Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 287

Finally, Pro B-Baller Comes Out

Just posted by Sports Illustrated.  It's center Jason Collins and he writes first-person account.

"I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay.

"I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn't the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, 'I'm different.' If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I'm raising my hand."  And he'll be marching.

The recent Boston Marathon bombing reinforced the notion that I shouldn't wait for the circumstances of my coming out to be perfect. Things can change in an instant, so why not live truthfully?

Kobe Bryant says he's "proud" Collins came out.  Bill Clinton tweets that he's proud to call him his "friend."  

Ten Years Ago: Friedman's Famous Iraq Column

It was ten years ago this weekend when Thomas Friedman wrote his iconic NYT column declaring that no WMDs need be found in Iraq to justify our (as he put it elsewhere) "suck on this" invasion.  "Mr. Bush doesn't owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue). It is clear that in ending Saddam's tyranny, a huge human engine for mass destruction has been broken. The thing about Saddam's reign is that when you look at that skull, you don't even know what period it came from -- his suppression of the Kurds or the Shiites, his insane wars with Iran and Kuwait, or just his daily brutality."  (Much more in new edition of my book on Iraq and the media, So Wrong for So Long.)

Whether you were for or against this war, whether you preferred that the war be done with the U.N.'s approval or without it, you have to feel good that right has triumphed over wrong. America did the right thing here. It toppled one of the most evil regimes on the face of the earth, and I don't think we know even a fraction of how deep that evil went. Fair-minded people have to acknowledge that. Who cares if we now find some buried barrels of poison? Do they carry more moral weight than those buried skulls? No way.

So why isn't everyone celebrating this triumph?

Student Shoots Self in Classroom

In a Cincinnati-area school today, a kid took out a gun and tried to kill himself. Rushed to hospital.   This story, however, has one injured and one apprehended (same person?).    In any case, the threat is "over."  Catholic boys school.

Today's Tale from Gun Nutty USA

Today's story in our daily feature comes via David Frum and it's from Oregon.   A mentally unstable woman is turned away by one store but goes to Dick's and easly gets one, then shoots and kills herself (on the other hand, she could have shot dozens).  No real background check on her background.  She'd been hospitalized many, many times recently.

No restrictions apply to people like Nyhof Dunn, whose battles with bipolar disorder and major depression drove her to voluntarily enter residential psychiatric care 13 times in the final year of her life. The month she died, Multnomah County sheriff's deputies visited her home after she told a 9-1-1 operator she planned to hang herself in her parents' barn.

An estimated 44 percent of the 656 Oregonians who killed themselves in 2011 suffered documented cases of mental illness, based on medical examiners' reports. And about 143,000 Oregonians experienced serious mental illness in the last year, based on survey data from 2010 and 2011.
 

Drones: Coll and Response

Important new piece from upcoming issue of The New Yorker by the expert Steve Coll just posted.  It's a review of new books by Mark Mazzetti and Jeremy Scahill, and more.  "Obama’s enthusiasm for drones—which he believes minimizes the risk to American forces and non-combatants on the ground—is unnervingly reminiscent of Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for poisoning schemes and coup plots. (The President’s foreign-policy advisers periodically cite Eisenhower as an inspiration.) Drone strikes are also defended on the ground that they have killed terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen before those terrorists could kill Americans in Times Square or on the Mall, in Washington. There is no way to assess these claims: the official secrecy surrounding the program makes it impossible to judge the results."

It is also far from clear that killing leaders is even a reliable means of disrupting terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Jenna Jordan, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Aaron Mannes, of the University of Maryland, have separately reviewed dozens of past campaigns by governments to destroy terrorist organizations and found that culling leaders works in some instances—especially when terrorist groups are young and small—but not in others. The approach is particularly ineffective against religious organizations, which tend to regroup and escalate violence in response to such efforts.

Besides, as the Boston Marathon bombing reminded us, terrorist plots can be hatched and carried out by individuals acting independently of any chain of command.
America’s drone campaign is also creating an ominous global precedent. Ten years or less from now, China will likely be able to field armed drones. How might its Politburo apply Obama’s doctrines to Tibetan activists holding meetings in Nepal?

Wolf Not at the Door

Police tonight revealed tonight that CNN icon Wolf Blitzer was target of a hoax Saturday night claiming that he'd been shot at his Bethesda home.  Police arrived in force but no Wolf.   He wasn't even there as a hologram.  This was latest in this type of "celeb" hoax.

How'd hoaxters do it?  "In the case involving Blitzer, the person or people behind the fraud wrote some form of text message, Starks said. The message was set up to seem like it was from Blitzer himself, and it included his address. It appeared to have been sent through a mobile phone company’s “relay” system, which is part of an arrangement to pass on urgent messages to the police’s emergency communications center, Starks said. But exactly where the message originated remains unclear, he said."

“We don’t know where these people are. They could be in New Zealand,” Starks said. What will happen next in terms of an investigation remains unclear as well, Starks said. “We’re trying to determine what kind of source it came from.”

Blitzer was out of town when the cruisers set up outside his house

Love Is Beck

The surprisingly giant 1968 hit instrumental "Love Is Blue" closes Mad Men tonight.  Just as surprising Jeff Beck recorded a guitar-laden version.

From 'Street Reporter' to Bomber Defender

Meet the public defender for surviving Boston Bomber.  Intereting:  Was well regarded Miami reporter.  Now will be "most reviled." 

I met Conrad in the early 1980s when we were both rookie reporters in the Miami Herald’s Ft. Lauderdale newsroom. I recall a tiny, funny and fiercely intelligent woman — the sort that patronizing male colleagues might call spunky before they became acquainted with Conrad’s startlingly powerful rabbit punch.

“She was a real street journalist, and smarter than the rest of us,” recalls Ernie Torriero, a Voice of America editor who worked with Conrad at the Herald and later at the Kansas City Times. Christine Spolar, an editor for London’s Financial Times who attended Northwestern University with Conrad and has remained a close friend for 35 years, remembers an analytical journalist who “loved to explore the whys and what-ifs” and worried perpetually that she had overlooked some critical witness to the story she was trying to tell.

Scoop from Unlikely Source

Who'd a thunk the venerable NY Review of Books would track down the alleged mentor of Boston bomber?  "Allakhverdov said he had known Tamerlan in Boston, where he lived until about three years ago, and has not had any contact with him since. He declined to describe the nature of his acquaintance with Tamerlan or the Tsarnaev family, but said he had never met the family members who are now accusing him of radicalizing Tamerlan. He also confirmed he had been interviewed by the FBI and that he has cooperated with the investigation."

I’ve been cooperating entirely with the FBI. I gave them my computer and my phone and everything I wanted to show I haven’t done anything. And they said they are about to return them to me. And the agents who talked told me they are about to close my case.

'Pops' Culture

For the closing night of this weekend's JazzFest in NOLA, here's Louis Armstrong from 1929, just one of his revolutionary tunes that changed American music forever and made him the true Music Man of the 20th Century.   Young 'uns, check out all of his recordings from 1925-1930.