The earliest film preserved in the National Archives holdings by Thomas Armat, "Carmencita - Spanish Dance," featuring the famous Spanish Gypsy dancer,1894 (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6020302018400450975&q=Carmencita+-+Spanish+Dance);

• A representative selection of U.S. government newsreels, documenting World War II,      1941-45 (http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=owner%3Anara+type%3Aworld_war_II&so=0);

• A sampling of documentaries produced by NASA on the history of the      spaceflight program (http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=owner%3Anara+type%3Anasa&so=0);

• Motion picture films, primarily from the 1930s, that document the history and establishment of a nationwide system of national and state parks.  Included is early footage of modern Native American activities, Boulder Dam, documentation of water and wind erosion, Civilian Conservation Corps workers, and the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority.  A 1970 film documents the expansion of recreational programs for inner city youth across the nation (http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=owner%3Anara+type%3Aparks&so=0).

The National Archives and Google are exploring the possibilities of expanding the on-line film collection and making the Archives extensive textual holdings available via the Internet.

FOLLOWING MALCOLM GLADWELL

Those in the know will be relieved to read that while I debated posting a link to author Malcolm Gladwell's new weblog, I ultimately went with my intuition which suggests that most of you have read at least one of his two books -- "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference" and "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" -- or one of his articles in the New Yorker. Since Gladwell just kicked his weblog off, it will be interesting in the coming months to follow its evolution, and to see what sort of voice he develops.

WILLIAM WRAY, ARTIST

I can credit Boing Boing with pointing me in the direction of California artist William Wray, whose eyes seems oddly attuned to that of Richmond artist Ed Trask -- particularly Wray's urban landscapes.

I'm not sure what I expected when I first read Boing Boing's blurb on Wray. What jumped out at me is that he worked painting backgrounds for the Ren & Stimpy show -- hardly the sort of credentials that would lead me to believe I would fall, head over literal heels, for his painting.

Wray also maintains a weblog, which is fairly frequently updated with new paintings and thoughts.

THE FINE ART OF RENDITION

Steve Clemmons at The Washington Note attended a screening of Yosri Fouda's documentary on the American practice of rendition -- basically sending prisoners overseas for detention or interrogation. Triangle of Anger is a 45-minute production that originally aired in Arabic on Al Jazeera; The Washington Note has apparently arranged to make the English translation available in the near future online.

Fouda's focus in the piece is primarily on the relatively infamous case of a German citizen Khaled El-Masri who was seized by American intelligence agents, shipped to Afghanistan for detention and interrogation, then dumped in southern Europe months later. But Clemmons also notes that Fouda adds some oft-forgotten perspective on rendition -- while the Bush administration has worked hard to perfect the practice, it was actually the Clinton administration that began using it as a matter of course.

Fouda takes no below-the-belt shots and interviews not only victims of extraordinary rendition, innocent cases and some perhaps not, and their family members and associates -- but he interviews a few of the architects of America's rendition policy.

Former CIA official Michael Scheuer is one of the primary backbones of the film. Scheuer helped construct the contemporary rendition program and applie it to al Qaeda operatives. On the film, he openly and self-critically questions the utility of the rendition program, which he thinks has done more harm than good to the perception of America in the world, and has not contributed much to American safety that could not otherwise be achieved by existing laws.

One thing I did not realize and learned from Fouda's and Giles Trendle's treatment on rendition history is that the founding fathers of the policy were President Bill Clinton, then National Security Council official Richard Clarke, and National Security Advisory Sandy Berger. Scheuer gave the program its practical legs and application, but these other three conceptualized and authored the program.

George W. Bush's team ratcheted up the use and broad application of extraordinary rendition as a key part of their actions against targeted terrorists and collaborators.

AN EXPLORATION OF WORD BALLOONS

I'm astounded and delighted by Joel Priddy's most recent explorations at Beeswax, namely his anlysis of phylacteries (the use of speech balloons in comic art). Joel produced an actual comic strip -- using characters from his acclaimed Pulpatoon Pilgramage graphic novella.