"Turning Daydreams into Reality"

By Diane Silver

The September Liberty Press is now on the streets and includes my new Hope and Politics column entitled "Turning Daydreams into Reality."

The column is not available online, but The Liberty Press is available free of charge throughout Kansas. In Lawrence, you can find it at the Community Mercantile on Iowa and 9th streets. You can also subscribe to The Liberty Press through the newsmagazine's web site.

DC Primary: Vote for Fenty, Patterson and Mendelson

By Nancy Jane Moore

The District of Columbia primary election is Tuesday, September 12. It's the key election -- whoever wins the Democratic primary will be elected in November. Here are my endorsements:

For Mayor: Adrian Fenty. I've already praised Fenty's stand against the meaningless "crime emergency" bill and deplored his main opponent's descent into name-calling. I also like Fenty's energy and openness to new ideas. And I've also seen a definite improvement in city services in Ward 4 -- where I live -- since he took over as our council member.

Fenty has also been endorsed by The Washington Post, the City Paper, the Examiner, the Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington Action Fund (I got an email from them), and former Mayor Marion Barry, along with a number of other organizations. That's a pretty wide base of support.

For Chair of the City Council: Kathy Patterson. What has really impressed me about Patterson has been her willingness to take strong stands, particularly in dealing with the police. She was particularly critical of police excesses dealing with political demonstrations -- an important issue, since DC gets major demonstrations on a regular basis. She's good on environmental issues as well. She didn't get The Post endorsement, but the City Paper and Examiner both support her.

For At-Large Council Member: Phil Mendelson. Mendelson's noted for his lack of charisma, but he's also one of those people who always asks hard questions and fights for good services for citizens, particularly those basic things we all need, such as firefighting and ambulance service. We need his voice on the council. He's collected endorsements from the City Paper and the Examiner and -- weakly -- from The Post.

For nonvoting Delegate to Congress: Eleanor Holmes Norton. Norton does a good job of representing DC in an impossible job. She has an opponent, but this race is unlikely to be close.

I shall pass on endorsements in the open council seats in the different wards, except to observe that Ward 1 Council Member Jim Graham deserves to be reelected. I don't know enough about the candidates in the other wards -- none are incumbents -- to express an opinion. However, the City Paper endorsements by Loose Lips columnist Jim Jones provide a good guide.

Since the "shadow" U.S. senator and representative positions are a joke, I don't intend to waste my time voting in those races. We need real activists fighting for our right to a vote in Congress, not sham elections for people who just want to get their names in the paper.

By the way, there will be two at-large seats on the ballot in the general election. Due to an odd DC law, one of those seats must go to someone who is not a member of the majority political party. That would open the door for candidates from the Republicans or the Statehood-Green Party, except for one thing: The incumbent, David Catania, is running as an independent, and he'll be a shoo-in, along with whoever gets the Democratic nomination, in November.

Catania used to be a Republican -- an openly gay, pretty liberal Republican -- but he gave up on the party after a few years of G.W. Bush. He's another one of our attack-dog council members.

So if you're registered as a Democrat, get out and vote in the primary. That's when all the key races will be decided. It doesn't matter much whether you vote in the other parties' primaries -- their candidates aren't in play this year.

Bush lied -- and a lot of people have died

By Nancy Jane Moore

Bush lied when he tied Saddam Hussein to September 11.

Bush lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

You don't have to take my word for it. Read the reports of the Senate Intelligence Committee (two long pdf files):

• Postwar Findings about Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How they Compare with Prewar Assessments
• The Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress

The New York Times begins its story on the reports:

The Senate Intelligence Committee said today that there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein had prewar ties to Al Qaeda and one of the terror organization's most notorious members, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The Times goes on to say:

The intelligence committee report notes that the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that, despite rumors of contacts between two of the Sept. 11 hijackers and members of the Hussein regime, "We have no credible information that Baghdad was complicit in the attacks on the Pentagon or the World Trade Center on 11 September or any other Al Qaeda strike."

