FDR on Conservatives

Quote for Today

"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward."

           President Franklin Roosevelt,
           in a radio address, 26 October 1939

Quote for today

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."
     -- Goethe

Quote for today

     "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

     -- Voltaire

Digitus Impudicus at WYPR

 A man flipped me the bird this week!

 He did it in a place where one might least expect it. This was not an expression of road rage on a busy roadway; it was at the studio of Baltimore’s local public radio station, WYPR where I was participating in a discussion of conditions in Uganda and the astounding impact of the viral video “Kony 2012.” I was in the sealed interview booth. He was outside, on the other side of the large window looking into the booth. The gesture astonished me so much that I lost track of the first question posed to me by the host, Dan Rodricks.

At first I wondered why on earth this fellow, who actually is employed by WYPR, would give me the finger. Then I recalled that more than 20 years ago he was an employee of The Baltimore Sun when I was an editor at the paper. He had an exclusively-held high opinion of himself but management was unimpressed. They tried to fire him. The union representing reporters successfully intervened on his behalf, but eventually he left. I will not name him here because apart from his notoriously long-held grudges, he also is notoriously litigious.

 But never mind all that. The incident reminded me that the finger gesture appears to have lost the popular place it once held in the realm of silent anger expression. I have not used it in years and this is not because I have not been sufficiently enraged. It’s more because the gesture can get you a punch in the nose.

My favorite story about a confrontation in which I did use it takes me back to Jerusalem in the 1980s when I was The Sun’s Middle East correspondent. I was driving on the road near the Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Old City, and an Israeli driver cut me off. I caught up with him at a traffic light and gave him the finger. He caught up with me at the next traffic light. I expected the worst. He rolled down his window and gave me a different hand gesture: A fist thrust forward with the index and small finger pointed forward. “No,” he said. “In this country, we do it like this.” And away he drove, clearly delighted to have had the last word.

The finger gesture is one of the world’s oldest. 2000 years before my Jerusalem experience, the city was occupied by Romans who called it digitus impudicus. Before them, the ancient Greeks called it katapugon, with certain, uh, back door implications.

It is a marvelous gesture with a rich history. I think I shall try to use it more often, preferably from behind the safety of a thick window with plenty of time to get away from the consequences.

Answer the question, please.

     Time spent these days watching most of the interview shows often is wasted because the people being interviewed do not really ever answer the questions put to them. This is especially true of political candidates, their supporters and surrogates, and these days very especially true of the candidates for the Republican Party presidential nomination. But it's also true of the other side. They're all afraid of wandering outside the circle of carefully programmed talking points.
     So here's an idea: After the interviewer asks the question, leave the question on the screen. Let the viewer decide if the question's being answered. What fun! Actually, after the question's asked, have a teleprompter facing the interviewed with the question, just to remind him what was asked and that we're all waiting for an answer. Even more fun!
 
   

Quote for today: America as Byzantium

       My friend David Mize has sent me this excerpt from Sir Steven Runciman’s prolific writings on the Byzantine Empire. This one belongs in the category of Santayana’s warning that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

        "The finances reflected the disorder. Taxation was high but varied and irregular. Wealth was unevenly distributed. Many millionaires could still be found, but there were whole provinces sunk in poverty. Moreover, the Empire had long been suffering from an adverse trade-balance. Already imports exceeded exports, and the position was never righted."

Uganda paper on Limbaugh's view of Kony

(From today’s Uganda newspaper NewVision)

Limbaugh ignorant about Kony’s LRA

By Wanyama Wangah

     The Bible says: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the

kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven”

(Matt 7:21)

     That is a quote that Rush Limbaugh should know because he is America’s number

one radio talk-show host and a religious conservative.

But Limbaugh thinks Joseph Kony is a good Christian, because his organization has

got the name ‘Lord’ in its title!

     When the American President sent troops to help track down the Lord’s Resistance

Army rebel leaders [last October], Limbaugh lurched onto it, saying Barrack Obama was fighting Christians!

