Part of the problem

Shorter Tavis Smiley: “Since National Public Radio - which has carried my show - has tried and failed to reach out to black folks, I’m going to pull my show from NPR altogether.”

Well, that’s one way of reaching out. Having no other information, you have to take Smiley’s rationale as is, but it feels kind of thin. Is he faulting NPR for not getting his show into more markets, or not developing more diverse programming? Or is the fault Smiley’s - is his show simply not appealing enough to sell? Something’s missing here and we’re not getting it from Smiley, because he’s outta there:

Talk-show host Tavis Smiley said Monday he will be leaving National Public Radio, which he said has tried hard but fallen short of reaching “a broad spectrum of Americans who would benefit from public radio.”

Smiley, 40, said Monday that December 16 will be his last day as host of “The Tavis Smiley Show.”

Launched in January 2002, the show is a daily, one-hour program, a collaboration between NPR and public radio stations with predominantly black audiences.

Smiley said he decided against renewing his contract, which is up at the end of the year.

In a statement, he thanked NPR stations and said he has come to care even more for public radio and its potential.

“Yet, after all that we’ve accomplished towards our goal of seeking a broader, more diverse and younger audience for public radio,” he said, “NPR’s own research has confirmed that NPR has simply failed to meaningfully reach out to a broad spectrum of Americans who would benefit from public radio but simply don’t know it exists or what it offers.”

Well, NPR will offer less now, thanks to Smiley.

Regarding Lauren Rainey: Thank you

I do not know Lauren Rainey, the 13-year-old trach-dependent patient at risk of losing her Medicaid-provided nursing care, nor have I ever met her mother, Laura. It would be presumptuous to speak for them, and I won’t try. Speaking solely for myself, however, I would very much like to thank everyone who has visited this website for information on her struggles with Alabama Medicaid and has gone on to write emails or letters or place phone calls on Lauren’s behalf. I can only judge the scale of the response by the traffic here at Waveflux, but by that measure the response has been both considerable and consistent. While there are a number of people who deserve particular thanks for bringing attention to this story (and they’ll get it), I’d like to make special mention just now of David and everyone connected with MichaelMoore.com. Public attention to Lauren’s case is indeed needed as much now as in the initial days of this matter, and I urge everyone reading this to continue speaking out for Lauren and to spread word of this story to others.

I ask that special effort be made to register your concerns with Alabama Governor Bob Riley, Senators Richard C. Shelby and Jeff Sessions, and Representative Jo Bonner. Contact info can be found here (scroll down). Please feel free to use the media contact list as well, located on the same page.

I also ask that everyone be polite when contacting any public official in this matter, including anyone connected with Alabama Medicaid. I understand that feelings may run high regarding Lauren’s situation, but name-calling and threats will not help matters. And helping matters, helping Lauren, is what counts.

Thank you again. Please keep at it. And tell everyone you know.

Wal-Mart Uber Alles

You can love the iconic corporate spawn of Sam Walton or you can despise it. You might even be able to do both at once. The one thing you can’t do with Wal-Mart is ignore it. That seems to be the reasoning behind Always Low Prices - Always, a blog devoted to the good, the bad, and the omnipresence of American retailing’s 800-pound gorilla. And omnipresence is indeed the word, for even if you’ve never set foot inside the big box and never intend to, Wal-Mart most likely has some effect on your life as a consumer. The blog is admirably critical and non-biased as it measures Wal-Mart’s huge economic and cultural footprint. Check it out.

Oliver Willis, on the air

Big-time blogger and liberal bomb-thrower Oliver Willis reasons that if the talk show format is indeed the locus of discourse in this country, who is he to resist? Hence The Willis Effect, brought to you via the wonders of the iPod. His first audio effort was a little tentative - he seemed somewhat apologetic for not being a professional mike jockey - but not bad on balance. I expect that his second podcast (available now) will be more focused and feisty. I haven’t had the chance to listen to it; the Dell Corporate Oppressor 6000 that I’m using at the moment isn’t handling the sound well. I’ll give it a listen at home later.

I have no idea how many bloggers are trying a multimedia approach like this; it does seem like a natural evolutionary step, given advances in technology (that is, affordable technology). Regarding Willis in particular: I should like to see (or, rather, hear) guests on his show and an interplay of ideas. That would be cool. Video would be equally cool. Of course, then you’d need a set, and maybe a bow-tie like Tucker Carlson’s. Still, it’s worth considering.