The report also says that postwar findings in Iraq do not support a 2002 intelligence estimate that Iraq was busily reconstituting it nuclear-weapons program or was in possession of biological weapons.

No evidence that Iraq had anything to do with September 11. No evidence that Iraq was building up its weapons of mass destruction. No reason to go to war.

The Senate Intelligence Committee -- like all Senate committees -- has a majority of Republicans and is led by the very right wing senator from Kansas, Pat Roberts. But it still issued these reports.

Not that there wasn't a lot of partisan bickering. According to The Times:

Senator Roberts said Democrats were indulging in selective amnesia about their own earlier support of the war and were "cherry-picking through the intelligence and the facts in a political attempt to rewrite history."

Well, I was angry back in 2002 that so many Democrats let Bush get away with these lies, but at least they're now admitting they were wrong. Someone should tell Sen. Roberts that it's time to pack it in. The truth is out.

The reports included additional views by various members of the Senate committee. In one set of such views, Democrats on the committee included the following conclusion:

The Committee's investigation into prewar intelligence on Iraq has revealed that the Administration's case for war with Iraq was fundamentally misleading. Administration officials repeatedly characterized Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs in more conclusive and threatening terms than were substantiated by the underlying intelligence assessments. Analytical judgments of the intelligence community that were not in line with the more strident Administration view on alleged Iraqi links to al-Qai'da and the 9/11 plot were ignored and denigrated by senior policymakers. Most disturbingly, the Administration in its zeal to promote public opinion in the United States for toppling Saddam Hussein, pursued a deceptive strategy prior to the war of using intelligence reporting that the U.S. intelligence community warned was uncorroborated, unreliable, and, in critical instances, fabricated.

Read that again: "The Administration ... pursued a deceptive policy ... of using intelligence reporting that ... was uncorroborated, unreliable, and, in critical instances, fabricated."

Bush lied. And he didn't lie about his sex life. He lied to drag us into war.

Now that is worthy of impeachment.

Historians tell ABC to yank broadcast as Bush seeks to profit from 9/11

By Diane Silver

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and historians from Princeton, Georgetown, Harvard, Cornell and other universities have written to the chief of ABC to demand that the network pull the broadcast of "The Path to 9/11."

Talking Points Cafe has the full text of the letter, which calls the mini-series "disingenuous and dangerous." The show is set to begin airing Monday on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In part the letter reads:

The key participants and eyewitnesses to these events state that the script distorts and even fabricates evidence into order to mislead viewers about the responsibility of numerous American officials for allegedly ignoring the terrorist threat before 2000.

The mini-series reortedly puts the blame for the 9/11 attacks on the administration of Bill Clinton while ignoring the responsibility of the administration of President George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, President George W. Bush has requested that the TV networks give him airtime for a "non-political" speech on the same night the mini-series begins. A Bush official said the Monday night speech will commemorate the anniversary of the attacks.

Personally, I am sickened by Bush's attempt to once again hijack a national tragedy for his own political profit. If Bush truly meant to take politics out of the broadcast, he would appear jointly with a Democratic leader, or he would appear with Congressional leaders from both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Can you imagine what it would mean for the nation to see that this painful moment was not being used as a campaign ad? That would be a healing. Ironically, it would also show that Bush and Republicans can act as true leaders and could help the GOP's chances in the mid-term elections in November.

Note: I have borrowed the graphic created by Think Progress because I like its message. If this offends the good folks at Think Progress, I'll be happy to take it down.

Strategy? We don't need no stinking strategy

By Nancy Jane Moore

Between all the saber-rattling at Iran and Bush's various speeches trying to tie the tragedy of September 11 to his failed war in Iraq, you may not have noticed that the situation in Afghanistan is going to hell. Again.

According to The Washington Post, Gen. James L. Jones, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, wants "2,000 plus" more troops. "Some 20,000 NATO soldiers and a similar number of U.S. forces are in Afghanistan trying to crush the emboldened Taliban insurgency," The Post reports.