     Just a quote from Mr Limbaugh: “’Lord’” referred to in their name is not someone

named Lord, but God. Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the

combat Lord’s Resistance Army. And here we are at war with them. Have you ever

heard of Lord’s Resistance Army, Dawn? How about you, Brian? Snerdley, have you?

You never heard of Lord’s Resistance Army? Well, proves my contention, most

Americans have never heard of it, and here we are at war with them. Lord’s

Resistance Army are Christians. It means God.

     So just how is it that America’s top radio talk show host does not know about the

atrocities committed by the LRA?

     Limbaugh hates Obama, but to hate him so much that he would criticize him for sending troops to help track down Kony is mindboggling.

     Limbaugh states that Obama is sending troops to fight Kony because he (Kony) is fighting against Muslim terrorists. If only he knew that is Kony who has indeed received backing form the Islamic regime in Sudan.

     That is America for you.

Kony 2012

     In the great international uproar generated by the Kony 2012 video from Invisible Children, the story of one truly heroic woman's challenge to Kony  that began 15 years ago at the risk of her own life, appears to have been lost.

     The woman is Sister Rachele Faserra, an Italian nun of the Camboni order, who as Deputy Headmistress of St, Mary's school in Aboke, Uganda, went after thugs from Kony's LRA after they had abducted 149 girls from the school in a night raid in October 1996.

     Traveling by bicycle, carrying money from the school for ransom, Sr. Faserra, somehow confident she would not be harmed because she was a white nun, found the raiders and persuaded them to release all but 30 of the abducted girls. She offered herself up in exchange for the remaining 30, but the LRA soldiers refused. Eventually, she was joined by parents of the remaining 30 in forming the Concerned Parents Association and they took their campaign to every authority imaginable, including then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, UN Sec. Gen. Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, even Muammar Ghaddafi and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir who actually was supplying the LRA with weapons and other needs in return for raids they were conducting against the Christian population in Southern Sudan.

     The last of the 30 Aboke girls, Catherine Ajok, was released 13 years later in 2009. She was pregnant with a child by Kony who had taken all 30 as his wives. Some died in captivity.

     The extraordinary saga of the girls and Sr. Faserra's tireless and courageous campaign to rescue them was recorded in a book, "Aboke Girls, Children Abducted in Northern Uganda," by another courageous woman, Belgian journalist Else de Temmerman. The book never went "viral" but it should, now that that's possible.

     I first read this book in 2005 while I was in Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda, on a writing assignment for Catholic Relief Services to bring attention to the conflict there in which CRS was supporting programs to help rescued victims of the LRA -- all former child soldiers and "wives" of LRA militiamen, as well as programs to protect people from abduction and death at the hands of the LRA. I have posted those articles elsewhere here on my blog.

                                                                     ***
     Regarding the viral video "Kony 2012," it occurs to me that if each of the people who have viewed the video so far -- an estimated 40 million to date -- were to contribute $1 or even 50 cents to a bounty for Kony's deliverance to justice, he'd probably be delivered up in a hurry. 

                                                                   ***

     One final observation: If Kony ever is captured, the world that dedicated itself to that end will have to find ways to deal with the young and old, men and women, who have been with him all these years -- practically all of them against their will. They will have to be re-integrated into a society that is barely able to eke out a decent existence even without the threat of the LRA. That will take money, too. Lots of it.
                                          
                                             

   

Excerpts from my reporting on Kony & LRA

Following are excerpts from my reporting on Joseph Kony and the LRA in Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda in 2005. The complete articles are on my blog www.buggerthebooboisie.blogspot.com.

Lilly Atek, 23, once beat to death a 10-year-old girl and has participated in the fatal beatings and shootings of others. She wants to be forgiven.

Geoffrey Torac, 28, has beaten to death several people. He asks for forgiveness.

  Francis Olanya, 18, has killed too many people to remember the number. Once, he was forced to kill a man and drink his victim's blood. He asks forgiveness. 

                                      ********

One day, Sunday Lalam said, she and four others were ordered to beat to death a boy her own age from her village because he had become too weak and was a burden.

 "I felt sad because I knew him, but they would have killed me if I did not do it. I have killed many people."  

Kony's Victims (Overview)

(August 25, 2005 – A longer overview drawn from previous columns from Sudan and Uganda).

