Molly Priesmeyer at City Pages has an article about the increase in brain injuries suffered by our soldiers in combat, and how the Army “retires” the wounded when the bills start showing up…

Like many families of Iraq vets, they’re not sure how, or even if, all the medical and travel expenses they are bound to incur will be covered. The Army to which Bob dedicated almost 14 years as a reservist has abandoned them, they say. Three months after his injury, the Army medically retired Bob and shifted his benefits to the VA, leaving unclear how his future care will be paid for.

Read the complete story here.

the laweekly tells us that, since absentee ballots are still being counted in caleefornia, it’s turning out that gov. ah-nold got his butt kicked even worse than anybody thought:

so the numbers keep coming in, and factoring in the late returns, the results are quietly astounding. the biggest story is turnout. in each of the other two special elections (that is, elections featuring ballot measures but no candidates) in california over the past two decades, turnout was roughly 37 percent. schwarzenegger’s consultants assumed that this time around, inasmuch as turnout has been steadily declining in state and out over the past four decades, they could count on 36 percent of voters actually bothering to participate. the consultants for the unions who ran the campaigns against schwarzenegger’s measures figured that they had to boost turnout at least to 41 percent. in the days before the election, the office of secretary of state bruce mcpherson figured that perhaps 42 percent of voters would cast ballots, and that was the figure most commonly cited on election day itself.

and they were all wrong. as the count proceeded this past weekend, the percentage of california voters who cast ballots was up to 47.3 percent. when the count’s all done — the county registrars have to wrap it up by december 8 — that figure may be close to 48 percent, 11 points higher than each of the two preceding specials…

it’s also a testament to the scope and efficacy of the campaign the unions ran to pull their voters — and not just union members, but black, latino and progressive voters more generally — to the polls. in l.a. county, not only was the turnout surprisingly high, but the margins against arnold’s measures were huge. as of this weekend, proposition 74, extending the probationary period for teachers, was losing by 22.8 percent among l.a. county voters; proposition 75, curtailing unions’ ability to wage election campaigns, was trailing by 23.2 percent; proposition 76, limiting funding on schools and giving the governor unilateral power to cut spending, was down by 35.6 percent; and proposition 77, establishing a mid-decade reapportionment, was behind by 32 percent.

the article goes on to mention the latimes’ new hard tack to the right (under new management), and thereby how out of touch with its core readership the paper is now appearing. the op-ed page not only endorsed 3 of ah-nold’s 4 propositions, the editors, after the loss, chided, deridedand broad-sided the citizenry of the state for failing to pass them.

howard dean predicts the dems will take back the house and the senate in 2006. after listing the advances the dems have made this year (in the dc publication the hill ), dean lays it out:

in 2006, democrats will take back the house and the senate. the democratic senatorial campaign committee and the democratic congressional campaign committee have done an excellent job recruiting strong candidates, and we are already investing in the local infrastructure to ensure they win. but the key to winning is running a national campaign based on our different vision and the themes that democrats around the country have put forward.

americans of all political persuasions are tired of and worried about the culture of corruption that republicans have brought to washington and to so many statehouses around america. we will offer real ethics reform and election reform so that the government accountability office can report in three years that we can have confidence in our voting machines.

thanks and a tip of the bush kangaroo hat to kitty’s dkos diary for the link!

While we customers of the U.S. corporate media spent the last weekend learning important details about rogue parade balloons and which discount merchants were advertising sales most likely to incite rioting, other news happened:

Al-Jazeera staff last week held protests demanding an investigation into the reports. At the station’s HQ in Doha they held pictures of Sami al-Haj, a colleague who is an inmate at Guantánamo Bay, and Tarek Ayoub, an al-Jazeera journalist killed in April 2003 when a US missile hit his office in Baghdad. The US state department said the air strike was a mistake.

In November 2002 al-Jazeera’s office in Kabul, Afghanistan, was destroyed by a US missile. No staff were in the office. US officials said they believed the target was a terrorist site.

There are many slimy rocks under which to look when it comes to the BushCo regime, but I’m going to put the story behind the "Let’s bomb al-Jazeera" memo at the top of my wish list.   War crimes should be exposed.

The Guardian adds some context.

But it is not the first time journalists have been deliberately targeted: Serb television was bombed during the Kosovo conflict because it was seen as an agent and advocate of state terrorism.