In an earlier report, The Post said that Afghanistan's opium crop is up 59 percent this year. They produced 6,100 tons of opium -- enough to make 610 tons of heroin, which, according to the article, would outstrip demand.

Apparently the record opium crop and the resurgent Taliban are both in the southern provinces.

Of course, Bush is still talking about how successful he was in Afghanistan. The Post says:

After the attacks, his "new doctrine" of holding nations harboring or supporting terrorists responsible had allowed the removal of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and the installation of a democratic government, Bush said.

Somebody better tell the man the Taliban is back. And oh, by the way, Afghanistan's economy is based on heroin and the "democratic government" is hanging by a thread.

Juan Cole summarizes all this very well and brings up an additional point: A peaceful Afghanistan is important on the oil front. He writes:

Afghanistan is especially important to Washington because it is the only plausible way to bring natural gas down from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India. The Turkmenistan alternative is being used to push Delhi away from any flirtation with an Iranian pipeline.

So the failed war in Iraq distracted us from Afghanistan, not only allowing the Taliban to come back and forcing the country back to its most traditional industry -- heroin -- but also making sure that we can't even make strategic use of Afghanistan for oil purposes.

If India and China want to deal with Iran for oil, they're certainly not going to sanction them or support a Bush escapade there.

I see a "domino theory" here -- that is, one stupid decision creates ten more problems. And, of course, Bush has made more than one stupid decision. Doesn't anyone in this administration know anything about strategy?

Good old-fashioned American values

Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post does a great job of pointing out the obfuscations and deflections -- maybe we should just call them lies -- in Bush's speech about bringing 14 actual terrorists from secret prisons abroad to the US for trial.

Robinson suggests that the prisons had to be kept secret because the people in the countries where they were located would have been outraged about their government conniving with the US on this matter. In other words, they were secret to protect those countries from the legitimate outrage of their own citizens, not from "terrorist reprisals."

And why weren't they being kept in the US in the first place? It's not like we have a shortage of maximum security lock ups. Ah, Robinson says, it's those pesky courts. They might decide that "an alternative set of procedures" -- i.e., torture -- was unacceptable.

Robinson also has an answer for those who point out that al-Qaeda and other groups of their ilk don't have to deal with judges who might make them treat their prisoners properly:

No, an American "detained" by al-Qaeda wouldn't enjoy a guarantee of due process. But we're not al-Qaeda. I thought that was the whole point.

Robinson says all this very wittily -- I'm fast becoming a big fan of his work. But the best part of his opinion piece is a little nub of fact he slips in at the end:

Oh, one more thing the president didn't mention, for some reason: Those 14 most-wanted terrorists who were kept in the secret prisons? As far as we know, not a single one was captured in Iraq.

Just another reminder that the Iraq War was never about dealing with terrorism. See my earlier post on this point, Follow the Money.

Even the military is horrified by Bush's detainee plan

The military's top lawyers are now attacking George W. Bush's latest kangaroo court plan for dealing with terrorist detainees. These so-called courts would have the power to order a detainee's execution without first allowing them to see the evidence against them.

The Washington Post reports:

Several uniformed military lawyers told the House Armed Services Committee yesterday that the White House goes too far in seeking to convict detainees on classified information never shared with the suspects.

"I am not aware of any situation in the world where there is a system of jurisprudence that is recognized by civilized people where an individual can be tried and convicted without seeing the evidence against him," said Brigadier Gen. James C. Walker, staff judge advocate to the Marine Corps commandant.

ABC & Disney to broadcast show that allegedly blames 9/11 on Bill Clinton

AMERICAblog, Daily Kos, Think Progress and a bunch of other progressive blogs are taking on ABC & Disney for planning to broadcast a mini-series called the "Path to 9/11" that they say distorts history. The series begins airing on MOnday.

Actually, if what the bloggers, Democrats and others say is true, then the mini-series seems to have only a passing acquaintance with the truth. The series is alleged to include fabricated scenes that are being portrayed as being historically accurate.

