Buttermilk & Molasses

RICHMOND'S CREATIVE HUB Here's one

RICHMOND'S CREATIVE HUB Here's one view of Richmond's creative juice. There are a slew of more creative, vibrant forces at work, but these are some dependable anchors and a few up-and-comers.

IRAQ'S PROBLEM WITH ISLAM G.

IRAQ'S PROBLEM WITH ISLAM G. wandered out into the desert recently to visit a U.S. military hospital, where he had a curious exchange with a Syrian who had come to Iraq to free it from the Western oppressors. Yet another indication that the coming months for the American forces could continue to be rocky.

ONE OF THE GREATS Katherine

ONE OF THE GREATS Katherine Hepburn's legacy was compounded in three ways -- her talent as an actress (13 Academy Award nominations), her staying power (she was 96 when she died) and her approach to her real life (she dedicated herself to caring for her partner Spencer Tracy when he was dying, and set her career aside). "Life's what's important," she once said. "Walking, houses, family. Birth and pain and joy -- and then death. Acting's just waiting for the custard pie. That's all." It's hard to imagine an actress as wonderfully three-dimensional as Hepburn.

STORMY RATIONALE The Brookings Institute's

STORMY RATIONALE The Brookings Institute's Kenneth Pollack wrote "The Threatening Storm," which probably pulled more people off the fence in 2002 to support military action against Iraq than any misinformation offered up by the Bush administration. In this NYTimes commentary (login: buttermilk.com password: buttermilk), Pollack argues that the post-war issue isn't whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction but where they went. And that the debate over pre-war intelligence is valid, but needs to be kept in perspective -- Pollack argues that it isn't a case of the Bush administration lying about Iraq, but there was a serious case of distortion of the facts:

Which raises the real crux of the slanted-intelligence debate: the timing of the war. Why was it necessary to put aside all of our other foreign policy priorities to go to war with Iraq in the spring of 2003? It was always the hardest part of the Bush administration's argument to square with the evidence. And, distressingly, there seems to be more than a little truth to claims that some members of the administration skewed, exaggerated and even distorted raw intelligence to coax the American people and reluctant allies into going to war against Iraq this year.

Before the war, some administration officials clearly tended to emphasize in public only the most dire aspects of the intelligence agencies' predictions. For example, of greatest importance were the estimates of how close Iraq was to obtaining a nuclear weapon. The major Western intelligence services essentially agreed that Iraq could acquire one or more nuclear bombs within about four to six years. However, all also indicated that it was possible Baghdad might be able to do so in as few as one or two years if, and only if, it were able to acquire fissile material on the black market...

...Moreover, before the war I heard many complaints from friends still in government that some Bush officials were mounting a ruthless campaign over intelligence estimates. I was told that when government analysts wrote cautious assessments of Iraq's capabilities, they were grilled and forced to go to unusual lengths to defend their judgments, and some were chastized for failing to come to more alarming conclusions. None of this is illegal, but it was perceived as an attempt to browbeat analysts into either changing their estimates or shutting up and ceding the field to their more hawkish colleagues.

More damning than the claims of my former colleagues has been some of the investigative reporting done since the war. Particularly troubling are reports that the administration knew its contention that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger was based on forged documents. If true, it would be a serious indictment of the administration's handling of the war.

THE REAL STRUGGLE FOR POWER

THE REAL STRUGGLE FOR POWER IN IRAQ While the headlines focus on tensions and continued conflict between American soldiers and former Baath loyalists in Iraq, another struggle for the country's future is taking place within the Shiite community. Anthony Shadid reports on a growing rift among Shiite leaders in Sadr City (the Shiite power center in Baghdad) and in Najaf (the spiritual center south of Baghdad).

ART OVER BAGHDAD I had

ART OVER BAGHDAD I had read a month or so back about the Najeen Group, which staged one of the first plays in Iraq after the fall of the Hussein government, but I didn't connect it with what my friend in Baghdad was writing at first. "I don't know if you have seen pictures of it," she wrote, "but this arts group helped erect a new statue in the place of the one the mob pulled down in Firdaws Square on April 9. The new one is called the Survivors Statue, by Basim Hamad, and it is really lovely. It is made of some blue-green oxidized bronze I think, and a group of soft, elongated figures are holding aloft a huge crescent in a triumphant pose that evokes both the Iwojima memorial and Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. Tidy, printed graffiti on the base of the statue says: All Donne, Go Home." Here's a piece in National Geographic about the Najeen Group's efforts.

BAGHDAD UPDATE G. is a

BAGHDAD UPDATE G. is a friend of Salam Pax and, like Salam, is maintaining a weblog from Baghdad. Another good spot to get some basic, "man on the street (who happens to speak English, so not quite the man on the street)" perspective on what's happening in the heart of Iraq.

TRUMPED AGAIN Every now and

TRUMPED AGAIN Every now and again, I start to think about creating a personal weblog, one that allows me to be expressive, creative and shiny, and one that allows you to be a voyeur. Usually, I stumbled across something like this, from Que Sera Sera, and realize that there are people who already do it better than me.

Earlier today I was thinking about how I'm really dorky and think about sex a lot, and there's a part of me that could be really content just sitting inside and reading comic books and playing video games and eating pizza, so maybe deep down inside I’m really just a 13 year old boy, but then I thought about how I secretly want to be a princess and really enjoy smelling good, so I’ve come to the conclusion that deep down inside, I'm really just a homosexual 13 year old boy.

THE COURT TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

THE COURT TURNED UPSIDE DOWN It's not as crazy as all that, but this week's Supreme Court decisions are full of surprises. For everyone. Curious about what the conservative chattering class thought, I turned to Rush Limbaugh to discover him foaming at the mouth, apoplectic about the affirmative action and Texas sodomy rulings. It's enough to make me want to hug Ronald Reagan. Here's how Slate's legal diarist, Dahlia Lithwick, described it in a missive to a fellow legal eagle:

As you noted earlier, today's holdings, plus Monday's, represent a shockingly progressive set of decisions from a supposedly conservative court. Pretty much everyone had suspected that the court would invalidate the Texas sodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas—but most of us thought it would be done on the narrowest possible grounds, somehow preserving Bowers v. Hardwick, and limiting the holding to Texas and the three other states that single out homosexual sodomy for criminal prosecution. But instead we have Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, using the broader substantive due process rationale (you may remember it from such favorites as Roe v. Wade) to carve out a zone of privacy for consensual gay sex! O'Connor declined to overrule Bowers, a decision in which she had joined the misguided majority, but still sided with the majority today to invalidate the Texas law, on the Equal Protection grounds you outlined this morning. My goodness, could Kennedy and O'Connor have had some sort of conversion—some Dickensian visitation? Did the ghost of Justice Warren appear to them in the night, terrorizing them with visions of an apocalyptic America where strict construction and originalism blight the land?

A DIFFERENT VIEW ON NEOCONS

A DIFFERENT VIEW ON NEOCONS The more libertarian voices are beginning to rise with concern about the nature of the Bush administration and its neoconservative bent. In this Financial Times commentary, the president and the founder of the Cato Institute express their dismay at the Bush administration's responses to the September 11 attacks. From a libertarian perspective, the Patriot Act and other decisions threaten a significant increase in government and a threat to civil liberties.