Seeking redemption ; Ex-child soldiers forced to fight in Northern Uganda's civil war return home and seek forgiveness in the Acholi tribe's ancient cleansing tradition

By G. Jefferson Price III

Special to The Sun

GULU, Uganda - While the world's wealthiest nations ponder debt forgiveness to rescue the most troubled countries in Africa, here in this small town in Northern Uganda, a very different kind of forgiveness is a lot closer to the human experience.

The Acholi tribe that dominates this area calls it a cleansing ceremony. In the last few years, the candidates for "cleansing" have been both the victims and unwilling enactors of some of the most heinous brutality imaginable.

Lilly Atek, 23, once beat to death a 10-year-old girl and has participated in the fatal beatings and shootings of others. She wants to be forgiven.

Geoffrey Torac, 28, has beaten to death several people. He asks for forgiveness.

Francis Olanya, 18, has killed too many people to remember the number. Once, he was forced to kill a man and drink his victim's blood. He asks forgiveness.

They were all abducted at a young age by a rebel group called the Lord's Resistance Army. The younger, the better for Joseph Kony, the messianic cultist who has led the LRA in 19 years of civil war in Northern Uganda, asserting that he wants the country to be ruled by the Ten Commandments.

To shape these children into obedient soldiers, Kony uses a combination of early indoctrination and fear. Many escapees have told similar stories of being ordered to beat someone to death within a week of their abduction, to instill fear in them and others.

They tell of frequent beatings they were subjected to and assaults and killings they were forced to participate in. They also describe deprivation and forced raids on farming communities to get food and new recruits. Those who have been lucky enough to escape, such as Atek, Torac and Olanya, have described these experiences in detail.

Atek was abducted when she was 14. She escaped 15 months ago with her three children, each of them fathered by a different LRA commander. The first two fathers were killed in battle. She escaped with the help of her third husband, who also later escaped. They live now in a small grass hut in Gulu.

Atek was often beaten, for "any small mistake I made." And she was ordered to beat to death others for their mistakes, including a 10-year-old girl who had given wrong directions to a group of LRA fighters.

"It is their policy to give you someone to kill soon after you are abducted," explained Torac, who also is living in Gulu.

In addition to beating to death helpless people who fell into the hands of the LRA, the youths were taught to fight with automatic weapons against the Ugandan army here and against anti-government insurgents in neighboring Sudan. The Islamic fundamentalist government of Sudan equipped the LRA to fight its insurgents.

When they were old enough - between 14 and 16 being regarded as the age of maturity - girls like Atek often were given as wives to LRA commanders, some much older than they, some not much older at all, abducted themselves at an early age.

Over the years, more than 20,000 youths have been abducted by the LRA. Thousands of these former child soldiers, practically all of them with blood on their hands and horrific experiences on their minds, have managed to escape. They are trying to recapture their youth and the affection of their families and communities, the very communities they helped to terrorize as soldiers in the LRA.

Now they want forgiveness. And, difficult as it may seem, they are receiving it in rituals that are as ancient as the Acholi tribe itself, with the help of Christian churches whose missionaries have been working in the area for centuries.

"They are all our children," says Sister Pauline Acayo, a 39- year-old nun who runs a peace-building project here for Catholic Relief Services, a Catholic humanitarian agency. "There is no other way."

Government forces in Northern Uganda have been strengthened by President Yoweri Museveni, and the killing, abduction and pillaging by the LRA has diminished. But an estimated 90 percent of the residents of Northern Uganda still lives in camps to which they fled during the war. Perversely, the LRA mostly raids, kills and abducts the very Acholi people they say they want to liberate.

Atek has been forgiven for the brutality she inflicted on others, including young people she was ordered to beat to death, one of them just for whistling while he worked.

And when other escapees and defectors from the LRA return home in peace, including the ones who made her commit such atrocities, they will be forgiven, too. For, by the time they come home, victims such as Lilly Atek may already have proclaimed forgiveness.

The tradition here of forgiveness and the ceremony that's part of the process are far older than the 19-year civil war in Northern Uganda, though this war has put tradition to a severe test.