The blogs -- particularly AMERICAblog & Think Progress -- are campaigning to get ABC to revise the series or to take it off the air.

Heterosexual writes: Gay weddings "made me happier to be married"

Allison Hantschel, who celebrated her very proper 8th wedding anniversary recently, writes about how watching same-sex couples marry has helped restore her faith in the institution of marriage. She writes in AlterNet today:

Gay union opponents can grandstand all they want about the "defense of the family." That doesn't change the fact that these loving couples fighting desperately for this right are actually reminding us, at a time when some heteros slip easily in and out of marriage and divorce at will, how precious this institution actually is. They're making it damn near impossible for even cynical sworn bachelors and bachelorettes to deny how desirable a state betrothal can be.
...
San Francisco's weddings made me remember my own wedding day, and the wedding days of some dear friends: thrown petals, good wishes, sufficient champagne, a bridesmaid snogging one of the groomsmen. They made me happier to be married, the joy of those couples reflected onto the rest of us, showing us how lucky we were to witness that kind of love.

And though those marriages were later invalidated by the state of California in a mean and small-minded court decision declaring San Fran mayor Gavin Newsom had overstepped his authority in granting them, the images of hope, of courage, of determination to live in love whatever the consequences, those images inspired me and many others. Those images were our conscience, saying, Look, how can you not approve?

Applause to Hantschel for stating what should be obvious to all.

Al Gore is right: We have to do something about global warming

By Nancy Jane Moore

I finally saw "An Inconvenient Truth" last night.

I'd been putting it off. I know a lot about global warming and I figured it would be depressing. I even figured it might be kind of boring -- Al Gore has the reputation for being a little dull. But I finally went, out of duty.

It was great. Gore was great: He was earnest, he was witty, he was on top of the facts. And he made very complicated things easy to understand, without sacrificing the truth or reducing them to slogans.

Essentially, the movie is the presentation Gore has been making around the world -- a way of making his talk on global warming available to a much larger audience.

Yes, in some ways it was depressing -- the facts are difficult to take. I can't say I learned anything that I didn't already know, because I have been paying attention. But it was valuable to see all the facts tied together.

And I felt inspired, perhaps because Gore, despite his knowledge of political reality, has an underlying faith that we human beings are capable of solving our problems.

Gore is providing leadership on this issue. In fact, he's what we used to call a "statesman." He's talking about the most important issue facing the human race, and he's going to talk about it regardless of whether it's politically useful to him or not.

We've had a real dearth of statesmen and stateswomen among our political leaders of late. And our country has never needed them more. The current administration hasn't just ignored the problem of global warming; it has been adopting policies that make it much, much worse. (I'll post a report soon on a significant Clean Air Act case that will be heard by the Supreme Court this coming term.) Yet almost no one in Congress or in public leadership has taken a significant stand against Bush's environmental policies. Some of them vote right, but they don't do anything else. They're too busy trying to get elected.

Al Gore is out speaking the truth. I don't know if he still wants to be President of the United States, but I do know that he is the kind of person I'd like to see running the country.

If you haven't seen "An Inconvenient Truth" yet, go see it right away. Click here to enter your zip code and see if it's playing in your vicinity.

Follow the Money

By Nancy Jane Moore

Whenever I talk about politics or world affairs with my father, he always reminds me, "Follow the money."

He's right. National leaders may dress up their saber rattling with ideology ("We're bringing democracy to Iraq"), religion ("Take the Holy Land back from the infidels"), or national defense ("The Global War on Terror), but it always comes back to the money.

It's always been thus -- think about all those Spaniards, searching the new world for El Dorado, the famed city of gold. Look at Africa, still reeling from colonization because of all its diamonds and gold.

Today money means oil. In the future, money may well mean water -- and that's likely to be true regardless of whether global warming and other human idiocies send us back to the stone age or whether we are able to keep our move toward human civilization on its shaky path forward.

