Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

On a Sultry, Stifling Day, This Yoga Class Turns Up the Heat and Inhales Deeply

These people are simply insane. There is no other logical explanation…

The rest of the Code Red world is blaring alerts and cautions — Find air conditioning! Stay inside! Avoid strenuous exercise! Drink lots of water! But inside the Down Dog Yoga studio there is, even with the wall thermometer at 92 degrees, barely enough space amid 30 supplicants to wedge another mat onto the floor. Several ceiling fans turn lethargically, barely moving the hot air around the room.

“You will have lots of opportunity to shine and sweat tonight,” Ivey says, smiling, the air in the room as invigorating as a tepid sauna. “Embrace the heat. The battle is in your mind.”

Students smooth towels over their mats and sit expectantly. Sweat is already starting to bead on their faces. Their expressions are blank. The point is not to think about the suffering they are about to embrace.

For the next 90 minutes, Ivey will guide her class through the rigors of power vinyasa yoga. Baron Baptiste, former Philadelphia Eagles trainer, ESPN2 fitness guru, author of “My Daddy Is a Pretzel” and a yogi, developed the practice. It’s an amalgam of other disciplines — ashtanga, iyengar, bikram — performed in mind-boggling heat. It’s all about the poses, stripped of the religion, New Age flair and fluffy mysticism, or so his Web site claims.

“The beauty of heat,” says Anita Killian, a Boston financial analyst who popped in for a fix before flying to Europe, “is that it teaches you to get out of the way of yourself.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/18/AR2006071801774.html?nav=most_emailed

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/07/18/BL2006071800423.html Approximately midway into his column he quotes one Paul Mirengoff:

“In an obscene attempt to obtain political mileage, the Democrats are claiming that President Bush is responsible for the outbreak of war in the Middle East. Howard Dean claims that the war would not have occurred if the Democrats had been in power because the Dems would have worked the past six years to prevent it. And Sen. Dodd has made basically the same assertion. Meanwhile, Rep. Jane Harmon contends that the Bush administration is to blame for our poor to non-existent relations with Syria and Iran which, she says, prevent us from using diplomacy to end the crisis.

“Once again, the Democrats are taking partisan politics to a previously unknown low. No past opposition party has attempted to blame the outbreak of an Arab-Israeli war on the party in power. Unless I’m mistaken, the Republicans didn’t blame President Johnson for the war in 1967; the Dems didn’t blame President Nixon for the war in 1973; nor did they blame President Reagan for the hostilities in Lebanon that occurred on his watch. Moreover, it is especially reprehensible for the Dems to be taking such a low road now, when unlike before, the U.S. is in the middle of essentially the same war as Israel — the war on terrorism.”

Mirengoff is the one who is being obscene. He quite hypocritically ignores one of the most infamous red-baiting events in U.S. history: “The Fall of China”. The fall of Chiang Kai Chek’s Government shocked many Americans (Who, if they had been paying proper attention to chinese affairs, would not have been shocked.).

(To give you the idea of the impression that China had on U.S. culture, I would remind the reader of a pithy little saying used by mothers up untill the 1950s: If a recalcitrant child refused to eat his/her food, then the mother would try this guilt trip — Don’t you know that there are children starving in China?)

At the time of Chiang Kai Chek’s fall the Republican leadership — who had been out of the White House for approximately twenty years — were desperate for an issue (any issue, really) that they could successfully attack the Democrats with. They accused the Democrats and the senior technocrats who were advising them of treason (Yes, I know: Shades of Ann Coulter.). So successfull were they that when Eisenhower came into office, he let John Foster Dulles be “bullied” — Dulles was a complete bastard in his own right — into enforcing the new Republican Politically Correct Orthodoxy: Anyone in the State Department who had said bad things about Chiang Kai Chek’s (corrupt and incompetent) Government was a traitor who had to be fired. They were and throughout the State Department the following lesson was learned: Beware of the leadership of Congress, because if they do not like what you say, they will try to get you fired. After that, the official analysis offered up by the State Department were always corrupted to the extent that would pass political muster of the Congressional Leadership. The process was critically corrupted by a Republican Leadership that was craven enough to violate the principle that “Partisanship stops at the shore.”

Because the process was corrupted, no one in the State Department was willing to oppose a policy that was favored by the Congressional Leadership. And so it was that when the political leadership declared that the French-created leadership of South Vietnam was to be supported, no one in the State Department dared to disagree. Thanks to the Republican Leadership, the Ghosts of China still haunted the foreign policy apparati of the U.S. leadership. A leadership that refused to lead when things went sour in Vietnam.