There are three parts to the Acholi "cleansing" ritual. The supplicant steps on an egg, "which symbolizes clean life not yet contaminated by sin," explains Sister Pauline. Then they jump over a farming tool, "which symbolizes you are to be productive." Finally, the sinner passes through the leaves of a pobo tree "whose slippery bark catches dirty things."

Sister Pauline says that so many of the LRA's soldiers have been "coming out of the bush" lately, there's a problem with the egg part of the ceremony. "We've had as many as 800 at a time," she says. "We can't give up 800 eggs, so they have to use the same egg."

The Christian part of the ceremony brings a priest, sometimes a Catholic bishop, who blesses the returnee and offers up a prayer of forgiveness. Christianity is widespread in Uganda, a former British colony where Catholic and Protestant missionaries built and still maintain some of the best schools. Practically all people in Northern Uganda have Christian names.

The simplicity of the reconciliation ceremonies belies the gravity of grief and fear that pervades Northern Uganda at the end of the second decade of the civil war between the government forces and the LRA.

In addition to living in Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps, tens of thousands of Acholi - mostly the children known as "night commuters" - parade every evening to various shelters in Gulu and Kitgum, leaving behind the IDP camps for safety from the LRA behind the walls of schools, hospitals and other secure institutions.

Other parts of the "cleansing" process for the returning LRA soldiers are more sophisticated than tribal ritual. Sister Pauline says her program follows up with counseling, not only for the returnees but for the communities to help them overcome the visceral desire for vengeance.

"We have discussions," she says. "We train paralegals, we show videos about reconciliation. We must have this to help with reconciliation, so the returnees will not feel like returning to the bush."

Speaking through an interpreter, Torac, who at 28 is older than most of the returnees, said that when he returned home, "I was traumatized. I could not sleep. I wasn't used to sleeping in an enclosed area.

"The elders told me I should go through the cleansing ceremony and I did that. A goat was slaughtered for a feast after the ceremony. After this, I felt released. I started going back to church. I sing in the choir. I am married now with two children. I live in peace."

What the people of Northern Uganda want is peace, an end to the war that has destroyed their homes and their livelihoods and led to the abduction of their children and their transformation into killers.

The Museveni government has contact with Kony through intermediaries, and the hope still exists that some day he will give up the battle. If he were to be found and killed, the larger war might end, but thousands of his entrenched followers, who have reaped profit and power from the war, would somehow have to be persuaded that they could re-integrate into their communities.

The tribal custom of forgiveness and all the reconciliation apparatus that accompanies it would be put to the ultimate test if that happens.

G. Jefferson Price III is a former foreign correspondent and editor at The Sun who has been traveling on behalf of Catholic Relief Services.

 ( ©The Baltimore Sun Company)

Kony's victims Uganda(2)

Forgiveness is first step in return to humanity

By G. Jefferson Price III

GULU, Uganda (July 19, 2005) The power of forgiveness is practically inestimable in any culture. This much is obvious in parts of Africa beset by conflict, senseless death and atrocities.

Three weeks ago in this column, I related the story of Sunday Lalam, a 16-year-old girl from northern Uganda who escaped and returned to her community after five years of captivity in the hands of a rebel force calling itself the Lord's Resistance Army.

While with the LRA, Sunday said, she was compelled to commit unspeakable atrocities, including beating to death so many people she did not know the number. Murder by beating is one of the sadistic ways devised by Joseph Kony, the LRA leader, to punish disobedience and to instill terror in others who might consider disobedience or escape.

Mr. Kony's war is nominally against the government of President Yoweri Museveni on behalf of the people of the Acholi tribe who dominate in northern Uganda.

But many, if not most, of the LRA victims have been Acholi tribal villages and people. So much so that 90 percent of the people of northern Uganda have fled to camps for internally displaced people. Some "soldiers" as young and younger than Sunday Lalam, have been forced to kill their own parents. Sunday told of having to beat to death a youngster from her own village.

She escaped the LRA last month and, pregnant with the child of an LRA commander to whom she was given as a "wife," is being helped by a group called the Concerned Parents Association to return to her community near Kitgum, one of the northernmost towns of the region.