The situations are somewhat different (although not by much, some would argue). Al-Jazeera is not an agent of a state, and few (except perhaps the US military) would claim that it is an agent of Bin Laden. But the fact that Al-Jazeera has reported in such depth the other side of this conflict is troubling to the authorities. "Al-Jazeera has been providing some material that has been very uncomfortable," Gowing said at News World.

If the story gets any traction in the U.S., expect to hear a lot about that Belgrade television station as the all-powerful Clenis once again takes the blame. 

Forcibly disabling opposition media outlets is a more difficult question than the discussion of the al-Jazeera memo has so far let on.   I’ve read plenty of people expert in the Rwandan genocide, for instance, say that the refusal to stop the hate speech coming out of Radio Mille Collines was a critical mistake made by the west that allowed the genocide to continue.  George Moose, US assistant secretary of state for African affairs told Frontline as much:

I mean, the other truly shameful episode was the whole failure to do anything about Radio Mille Collines, [the radio station inciting the violence]. When I think back upon it, those are
the three things that come to mind. It was the decision on whether to
call it genocide. It was the Mille Collines radio decision, which [was] truly atrocious that we weren’t able to do something because of some legal nicety about international radio
conventions. 

Of course he was talking about jamming signals, not bombing stations. 

In Haiti, journalists are  killed by both sides as radio plays a big part in the battle for that country’s soul, although figuring out which side is doing what is anybody’s guess.  Reporters Without Borders think they have it figured out.  I’m not so sure.

In Venezuela Chavez wants to shut down critical media - here’s his side of the story.   

In the United States we have the Right Wing Noise Machine which exists to silence dissent of a corporatist agenda and distract us with out and out hate speech.  Which gets to the real reason I want to see the al-Jazeera memos story gets big: it’ll be entertaining to watch corporate bobble heads struggle to decide where to come down on the BushCo-sanctioned policy of blowing them up. 

If there were ever an indelible set of fallback words that weak Presidents utilize, it’s the overdone warning to ‘never forget.’ Others have used them with far greater meaning, such as Elie Wiesel, who spent decades reminding the world of the Jewish Holocaust at Nazi hands.

But part of his task was not just reminding us, but in destroying the arguments of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers with the best ammunition available: the truth. Presidents do not find it necessary to resort to such an extreme weapon, because their motivation in making you remember differs.

‘Remember’, they say, ‘because you were scared… and I was your protective Daddy then and I’m still your Daddy now.’

That’s not what they say, but that’s what they mean.

But what if we were truly to remember? Not just 9-11, but some of the worst tragedies in the past century alone that were perpetrated by evil men. The list would look something like this:

1957-59: China famine (Mao), 16 to 30 million deaths (beyond those caused by natural disasters because of Mao’s agriculture policies).

1932-33: Ukraine famine (Stalin), 7 million deaths

1938-45: Nazi Germany/Holocaust, 6 million deaths (plus 61 million deaths in WWII warring, beyond the planned genocide)

1975-79: Cambodia (Pol Pot), 2 million deaths

1915-18: Armenia, 1.5 million deaths

1994: Rwanda, 800,000 deaths

1937-38: Nanking Massacre, 300,000 deaths

1992-95: Bosnia, 200,000 deaths

Of course, that hardly covers all of it, for there were other wars throughout the world going on. And does it really matter if it was the fault of obvious madmen and ideologues or regular guy leaders in the Korean War or the Vietnam War, or leaders of the half million who died in the Iran-Iraq War, or any other war, or even a government exacerbated famine? Hitler or Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh or LBJ-and-Nixon, all were the result of evil or misguided or horribly inept men.

But that’s not my point. Neither is Saddam Hussein, who reportedly has caused the deaths of at least a couple hundred thousand Iraqis - not counting those troops he’s lost in wars.

My point is Darfur. As of last summer, the death total estimates range between 100,000 and 400,000 in that ongoing genocide. Paul Slovic, a well-connected scholar has made this his mission, notes the numbers involved in genocide move beyond our comprehension:

Also, even if they never experience one, people can imagine a hurricane or tsunami happening to them. But mass murder? Genocide “is such an extreme level of violence, it’s hard to wrap our minds around,” Slovic said. “It doesn’t seem real - and the fact that it doesn’t get much news coverage makes it less real.”

In just one example of media aversion, Slovic points to a study that shows ABC devoted 18 minutes last year in its nightly newscasts to the genocide in Darfur, NBC five minutes and CBS three minutes.