In conclusion, I’d like to quote one Hwun Yee Chen’s review of The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam (It’s the 8th review down)

David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” is a mostly angry, but occasionally sympathetic book about the can-do activists of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. I think this is one of the best books written about the Vietnam War. If you read it today, you will think about Iraq and feel very sad.

In a way, this is a book in search of a hero and there was perhaps no one in the country with more power than Kennedy to influence the way Americans saw Vietnam and Communism. He had made a speech at American University where he asked Americans and Soviets alike to reexamine their attitude towards each other, but that kind of talk was rare, and it was a speech, Halberstam suggests, that would not have happened had Kennedy not proven his toughness during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy, of course had enormous doubts about Vietnam; they were based in large part on his reading of history and his own experiences. But those doubts existed during a time of unreal pressures. The culprit is the Korean War and the fall of China to Communism. The fall of China, in particular, would have a profound effect on the American people. It would spark a great debate about who had lost China, and while there was no consensus (some believed that China was never ours to lose and that those events were beyond our control), the State Department and the Democratic Party would take most of the blame. According to Halberstam, the result of all of this was devastating. From then on, U.S. Presidents would find themselves under enormous pressure to not lose any more countries.

“If there were problems”, writes Halberstam “the Administration would somehow glide around them, letting time rather than political candor or courage do the healing. It was a belief that if there were scars from the period (and both the Democratic party and the Department of State were deeply scarred), they were by now secret scars, and if there were victims, they were invisible victims. If one looked away and did not talk about them, somehow they would go away. Yet the truth was altogether different: the scars and victims were real and the McCarthy period had frozen American policies on China and Asia. The Kennedy administration would in no way come to terms with the aberrations of those policies; it had not created them, as its advocates pointed out, but it did not undo them, either.”

This is quite prescient, seeing as it was written over a year and a half ago. Mirengoff is quite the hypocrite and bastard to willfully ignore this history.

Forbes.com

Riverbend, the woman who writes the blog Baghdad Burning from Iraq, writes achingly of a personal loss. There is nothing I can add to her words;

At nearly 2 pm, we received some terrible news. We lost a good friend in the killings. T. was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. The last time I saw him was a week ago. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he’d brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad.

He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he’d promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T. was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing. 

People are staying in their homes in the area and no one dares enter it so the wakes for the people who were massacred haven’t begun yet. I haven’t seen his family yet and I’m not sure I have the courage or the energy to give condolences. I feel like I’ve given the traditional words of condolences a thousand times these last few months, “Baqiya ib hayatkum… Akhir il ahzan…” or “May this be the last of your sorrows.” Except they are empty words because even as we say them, we know that in today’s Iraq any sorrow- no matter how great- will not be the last.

There was also an attack yesterday on Ghazaliya though we haven’t heard what the casualties are. People are saying it’s Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi army, behind the killings. The news the world hears about Iraq and the situation in the country itself are wholly different. People are being driven out of their homes and areas by force and killed in the streets, and the Americans, Iranians and the Puppets talk of national conferences and progress.

It’s like Baghdad is no longer one city, it’s a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence. It’s gotten so that I dread sleeping because the morning always brings so much bad news. The television shows the images and the radio stations broadcast it. The newspapers show images of corpses and angry words jump out at you from their pages, “civil war… death… killing… bombing… rape…”

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don’t report rapes here, they avenge them. We’ve been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can’t believe their ‘heroes’ are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

In the news they’re estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes… Raise your heads high supporters of the ‘liberation’ - your troops have made you proud today. I don’t believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an ‘independent investigation’, ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn’t his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.

It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It’s been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can’t bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can’t bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can’t bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can’t bring myself to care because it’s difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they’ll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

Why don’t the Americans just go home? They’ve done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they ‘cut and run’, but the fact is that they aren’t doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what’s being done about it? Nothing. It’s convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape.

Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it’s no longer a ‘life’ like people live abroad. It’s simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends- friends like T.