Just how does a community that has been terrorized by the LRA accept and welcome such a child soldier back into the community?

"Not easily" is one answer. "Simply and beautifully" is another.

The answer lay in Gulu, a town to the south where David Oneno Acan II, the paramount chief of the Acholi tribe, presides from his office in a small stucco building on a hill overlooking the town. He is the orchestrator of what is known as a "cleansing ceremony," an ancient, primitive ritual in which someone who has behaved badly is forgiven after stepping on an egg, over a farm pole and through some branches from a pobo tree.

The paramount chief was not in when I visited, but Sister Pauline Acayo, who runs a peace-building project there for the Baltimore- based Catholic Relief Services, introduced me to his deputy, Albert Achiri.

"The ceremony started long ago," said Mr. Achiri. "It heals trauma. It is a belief we have."

"The egg represents life without sin," explained Sister Pauline. "The farm pole represents productivity. The pobo branches trap dirty things."

Sister Pauline said that the Catholic Church also participates in a fuller ceremony in which a priest blesses the candidate, either at the beginning or the end of the tribal ritual.

So many young men and women have been escaping or defecting from the LRA lately that there may be scores at a single ceremony, which presents an egg problem. "We can't use a fresh egg for everyone, so they all step on the same egg," she said.

Does it work?

Lilly Atek, a 23-year-old returnee who bore the children of three different LRA commanders to whom she was given, said it does.

Ms. Atek, who was abducted by the LRA at 14 and escaped 15 months ago, lives in a hut near the headquarters of the paramount chief. Like Sunday Lalam, Ms. Atek was compelled to beat to death many people, including a 10-year-old girl who had given wrong directions to a group of rebels.

After she escaped, with the help of the last commander to whom she was given, she had recurring nightmares. "I kept seeing the past and the people I had seen killed in front of me," she said.

After the cleansing ceremony, she said, "I was accepted back into the community. I prayed a lot. I no longer see the visions of the past."

The re-entry process involves more than the forgiveness ritual. The returnees require extensive counseling, livelihood training and moral support. The communities to which they are returning need to be prepared so forgiveness overwhelms the visceral desire for vengeance.

But it all starts with forgiveness.

G. Jefferson Price III was a foreign correspondent and an editor at The Sun. He recently was traveling on behalf of Catholic Relief Services.

(©The Baltimore Sun Company)

Kony's victims in Uganda (1)

Rebels leave deep scars on Uganda's youth

By G. Jefferson Price III

KITGUM, Uganda – (July 7, 2005) Sunday Lalam, a 16-year-old girl, was a forced accomplice and a victim in a cruel conflict that's been waged for 19 years in northern Uganda and southern Sudan.

Ms. Lalam was abducted Aug. 4, 2000, by a Ugandan rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army when she was 11. During nearly five years of brutal captivity, she lived under constant threat of death and endured numerous beatings. On pain of her own death, she said, she killed many people, so many she does not know the exact number.

More than 20,000 boys and girls have been abducted by the LRA in its insurgency against the government of President Yoweri Museveni. Those who have managed to escape have described barbaric treatment by the LRA, which is led by a messianic cultist named Joseph Kony. He holds sway with a mixture of terror and spiritual mysticism and says he wants Uganda to be ruled by the Ten Commandments after he overthrows the Museveni regime.

Sunday Lalam escaped last month, six months pregnant with the child of an LRA commander to whom she was given as a "wife."

Sitting beside a counselor from the Concerned Parents Association, a group formed to rescue and rehabilitate youngsters like her, she told her story.

She was taken along with 11 others at night. They were forced to march into the bush lugging the booty the rebels, some as young as she, had plundered from her village. Later, all of the others were released. The young men were too old for the sort of indoctrination the LRA uses on young minds. The young girls were all over l6, too old for indoctrination and old enough to be HIV-positive, Ms. Lalam explained.

In a ritual designed early in the experience to instill fear in young captives, she and others were ordered to kill people - not to shoot them, but to beat them to death with clubs.