During the same 12 months, the three networks combined to devote 130 minutes to fashion maven Martha Stewart.

So, there’s obvious racism in our government’s refusal to deal with two of the three most recent genocides (the two that ‘coincidentally’ mean black Africans are dying: Rwanda and Darfur). And there’s racism in the fact that the state with the highest percentage of blacks - Mississippi - has the nation’s highest poverty rate at 18%. And there’s racism in the immediate response to poor blacks drowning in New Orleans, and in the ongoing slow aid provision there. And considering that Rwanda’s genocide took place on Clinton’s watch, to a degree the racism is bipartisan.

But this administration decided to go after Saddam, many years after his mass killings were done, even though we encouraged his carnage when it was directed at Iran. All the while claiming it’s about stopping terrorism, and pretending the Darfur genocide isn’t a much worse and immediate crisis.

If it really was about terrorism or overcoming its violence, our troops would be in Darfur. But the priority isn’t terrorism, the preservation of life, nor promoting democracy. The motivation is and always has been about oil and corporate crony profiteering. So much so that they remain willfully blind about the massive murder in Darfur and about their own racist value system and they’ll lie about it all in the face of absolute evidence to the contrary.

We continue to tolerate genocide while pursuing complete control of oil resources. Not our government. Us. Because we’re not fighting hard enough to make the genocide stop.

Never forget that. 3,000 people died on 9-11. And 100,000 to 400,000 have died in Darfur, where the slaughter’s ongoing. Never forget the reasons why or you, too, could be a racist pig more concerned with oil and ideology than in basic human decency.

We know there’s good news from Iraq, because U.S. propagandists plant it in the Iraqi press! Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi write in today’s Los Angeles Times:

As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military “information operations” troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country.

Every day we do get more and more like the old Soviet Union, don’t we? Note this:

U.S. law forbids the military from carrying out psychological operations or planting propaganda through American media outlets. Yet several officials said that given the globalization of media driven by the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, the Pentagon’s efforts were carried out with the knowledge that coverage in the foreign press inevitably “bleeds” into the Western media and influences coverage in U.S. news outlets.

Who’s in charge of this effort, you ask? Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think I need to draw the prallels here. You can do that yourself.

“A top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees arose from White House and Pentagon officials who argued that “the president of the United States is all-powerful” and the Geneva Conventions irrelevant. “

“Ignore the man behind the curtain!”

There’s Andrea “Dorothy” Mitchell, Booby “Cowardly Lion” Woodward, Timmy “Tin Man” Russert, and Chris “Scraecrow” Matthews all seeking favors from the “Great and Powerful Dubyah.”

Today’s as good a day as any to reexamine where you stand on capital punishment.

Since the Supreme Court began allowing states to execute prisoners again in 1976, the U.S. has put 997 inmates to death. This week, if all goes according to plan, we’ll see the deaths of the 998th, 999th, and 1,000th prisoners.

I don’t want to rehash all the same old arguments on the subject. But I do think it bears repeating that in the past 32 years, 120 prisoners have been proved innocent and released from death row. Most of those releases have only come in the past 15 years or so, since DNA evidence has been more easily examined. Mistakes are made. So, I think everyone needs to assume that some innocent people have probably been counted in the number of deaths. I guess I just am not the sort of person who thinks it’s ok for one or two innocent folks to die for the greater good. I like Immanuel Kant.

“Never act in such a way as to treat people merely as a means to an end, but rather treat them as ends in themselves.”

But even with this landmark 1,000 execution looming, most of the recent death penalty attention is focused on Stanley “Tookie” Williams out in California. The co-founder of the Crips gang is slated to die on December 13th, but Governor Schwarzenegger has agreed to a clemency hearing. (A celebrity politician meeting with a celebrity criminal….there’s a bad joke there somewhere, but I’m not touching it.) Don’t get me wrong….I hope he IS granted clemency. I’m 100% against the death penalty. However, Schwarzenegger hasn’t granted clemency for any others thus far…so if he does in this case, I have to wonder if the celebrities alone are to thank for it And I haven’t jumped on that star-studded “Tookie’s a Great Guy Now” bandwagon. I just don’t buy the idea that his anti-gang children’s books have saved as many kids as the number of kids’ lives that were destroyed thanks to him. But that’s beside the point. I don’t want to see him executed.