It’s difficult to believe T. is really gone… I was checking my email today and I saw three unopened emails from him in my inbox. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was alive. T. was alive and it was all some horrific mistake! I let myself ride the wave of giddy disbelief for a few precious seconds before I came crashing down as my eyes caught the date on the emails- he had sent them the night before he was killed. One email was a collection of jokes, the other was an assortment of cat pictures, and the third was a poem in Arabic about Iraq under American occupation. He had highlighted a few lines describing the beauty of Baghdad in spite of the war… And while I always thought Baghdad was one of the more marvelous cities in the world, I’m finding it very difficult this moment to see any beauty in a city stained with the blood of T. and so many other innocents…

Energy initiatives unveiled by Scottish ministers would require virtually all new property owners to produce at least 10 percent of their own electricity through a micro-renewable generating plant.

The plan is aimed at big developments such as schools, hospitals, council buildings and factories, but it will also affect large housing developments.

Solar panels, wind turbines, biofuels, photovoltaic cells, hydro-electric, ground-source heat pumps or some combination of these could would be required to fitted to any new development.  The ministers believe these additions will add to the building’s value and save electric costs in the long run.

Scotland’s plan is the most ambitious of any government so far, but it is not the first.  The English community of Woking Borough established their own local electric service beginning in 1990, using co-generation systems, photovoltaics and fuel cells. The system cut CO2 emmissions by 70% and cut energy consumption by over 40%

These are models all greens should be studying.  They are locally controlled, environmentally sound and drastically reduce reliance on hydrocarbon fuels.

The Republican House has passed a sweeping food safety act that could roll back as many as 150 state consumer and environmental regulations across the country. The industry sponsored legislation is being driven by the philosophy that 50 different sets of regulations on goods marketed nationally drains budgets and drives up costs that the consumer eventually pays. The Senate is expected to take up the bill in the coming weeks.

Already federal agencies have either overturned, stalled or weakened California’s initiatives to clean the air, block unwanted faxes, control e-mail spam, protect personal financial data from being sold and warn consumers of mercury in tuna.

The proposed food safety act would overturn Proposition 65 which requires a warning if consumers could be exposed to toxic chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects.

Governor Schwarzenegger, normally a pro-business Republican, condemns Congresses actions sayng that the Republicans have abandoned the shared power federalism promoted by Ronald Reagan. This December he blasted Congress;

Incredibly, under Republican control of Congress, states’ rights are beginning to erode again. They are telling us how to run state education, state health care, state elections and even where we can locate a liquefied natural gas plant.

Businesses seeking to limitstate regulations by turning to the federal government for watered down versions is nothing new.  Some of the landmark regulations of the progressive era were pushed by businesses because states were passing more radical versions.

The Republican mantra of states rights only comes to the fore when the federal government starts passing regulations that businesses don’t like.

According to Ballot Access News Maine state Representative John Eder has received the endorsement of the Maine AFL-CIO in his race for re-election, the first time the AFL-CIO has endorsed a Green Party candidate.  Local AFL-CIO organizations have also given official support to the Working Families Party in several states and the Labor Party in South Carolina.

We trust that the labor organization realizes that they still won’t be able to donate money to Eder’s campaign.

Chris Crowder, who had just filed papers to be the Statehood/Green Party candidate for Mayor of D.C. was fatally shot on Saturday in a park a block away from the new convention center.

Chris was confined to a wheelchair since previously being shot in 1990 in a case of mistaken identity.

Chris had been an activist in D.C. politics, lobbying the Council–often loudly–on issues affecting the poor and young.  D.C. Councilwoman Adrian Fenty remaked that,

He stood out because of his energy and his passion. He was an advocate for affordable housing, more services and programs for young people. He spoke very loud. Even when he was challenging the government, he was always the type of person who would walk over and shake your hand. He really seemed concerned about the future of the city.

“He said he wanted to help the city be better,” said his mother, Gracie Brown. “He didn’t have much money, but he was running.”

Let America Be America Again

By Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? 
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home–
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free?  Not me?
Surely not me?  The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again! 

Sgt. Matthew Bee, a decorated Akron, Ohio Marine who spent eight months in Hadeetha, is sending one of his six medals of commendation back to the White House in protest.

Bee is returning his War on Terrorism medal, calling it “eye candy” from Bush, protesting that;

So, he took something noble and honorable and made it kind of dirty. And I always thought that medal was the one he pinned on us and said, ‘This is my war. This is my stamp in history.

Claiming that he is not anti-war, but rather pro-peace, Bee intends to travel to Washington, D.C. with a group of like minded Marines.  They will try to return their War on Terrorism medal to Bush personally or to members of Congress.