One day, Ms. Lalam said, she and four others were ordered to beat to death a boy her own age from her village because he had become too weak and was a burden. "I felt sad because I knew him, but they would have killed me if I did not do it.

"I have killed many people," she said quietly.

The penalty for trying to escape was severe, possibly deadly. She and four girls tried to escape one night. They were caught and dragged back to the LRA camp. "Each of us was beaten with 100 strokes," she said.

Ms. Lalam said she and all the others were trained to use automatic weapons and to fight. The LRA moved between northern Uganda, where its forces raided villages for new recruits, food and other supplies, and southern Sudan, where they did the same against southern Sudanese farmers. The LRA also battled southern Sudanese insurgents who were fighting their government in Khartoum, for which Khartoum provided supplies in return.

The LRA has been weakened lately by defections and diminished support from Sudan now that Khartoum has signed a peace agreement with its own rebels. The Ugandan army has been reinforced. But the LRA is still raiding, abducting and killing people in northern Uganda, where 90 percent of the population have fled their homes and are living in camps, and in southern Sudan where many also live in camps.

Six months pregnant with the child of her commander "husband," Ms. Lalam managed to escape last month in the confusion of a government attack on her LRA camp.

Now, like thousands of others with similar stories, she is being counseled and helped to return to her family and her community, the very people terrorized by the LRA.

International aid agencies are heavily involved in trying to help the millions of people displaced and otherwise affected by the conflict. But apart from that, hardly anyone outside of this region knows of the atrocities here. If Sunday Lalam had been abducted in America, she might be the subject of intense attention from the media and police. Here, she and thousands like her are casualties in a conflict that's largely unnoticed by the outside world.

That's a crime, too.

G. Jefferson Price III was a foreign correspondent and an editor at The Sun. He has been traveling on behalf of Catholic Relief Services.

© The Baltimore Sun

Kony's victims in Sudan

Children at war, children on the run

By G. Jefferson Price III

KEREPO, Sudan (June 28, 2005) - Freddie Deichi speaks in a hoarse murmur when he describes the day he was abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal rebel militia of young boys, girls and grown men fighting the government in northern Uganda.

It was two years ago. Freddie was 7 years old at the time. His father, Daniel Wani, his mother, Josephine Abua, and his six siblings had fled to northern Uganda to escape the war in southern Sudan.

They were living in a refugee camp in the center of another conflict. The area around them was being terrorized by the LRA, led by Joseph Kony, a messianic fanatic who claimed he wanted to rule the land according to the Ten Commandments.

In the process, he and his band were violating most commandments, especially the one on killing. To build their army, they abducted youngsters and taught them to kill at an age when they were most susceptible to indoctrination. The young girls were trained in the same murderous ways, even to return to their villages and beat to death their own parents. The girls also were taken as wives for the older LRA militiamen, forced into submission by the knowledge that they would be beaten to death if they did not submit.

At the height of the LRA's rampage, an estimated 20,000 youngsters were said to have been abducted in this way.

In that context, Freddie Deichi was one of the lucky ones. He escaped.

"They came during the day," he said, speaking through a local interpreter. "My mother was cooking. My father was working in the field.

"My father came and tried to rescue me, but they beat him and he ran to hide in the sorghum field. My mother ran away and they did not try to chase her. They were gathering together the children they had captured. There about 25 of us. Some of us were tied together with ropes.

"We marched a long way to a forest. I was not tied. When they were not looking, I hid in the forest. I walked back. It was a long way. I came to a stream and slept there. In the morning, I walked to the home of my aunt and she took me home."

His parents show no sign of awkwardness as he describes how they appeared to abandon him to his fate. If they had persisted in trying to save the boy, they would certainly have been beaten to death. All they could do was hope he would return.

In January, Sudan's Islamic fundamentalist government signed a peace agreement with the rebels of the south, who are dominated by the Sudan People's Liberation Army. The war lasted more than 20 years in its latest incarnation. Two million people died in the conflict. Four million people, like Daniel Wani and his family, were uprooted from their homes as the government forces, using bombers and tanks, swept through the south, assisted by local militias.