I just wish there was as much outcry over capital punishment in general right now. Don’t forget the other 1,000+ before him, and however many will come after him.

Mick Arran covers the state of the working stiff today. More productive, that added value of American workers lines the pockets of management and the shareholders, with a pittance - or nothing - given to the worker for the extra effort put out.

But I’m not sure I agree that more unions is the answer, at least not as unions are currently constituted. Against the labor competition caused by global trade, I think it’s time unions evolve globally, as well.

Mother Jones used to decry how union management would start living lifestyles closer to the owner class, instead of the workers they’re supposed to represent. She felt union management couldn’t understand worker issues when they no longer shared working class concerns.

That’s why I wonder if craft guilds or craft cooperatives may be the answer. More like a credit union model or a grocery coop, so workers and union management are one and the same.

Further, by establishing a median standard of living that varies from country to country, such a cooperative could represent workers on both sides of each border, pushing fair wages and benefits according to each country’s average, with strikes crossing borders in sympathy to anyone being cheated anywhere.

That’s just a rough sketch, but the key is that unions must evolve, or they’ll continue to decline, partly because they’re perceived as irrelevant in the NAFTA, GATT, CAFTA world.

What if there was a place you could go to talk about the religious right, whenever you had a question and needed an answer?

Thus begins the ‘about’ page for Talk To Action, where you can read, comment or set up your own diary. It looks promising, especially with this statement of purpose:

There is an editorial framework for this site than that is different than you will find on other major blog sites, so please read this carefully: We are pro-religious equality and pro-separation of church and state. We are prochoice, and we support gay and lesbian civil rights — including marriage equality. Therefore, debates about the validity of abortion and gay rights are off topic. We understand that some people who share our general concern about the politics of the Christian Right may not agree on all of these matters. That’s fine. Anyone who agrees with the general mission of this site is welcome to participate — but bearing this in mind. It is our intention to take the conversation forward, and not let it be held back by debating what, in our view are or should be, settled matters of human, civil and constitutional rights. Similarly, religious debates are off topic, especially debates between theism and atheism. Finally, we are nonpartisan. While political discussions are welcome, — even central to the purpose of this site — we do not wish the site itself to be a platform that is necessarily for or opposed to any particular party.

BioEssays regularly runs a feature called “My Favorite Animal”; this month’s choice is barely an animal at all, the placophoran Trichoplax adhaerens. I’ve written about Trichoplax before. It’s a strange creature, a small flat blob that creeps amoeba-like over the substrate, that replicates by simply splitting in two, and that seems to have no distinguishing features at all—no head, no sense organs, no nervous system, no gut, just a collection of cells that hang together and slurp up algal slime. They are, however, multicellular, and their bodies contain at least four functionally distinct cell types, and the molecular evidence suggests affinities to other animal groups (they have a ProtoHox/ParaHox gene, for instance)…so they are definitely metazoans. They are just the simplest, barest kind of metazoan we can find now.

As a thin disc with no polarity other than which side sticks to the substrate and which faces the open water, Trichoplax has provocative appeal as a representative of an ancient multicellular form—a creature that has clustered cells together to grow larger, has taken the first steps towards specializing cells for digestion and protection, but hasn’t even achieved pre-worm status. It’s the kind of pre-Cambrian browser from which our own line might have evolved. Here’s a simple and speculative (but not at all outrageous) idea of how this could have occurred:

Placula hypothesis of metazoan evolution. Flagellated protozoans unite to form a benthic-vagile, plate-like metazoan organism.
The one-layered protist form (a) evolves to the two-layered “placula” (b,c). Cells of the upper layer form the ectoderm, while cells of the
lower layer (orange) adopt a nutritive function and later invaginate to form the entoderm (d-g)

Trichoplax represents an intermediate grade of organism, one which has learned the trick of maintaining multiple cell types in specific roles and how to organize them into a spatially patterned relationship, but has not established any other kind of polarity—it doesn’t know its head from its ass, and actually has neither one of those sophisticated features. At this point, it’s an intensely mysterious organism, and there are many things we simply don’t know about it. That is one of the many provocative things about this animal, things that draw scientists to it in fascination.