But for now, it's oil. And as Juan Cole demonstrates brilliantly today on Informed Comment, the quest for control of the world's oil reserves is the only coherent explanation for US policy in the Middle East.

Using a map, Cole gives us the strategic ellipse -- location of 70 percent of the world's oil reserves and about 65 percent of the natural gas reserves. It includes Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Russia, and several former parts of the Soviet Union: Kazakhistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan.

Why did we invade Iraq? Well, there wasn't any oil to speak of in Afghanistan. Why are we threatening Iran? Could it have more to do with oil than the potential for nuclear weapons?

Cole also lists all the actual enemies of the United States -- North Korea, Syria, the Shiites of southern Lebanon, the Sunnis in Iraq (mostly secular, he says, with a few fundamentalists thrown in), Iran, Pushtun guerrillas in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda and other tiny terrorist groups. It looks pretty pathetic when he lays out all the facts. They're not exactly Hitler's Germany, no matter how many times Bush calls them "Islamic fascists."

And some of our allies make our enemies look good. Check out this report from Craig Murray, Britain's former Ambassador to Uzbekistan in Sunday's Washington Post:

The next day, an envelope landed on my desk; inside were photos of the corpse of a man who had been imprisoned in Uzbekistan's gulags. ... We sent the photos to the University of Glasgow. Two weeks later, a pathology report arrived. It said that the man's fingernails had been pulled out, that he had been beaten and that the line around his torso showed he had been immersed in hot liquid. He had been boiled alive.

For taking a stand against human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, Murray was accused of misconduct and hounded out of his job by his own government. Uzbekistan is important to is. It's in the strategic ellipse.

Follow the money.

And if you still think all this warmongering is about terrorism, take a look at this report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data gathering, data research, and data distribution organization associated with Syracuse University. According to TRAC:

• Prosecution of people charged as terrorists has dropped to pre-September 11 levels.
• Assistant US attorneys have declined to prosecute nine out of ten of the international terrorism charges recommended by law enforcement.
• The median sentence for those who were convicted is 28 days. Before Sept. 11, the median sentence was 41 months.

As Cole points out:

Al-Qaeda is proven dangerous, and should be combatted by good police and counter-terrorism work. But it is small and mostly disrupted or under surveillance. If its ideology were so challenging to Bush, then he should shut up those videotapes by capturing Bin Laden and Zawahiri. He has not done it.

In other words, the only thing the Bush administration is doing about terrorism is using it as a red flag to scare us into supporting his attacks on civil liberties, his incredible accumulation of executive power, and his wars. Meanwhile, the real goal is the control of the strategic ellipse by the major oil companies. Never forget that Bush was elected to be the president from Enron. Enron itself may be gone, but the power structure it represented hasn't disappeared.

Follow the money.

Two steps forward, one step back for Muslim Americans

By Pamela K. Taylor

The Islamic Society of North America, one of the largest Muslim American organizations, recently announced that for the first time a woman has been elected as their President.

Ingrid Mattson had served two terms as ISNA's vice president, and was a natural choice. She ran unopposed on the ballot, but at the recent ISNA convention the members' support for for her simply poured from the audience every time she came to the podium. It was amazing how much enthusiasm the crowd showed for her.

Needless to say this is a big step for American Muslims, one with implications for Muslims worldwide. Although American Muslim women enjoy a better status than women throughout the Muslim world, there are still far too many masjids where women are relegated to back rooms, or hidden away behind screens (or where they hide themselves away behind screens), where they are not allowed to vote in mosque board elections, or who (according to bylaws or in practice) can only serve as the "ladies' committee" representative to the board. There are too many families that still have double standards for their girls and boys in terms of education, or life goals, or moral compass.

The election of a woman to the leadership of a national Muslim organization cuts at all those notions which prevent women from participating fully in the mosque, and debunks the traditions that women cannot attain to positions of national leadership. The fact that Ingrid is relatively conservative, will, one hopes, allay fears of overseas Muslims that women's leadership defacto means the destruction of established tradition and long-standing moral and social order. Lessening those fears could open doors for other women leaders and ease restrictions of women's participation in daily life.