After the peace agreement was signed, Mr. Wani decided to bring his family back to what was left of a collection of mud huts covered with thatched roofs in Kerepo. He did this over several weeks, using only a bicycle to bring back one or two at a time.

Kerepo is near the road that runs north toward Juba. The countryside is littered with the debris of war. Men of the SPLA, carrying automatic weapons, some festooned with bandoleers of shells, patrol the area on foot and in trucks.

Why? Because although the SPLA and Sudan's army aren't fighting anymore, the LRA is here, attacking villages for food and supplies, killing people and abducting youngsters, although not nearly on the scale of a couple of years ago in northern Uganda. They are here because during the north-south war, the Khartoum government supplied them to attack the Sudanese rebels from the south.

Everything is relative, though. "I feel better protected here," says Daniel Wani, standing by a patch of peanuts he has cultivated. "I want to settle down without having to run away again."

Maybe that will happen, if the peace agreement holds, if international donors such as the United States come through with the $4.5 billion promised to rebuild southern Sudan, if the LRA is driven back into northern Uganda - and if these things happen quickly so the whole place doesn't blow up again.

G. Jefferson Price III was a foreign correspondent and an editor at The Sun. He has been traveling on behalf of Catholic Relief Services

© The Baltimore Sun Company

Rush's latest, uh, explanation

Rush Limbaugh on his show today:

"We (the right) are losing this country. That's what causes me to make mistakes."

Survey of U.S. and U.K. newspaper readership

Who reads which newspapers in the United States The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country, and who are very good at crossword puzzles. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could find the time — and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do it. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train. The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated . The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped, minority, feminist, atheist or illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store. The Key West Citizen is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something to wrap it in. (The origin of this list is unknown to me. It was sent to me recently by a friend who is prominent in the world of high finance, possibly best described as a moderate Republican with occasionally immoderate expectations, such as the hope for a brokered GOP convention this year. )

And who reads which newspapers in the United Kingdom:

The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country

The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country

The Times is read by people who actually do run the country

The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country

The Financial Times is read by people who own the country

The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country

The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

The Sun is read by people who don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.

(This is adapted from dialogue in “ Yes Minister,” a popular BBC series – followed later by “Yes, Prime Minister” --that appeared in the 1980s,  written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, in which the government minister, The Right Honourable James Hacker MP, played by Paul Eddington, gives his views of the British Press.)

 

Quote for the day

"The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others."

-- Theodore Roosevelt, Labor Day speech September 7, 1903  

Quotes (and comment) for the day

[From the 2012 AIPAC convention underway in Washington]

“If it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. It’s a nuclear duck. It’s time to start calling the duck a duck.”

    --- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the only country in the Middle East that possesses fully developed nuclear warheads and punishes any of its citizens who speak of it.

Everybody: Duck! 

                                                            *********

“There’s only one race that’s better than the Jews, and that’s the Kentucky Derby.”

     -- Sen. Mitch McConnell, R. KY, Senate minority leader.

Oh, Mitch. What a horse’s arse. His attempts at humor are invariably feeble. Jews might even consider this comparison offensive.

Quote for the day

 

    "It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry. "

 

     H.L. MENCKEN

The U.S. & Israel: An imbalance of power


This week, the full power of the Israel lobby will be on display along with the carefully calibrated demonstrations of its power to influence U. S. presidential elections as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu comes to see President Obama while the American Israel Political Action Committee, the most powerful foreign policy lobby in America, meets in Washington.

    As you watch the display of power manifest in the homage-paying appearances of America's most important decision-makers, beginning with President Obama, consider an article today in the Israeli newspaper, Ha'Aretz, (www.haaretz.com ) in which an Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy, poses a question that should trouble not only Americans, but Israelis as well:

" One day, perhaps, even in brainwashed America the questions may begin: another war? Is it right to put more American soldiers in harm's way for an interest that is more Israeli than it is American? It's just a matter of time before U.S. tires of Israel."

Israel doesn't know when to stop, and it could pay dearly as a result.