• We don’t know how many species of Trichoplax there are. It lacks distinguishing morphological characters, obviously enough, and molecular/genetic tests of animals collected in the Red Sea and the Sea of Japan have found them to be indistinguishable. A single species seems to have a world-wide distribution, yet other analyses have found distinct differences between different strains.
• We know nothing of their ecology. Samples are collected and grown in the lab for study, but what exactly these nearly invisible animals do in the wild is unknown.
• As a developmental biologist, I’m most puzzled by their modes of reproduction. In the lab, they are known to reproduce solely by vegetative division—the animal just splits in two, and two placozoans crawl away. However, they’ve also been known to produce motile sperm and eggs, which fail to produce viable offspring in the lab…they just die. Do they reproduce sexually only under certain very specific conditions in the wild, or is sexual reproduction a fading vestige of a primitive condition they are in the process of abandoning?

Where I find these creatures particularly interesting, though, is how they may help answer questions about evolution and development.

There is a concept in evolution that many people find hard to grasp: that is, new genes and new functions do not evolve out of any “need” for a new property. Instead, genes that have one role may be coopted into a new role by fortuitous ancillary properties. For instance, the set of genes that are involved in early longitudinal patterning in us chordates, that is, that help define which end of an embryo should form a head and which end should form a tail, are the Hox genes. It would be a mistake to argue that these genes arose in order to specify the head end of an animal, though—the first animals to have these genes would not have had a head! That primordial Hox-like gene must have had some other function, a function which could be easily modified by chance to localize to just one end of the animal, an event which would have been crucial in defining anterior-posterior polarity and turning a blob into a worm.

What would that function have been? How can we find out?

The strategy is to look for animals that do not form heads, but do have Hox-like genes, and ask what they use them for…animals like Trichoplax. They do have a gene called Trox-2 which is in the Hox gene family, and we can examine where it is being expressed in Trichoplax. It is expressed in scattered cells around the margin of the animal, seen as the pink dots in A, below:

The study of regulatory genes reveals insights into basic and basal mechanisms of metazoan development and evolution. Most
regulatory genes studied so far are expressed within or close to a small region of potentially undifferentiated cells embedded between the
lower and the upper epithelium. A,B: Trichoplax whole mount in situ hybridization for the putative ProtoHox/ParaHox gene, Trox-2; note the
strong and homogenous expression close to the body margin; arrows in B point to small undifferentiated—yet undescribed—cells between
the lower and upper epithelium. C,D: Trichoplax whole mount in situ hybridization for the putative ProtoPax gene, TriPaxB; note the
more spotted expression along the body margin; the arrow in D points to a small TriPaxB-expressing cell that is similar to cells expressing the Trox-2 gene.

The gene seems to be active in a pool of undifferentiated cells, which are not localized to one end, but are instead found in a ring. It is a kind of spatial localization; a change in gene regulation that involved a loss of expression over a part of its range would lead to an asymmetry that could be a precursor to defining an anterior-posterior axis.

It’s more than just a single gene. Other genes similar to patterning genes found in more complex metazoans have also been identified: the gene Pax B is illustrated above and is also present in a ring, and genes related to Not, the T-Box class, and antp have been found. There is a whole network of regulatory gene interactions present in these marginal cells, a network that was a precursor to the more restricted networks we possess that are responsible for giving us a head and a more sophisticated form than a disc-like blob.

This represents another successful evolutionary prediction. What we expect to find in biology is that the networks of genes responsible for specific morphological features in complex organisms will also be present in simpler forms, but with broader, more general, and sometimes rather different functions. With Trichoplax, we’re identifying the evolutionary foundations of some of the most basic features of our embryonic organization—features so primitive that we take them entirely for granted.

Schierwater B (2005) My favorite animal, Trichoplax adhaerens. BioEssays 27:1294-1302.

Fair Use means that I can’t quote this entire story, but you should read the whole thing. I find it interesting that only the LAT picked this up today.

A Journey That Ended in Anguish
# Col. Ted Westhusing, a military ethicist who volunteered to go to Iraq, was upset by what he saw. His apparent suicide raises questions.

By T. Christian Miller, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — One hot, dusty day in June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head.

The Army would conclude that he committed suicide with his service pistol. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

The Army closed its case. But the questions surrounding Westhusing’s death continue.

Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army’s leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military.

His death stunned all who knew him. Colleagues and commanders wondered whether they had missed signs of depression. He had been losing weight and not sleeping well. But only a day before his death, Westhusing won praise from a senior officer for his progress in training Iraqi police.