At the same time, her leadership will not challenge certain traditions that need to be challenged, as far as I'm concerned. Among these are traditions that say women cannot lead men in prayer (despite concrete and validated evidence that the Prophet commanded at least one woman to lead men in prayer) and thus perpetuate a two-tier social order. Her leadership will not challenge traditions that say women are a source of temptation for men, and cannot be allowed to sing or dance in public. Her leadership will not challenge traditions that are used to keep women from speaking in public or participating in sporting events.

Ingrid will try to distinguish between types of speech and singing, between "healthy" public motions (ie sports) and "unhealthy ones" (ie dancing). In the long run, though, accepting this differentiation rather than trying to educate men about treating women as human beings (again a prophetic tradition) leads to the slippery slope by which all limitations can be rationalized.

One can't help but wonder if it is really a step forward for women to come to leadership if women are going to participate in shoring up the patriarchy in certain areas. In this case, I have to say, yes, it is better that she was elected than another old immigrant guy, but it she is far from the ideal.

I hope her leadership will improve the situation many American Muslim women face in their daily lives. Unfortunately, her leadership will not change things far enough. It is, no doubt, a great step forward in many ways. I hope it will pave the way for the greater progress that is needed.

Taking Back Kansas: Gov. Kathleen Sebelius still leads & even her opponent wonders

By Diane Silver

Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius continues to defy the odds in red-state Kansas as a new poll shows her holding a double-digit lead over her Republican opponent. The polster picked Sebelius to win.

The new Rasmussen Reports poll shows the race narrowing with Sebelius' lead dropping from 17 points in July to 11 points. In a poll taken Aug. 23, Sebelius leads 48 percent to 37 percent. The poll surveyed 500 adults and has a margin of error of 4.5 percent. The Rasmussen article notes:

The Governor's support has yet to rise much above 50% in any case. But the decline reflects the closer competition we often see in a final campaign stretch and have been seeing in races around the country

Sebelius's current lead is comparable to what we saw in April, when her support was at 49%. A Democrat in a Republican-leaning state, the incumbent continues to enjoy high favorables and job ratings, with 35% viewing her "very favorably," only 11% "very unfavorably." Thirty-two percent (32%) "strongly approve" of her performance as Governor.

Barnett is viewed very favorably by only 19%, and although fewer (9%) see him very unfavorably than see the Governor that way, he's still an unknown to 18%. By contrast, only 3% are "not sure" what to think of the Governor (and only 1% abstain from assessing her performance).

By the way, to call Kansas a "Republican-leaning state" is to understate matters a bit. We're a Republican-dominated state with nearly twice as many registered Republicans in Kansas as registered Democrats.

The Lawrence Journal-World quotes Washburn University Political Science Professor Bob Beatty on the poll:

Sebelius' 11 point lead represents what is now a fairly (and strikingly) consistent 8-13 point lead over Barnett in RR polls taken since January. This lead has remained consistent through the legislative session, the GOP primary, Barnett's victory, and Sebelius' first three TV ad campaigns ("Respect," "Clips" and the now famous ad of the Governor driving a school bus).

Meanwhile, Barnett is still trying to raise money. He told AP:

"It's going to be a tough race," Barnett acknowledged during an interview. "I'm not saying I will win, but I have the faith that I can win."

Yee-Haw Religion! Terry Fox opens new Kansas church & declares love for homosexuals

By Diane Silver

Anti-gay minister Terry Fox, late of Immanuel Baptist Church, drew 500 people to his first service Sunday at his new church, The Wichita Eagle reports.

His new venue, called Summit Church, meets in the Johnny Western Theatre at Wild West World in Park City, less than 10 miles from his old church. Many of the people attending on Sunday formerly went to Immanuel.