After Falluja II: Hot time in the cities

From Lt. Gen. John Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force at Falluja:

“We feel right now that we have, as I mentioned, broken the back of the insurgency and we’ve taken away the safe haven,” Sattler said in a briefing from outside Falluja monitored at the Pentagon.

Sattler, citing records captured from rebel positions inside Falluja, said insurgents had lost its “means for command and control” and “the turf where you’re operating, the town that you feel comfortable moving about in, where you know your way about.”

Speaking of insurgents, he added, “Now you are scattered — you’re scattered. You’ve been flushed from your hide-out. You have no friends in the area you move into. You must make new contacts.”

From Aparisim Ghosh of Time:

Flushed from their hideouts in the Sunni triangle, many fighters have descended upon Baghdad and Mosul, taking with them a burning desire to avenge Fallujah and a style of fighting previously unseen in Iraq. The rebels, according to sources familiar with their operations, are no longer seeking small-town havens. By basing themselves in urban areas, they are more anonymous and can be relatively certain that U.S. forces won’t launch massive offensive assaults, as they did in Fallujah. “We can’t get into a shooting war … inside the city,” says Major General Peter Chiarelli, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, which guards the Iraqi capital. The rebels’ new tactics suggest that Marine Lieut. General John Sattler perhaps spoke too soon last week when he boasted that his troops had “broken the back of the insurgency” by rolling up its Fallujah sanctuary.

Having the insurgents “scattered” may not be the advantage Sattler thinks it is.

The Ghosh article is chilling in its depiction of the new urban battleground, and is well worth the reading.

It’s a jingle out there

Ah, the season of light. You can always count on the holidays to bring disturbing sidebar stories, unwanted glimpses of humanity at its most revealing. Sociopaths stabbing relatives over table manners. Jerks with too much money, not enough taste, and no sense of neighborliness. And that’s just the stuff that made CNN. God knows what’s happpening in your neighborhood.

Apropos holiday madness, I understand that this is, or was, “Black Friday.” I shuddered as I watched televised scenes of shoppers struggling upstream like salmon. Not for me or mine, thanks. I’m not a button-wearing observant of the whole “Buy Nothing Day” thing. Still, the idea of turning on the currency tap full-blast just because everybody else says it’s a good idea doesn’t thrill me as it used to.

I am going out to eat with friends tonight, though. Does that count as holiday spending? Maybe if I wear red and green…

Obviously light posting

As you can easily see, the weblog has gone largely untended in the first half of the four-day T-Day weekend. I’ve been hanging with M and doing a few domestic chores. The sweetgum out back chose this week to dump the greater portion of its leaves; now that I’ve raked it all up for compost duty, I see that the grass underneath needs to be cut one more time. I’ve got some floor sanding to do at the end of the hallway upstairs, and laundry, and…I can see your eyes glazing over. Sorry.

Hope all are enjoying a great and safe holiday, and are not spending too much in the stores today.

Thanksgiving wishes

Lauren Rainey wins!

This 13-year-old middle-school student had been in danger of having her nursing care terminated. Now Medicaid has changed its policies for the better. Read details here.

I’d like to wish a happy Thanksgiving Day to young trach-dependent patient Lauren Rainey of Mobile, Alabama, whose struggles for continued nursing care have been well-documented.

I would also like to wish a happy Thanksgiving Day to Dr. Mary McIntyre, the director of Alabama Medicaid, the organization whose every decision directly affects Lauren’s continued health and welfare.

The holiday season is a time when the fundamentals of our common humanity become more celebrated and more cherished. I hope - I wish - that those charged with protecting Lauren’s health act with compassion, in the name of the humanity we share.

Age of sheer ironicalness

Both Julie Saltman and Hecate at Eschaton have underscored the thematic contradiction of the Bush administration calling Ukraine’s presidential election fraudulent.

Ukraine’s Liberal opposition challenger Viktor Yushchenko said he did not recognize the election of Ukraine’s prime minister as president and called for a country-wide “political strike.”

The country’s election commission declared PM Viktor Yanukovych the winner of a hotly contested presidential runoff, but U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell quickly dismissed the contest as marred by fraud.

Speaking in Washington, Powell urged Ukraine’s leaders to “respond immediately” warning “there will be consequences” for the United States’ relationship with Ukraine.