By Gideon Levy
   
An elephant and an ant will meet in Washington on Monday for a critical summit. But wait, who here is the elephant and who the ant? Who is the superpower and who the patronage state?
     A new chapter is being written in the history of nations. Never before has a small country dictated to a superpower; never before has the chirp of the cricket sounded like a roar; never has the elephant resembled the ant - and vice versa. No Roman province dared tell Julius Caesar what to do, no tribe ever dreamed of forcing Genghis Khan to act in accordance with its own tribal interests. Only Israel does this. On Monday, when Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu meet at the White House, it will be hard to tell which one is the real leader of the world.
     For the past few years the Israeli cricket has been chirping "Iran," and the world responds with a muffled echo. It isn't that Iran is only an Israeli problem, but North Korea could endanger Japan just as much as Iran endangers Israel - and the world has not come running to Japan's side. Netanyahu's Israel has dictated the global agenda as no small state has ever done before, just as its international standing is at its nadir and its dependence on the United States at a zenith.
To the miracles of the rebirth of the Hebrew language after two millennia, the establishment of a thriving country of immigrants in the Land of Israel in such a short span of time and the invention of the kibbutz, we must now add another, much more deserving of a place on the list of the seven wonders of the world than the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, than the Roman Colosseum or the Great Wall of China: Israel's wondrous power in the face of the United States. There is no rational explanation.
     Israel features in the American presidential campaign as no other foreign country does, with the candidates vying for the sobriquet of "biggest Israel-lover" to the point where it often seems to be the main issue. Rich Jews like Sheldon Adelson donate enormous war chests to candidates for the sole purpose of buying their support for Israel, while the president of the United States, who won with a message of change, was forced to fold up, at lightning speed, the flag of planting peace in the Middle East simply because Israel said "No." If last week a British member of the House of Lords was forced to resign from Parliament after daring to criticize Israel, in the United States she would never have even considered making her views known.
     Israel is teaching the world a lesson in international relations: Size doesn't matter. When it comes to foreign policy Europe toes the U.S. line much more than tiny Israel does. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also taught the world that it's possible to tell the American president "No," bluntly and explicitly, and not only remain alive but even to gain in strength. So Obama begged for an extension of the settlement construction freeze - so what? Netanyahu will take care of it: He took the issue off the agenda.
     When he goes to the White House on Monday he will make a new demand: Either you or we (attack Iran ), putting the leader of the free world in a tight spot. Obama does not want to ensnare his country in another war or in an energy crisis, but when Netanyahu hath demanded, who will not fear?
This would appear to be a good thing, a reason to marvel at the prime minister. A cat may look at a king, but it doesn't always end well. One day, perhaps, even in brainwashed America the questions may begin: another war? Is it right to put more American soldiers in harm's way for an interest that is more Israeli than it is American? And perhaps we should also make demands from the small protege?
For now, Obama may be unable to prohibit Israel from a military adventure in Iran without offering serious quid pro quo. After all, we are talking about the prime minister of Israel. But one day the rope could snap and the whole thing could blow up in the face of power-drunk Israel: Israel doesn't know when to stop, and it could pay dearly as a result.

Quote for the day

 Babbling Boobs

     One of the great annoyances of talk show radio and television is the tendency of hosts on the left and the right to constantly interrupt the people they are interviewing to express their own often fatuous and entirely predictable opinions. Chris Matthews, on the one side, and Joe Scarborough on the other, come to mind as a couple of the most tedious offenders.
     But this is hardly a new phenomenon, as revealed in the following observation, more than 300 years ago, from Francois de La Rochefoucauld, the 17th century French warrior, writer and moralist:
     "Few are agreeable in conversation because each thinks more of what he intends to say than of what others are saying, and listens no more when he himself has a chance to speak"
  

Recommended Reading

     In an article in The National, Charles Glass cautions that as a civil war develops in Syria. reporters should not take sides:
 http://charlesglass.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=349f815120864d73f22786e0f&id=132092746a&e=fa72ebd586



Charles Glass



     In The London Review of Books, Glass reviews "Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean" by Philip Mansel; and "Beirut," by Samir Kassir, translated by M.B. Debevoise:

http://charlesglass.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=349f815120864d73f22786e0f&id=37c9babdae&e=fa72ebd586