Fox' reportedly left his old church just before Immanuel's deacons were going to confront him on possible ethical lapses, arrogance and host of other issues.

Fox told his new congregation that dress would be casual so folks could come for a little religion and then spend the day in the theme park.

Fox also said that he wants to reach out to "all people." The Eagle reports:

That includes reaching out to people of any lifestyle, even if it's a lifestyle the church doesn't agree with. He cited one such lifestyle.

"We love homosexuals," he said. "And they're welcome to come to church here."

No word yet, on whether lesbian and gay parents would have to give up their children at the church door as Fox doesn't believe queers should be parents.

No word yet on whether people in decades-long and deeply loving same-sex relationships would be required to abandon each other. Fox thinks such love destroys heterosexual marriage.

Actually, there's no word yet on whether Fox will tackle the issues that are really threatening heterosexual marriages such as infidelity, divorce, poverty, substance abuse, etc.

Stay tuned for further signs of Fox' love.

Labor Day Reading: Understanding the life of an American Muslim

By Diane Silver

Recently Pamela K. Taylor -- an American Muslim -- posted two fascinating entries to In This Moment. I suspect that most folks may have overlooked her posts.

Her posts weren't about fighting for gay rights or Kansas fundamentalists or about cyclist Floyd Landis and drugs in sports. Those were the topics that seemed to monopolize most folks attention. Those were all good posts. Heck, I wrote many of them myself.

Pamela, though, brings something unique to this blog. She gives those of us with a Waspish, Christian, non-Muslim background a chance to learn just a tiny bit about what it's like to live as a Muslim in post-9/11 United States.

In one post, she brings compassion and a deep understanding to the tragedy of the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

In a second post, she talks about committing the "crime" of attempting to take a commercial flight while being a Muslim.

Barking up the wrong tree in Israel and Lebanon

Flying while Muslim

In memory of a good neighbor, Martin Ritter Jr.

By Nancy Jane Moore

My neighbor Mr. Ritter passed last week. His death broke the hearts of everyone on the block.

We're not an especially close-knit block. People know each other, but we talk on the sidewalk, not in each other's living rooms.

But everyone knew Mr. Ritter. We often saw him walking down the street or alley, stopping to talk with each person he met. Like the traditional Zen monk, Mr. Ritter was not intimidated by rank or shows of strength. He presented the same friendly, but firm, manner regardless of whether he was talking to an elderly woman, a tough kid, or an elected official.

A tall, slim man, Mr. Ritter still walked with the cockiness of someone half his age. I don't know how old he was, but he was already retired when I first moved into the neighborhood fifteen years ago, so he certainly wasn't a young man. He'd managed to make the transition to the wise elder -- a role he definitely played on our block -- without forgetting what it was like to be young.

It was Mr. Ritter who kept making phone calls to the mayor's office until they finally sent a front-end loader out to clear the snow from our block after a particularly bad blizzard. And I'm sure he was responsible for the fact that both our street (a narrow one-way route used only by people who live here and their visitors) and our alley were repaved years ago while streets around us in worse condition are still full of potholes.

His yard has always been the showpiece of the block. His grass was always cut to just the right length -- he used clippers, not a mower. And it was real grass -- not the green weeds that most of the rest of us have. There were flowers, statues, an archway leading to the side of the house, all impeccably maintained. So was his Jaguar, kept under a cover when not in use. It must be an old car, because he's had it as long as I've lived here, but it still looks brand new.

My neighbor told me he fell from the roof he was repairing on his other house in Michigan -- so typical that he would be fixing it himself. It says a lot about his presence on the block that he was so well known even though he spent a lot of the year in other places.

Mr. Ritter never ran for public office, at least not in the years that I knew him. He provided leadership for our neighborhood not to build up his reputation, but just because it was what he did. He took care of things.

Every neighborhood needs someone like Mr. Ritter. We of the 800 block of Somerset Place N.W. in Washington, D.C., were lucky to have him for as long as we did. We're going to miss him.