You have to wonder if Powell suffered even an instant’s worth of ironic discomfort - or felt even transiently and vaguely hypocritical - in putting the wood to Ukraine. My guess is probably not. That would take a bit of figurative thinking; Powell seems to have been in “literal-only mode” - strictly as a matter of psychic self-preservation - ever since that UN speech. In the meantime, it looks like the man whose soul has been examined by George Bush couldn’t care less about Washington’s criticism or anybody else’s:

[Russian President Vladimir Putin] has congratulated Yanukovych on his victory, and the Kremlin-controlled Russian parliament denounced the Ukrainian opposition Wednesday for its “illegal actions,” AP reported.

Putin, traveling in Portugal, called the observers’ criticism “inadmissible” and said through an interpreter that Ukraine “doesn’t need to be lectured,” AP reported.

Next thing you know, Putin will claim that Yanukovych has a “mandate” or something.

P.S. - For more on the whole hypocrisy thing informing the American view (or the Republican view, at least) of the Ukrainian election (wouldn’t that have been called “the-the Ukrainian election” once upon a time?), go no further than Jill Cozzi’s Brilliant at Breakfast. Well, actually, you’ll have to go a little farther, but she’ll point the way.

Through a mirror, darkly

The American occupation of Iraq has been compared to the Vietnam War so many times that the comparison has lost much of its meaning - it’s so much white noise now, beyond actual consideration. You reflexively agree with the premise or reflexively dissent, and learn nothing. I think that a more apt parallel for Iraq is the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. The tragedy of that bloody stalemate should serve as a warning sign to Americans of what to expect from our own ill-considered engagement. In the wake of the recent killing of a wounded Iraqi in Falluja, the following horror story out of Gaza reads like a grim exercise in divination.

This is where we’re headed.

Israelis fired on girl ‘having identified her as a 10-year-old’, military tape shows

Israeli soldiers continued firing at a Palestinian girl killed in Gaza last month well after she had been identified as a frightened child, a military communications tape has revealed.

The tape is likely to be crucial in the prosecution case against the men’s company commander, who faces five charges arising from the killing of Iman al-Hams, 13, in the southern border town of Rafah on 6 October.

It shows that troops firing with light weapons and machine guns on a figure moving in a “no entry zone” close to an army outpost near the border with Egypt had swiftly discovered that she was a girl.

In the recorded exchanges someone in the operations room asks: “Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?” The observation post, housed in a watchtower, replies: “It’s a little girl. She’s running defensively eastwards, a girl of about 10. She’s behind the embankment, scared to death.”

Not until four minutes later was it reported that the girl had been hit and had fallen. The observation post reports: “Receive, I think that one of the positions took her out.” … Operations room: “What, she fell?” Observation post: “She’s not moving right now.”

The tape records the commander as telling his men, after firing at the girl with an automatic weapon and declaring he has “confirmed” the killing: “Anyone who’s mobile, moving in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed.” [...]

The army admitted shortly after the shooting near the Girit outpost that it had been a mistake. The girl was carrying a bag which the army said that the soldiers had thought contained explosives, but which was found to contain schoolbooks. Although the family is at a loss to explain why she had wandered into a dangerous prohibited zone, they say she was on her way to school at the time.

The soldiers said that the commander had fired two shots at the girl from close range as she lay on the ground before withdrawing, turning and “emptying his magazine” by firing some 10 bullets at her body.

This account is broadly confirmed by the terms of the indictment issued this week. Although the family’s Israeli lawyer believes - and Palestinian witnesses said last month - that she was wounded but alive when the commander fired his first two shots, he has not been charged with manslaughter, apparently on the grounds that there is no evidence that the two bullets killed the girl.

After the report that she has been hit, the tape records the company commander as saying: “I and another soldier … are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill …” After a pause he adds: “Receive a situation report - we fired and killed her. She was wearing pants, jeans, an undershirt, a shirt. Also, she was wearing a keffiyah on her head. I also confirmed the kill. Over.”

The charges include obstruction of justice because of a false explanation - which was accepted by senior commanders until soldiers came forward with their version of events to the newspaper Yedhiot Ahronot - that he came under fire from Palestinian gunmen 300 yards away as he approached the girl and shot at the ground to deter the fire.

Via Juan Cole.

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