His friends and family struggle with the idea that Westhusing could have killed himself. He was a loving father and husband and a devout Catholic. He was an extraordinary intellect and had mastered ancient Greek and Italian. He had less than a month before his return home. It seemed impossible that anything could crush the spirit of a man with such a powerful sense of right and wrong.

On the Internet and in conversations with one another, Westhusing’s family and friends have questioned the military investigation.

A note found in his trailer seemed to offer clues. Written in what the Army determined was his handwriting, the colonel appeared to be struggling with a final question.

How is honor possible in a war like the one in Iraq?

How is honor possible in war which violates the Geneva conventions?

The Triwizard Tournament that takes up the hippogryph’s share of screen time in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is in conception and effect so perverse, so cruel, so absurd, and so obviously of no consequence in and of itself, either within the worlds of the movies and books or as an aesthetic creation, that I began to think that Harry’s creator J.K. Rowling had gone over to the dark side herself and joined he who must not be named.

No, not Voldemort.

George Lucas.

The three prequels of the Star Wars saga are seriously flawed in many ways, but probably their greatest weakness is that Lucas keeps stopping his story dead in its tracks to insert elaborate commercials for the video game spinoffs. For long periods of time he doesn’t have to waste Lucas fills the screen with chaotic, senseless, and sadistic violence that doesn’t even have any aesthetic virtue to partially redeem it. The attack on the Death Star in the original Star Wars was visually enchanting. When Lucas repeated it in Return of the Jedi he cluttered up the screen and made just blowing up things the only source of excitement. The video game anti-aesthetic reaches its pinnacle in the rescue of Palpatine at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. The two heroes, Obi-wan and Anakin, are only puppets of themselves, stick figures maneuvered through a randomly generated violence field doing nothing but escaping one implausible attack after another simply by moving forward at top speed.

The three challenges the young heroes face in Goblet of Fire are just like that. We see Harry fight off and outfly a dragon, fight off and outswim some water demons, and run helter-skelter through a maze, and there’s no real objective in any of them. The point and the strategy is to keep moving.

In the book, the challenges are unimaginative and senseless, but they are surrounded by the usual Hogwarts subplots—the clash of eccentrics among the teaching staff and the bickering of Harry, Ron, and Hermione that leads to their pulling together to triumph over a new threat—in Goblet of Fire the threat is adolescence, which comes over them like a dark wizard’s spell and almost ends their friendship—that it’s almost possible to skip the chapters detailing Harry’s adventures in the tournament.

The movie pares away most of the eccentricity. We catch only glimpses of Hagrid’s courtship of the giantess who’s headmistress of the visiting French school for witches. (Hogwarts is apparently the only co-ed academy in the world of witchcraft.) The appalling Rita Skeeter is reduced to a one off that Miranda Richardson milks for all its worth, adding a touch that I don’t think is in the book—Rita as a near child molester. She pulls Harry into a closet to interview him in private and then purrs at him about how cozy it is in there, charging the one line with more sexuality than most movies for grown ups manage in a hundred lines of dialogue. It’s fairly creepy. As is the scene where the ghost of Moaning Myrtle spies upon Harry in the bathtub. That’s creepy enough in the book because it’s the first time Rowling suggests that her main characters have genetalia and she does it with a goofy lack of adult restraint, as if she’s very keen on all of us imagining Harry naked. In the movie, it’s even creepier because the actress who plays Myrtle is 40 years old and despite her squeeky little girl’s voice looks like a grown woman trying to sneak a peak at a 14 year old boy’s goods.

And then the Harry, Ron, and Hermione scenes are about everything in their lives but the Triwizard tournament. Even when they talk about the tournament they are really talking about other, more important (to them) issues. The result is that the three of them seem completely uninterested in what is finally the plot of the movie. In fact, they are so removed from it that their scenes together seem to be taking place in an entirely separate movie.

So the challenges are left to stand on their own, and on their own they come across as just Lucas-esque video games.

But, thinking this over after re-reading parts of the book, I decided that the flaw isn’t due to Rowling’s giving in to Lucas-think. Rowling has, in fact, written an incisive critique of Star Wars into the Potter series. Harry started the series as an obvious parallel to Luke Skywalker who meets his own Obi-wan in the form of Dumbledore. But over time the parallels between the two characters have deepened in interesting and subtle ways and it’s even begun to look to me as though Rowland is moving towards having Harry face the sort of temptations that Anakin faced and failed to resist but which Luke only glanced at and shrugged off in a couple of scenes.

I think Rowling both appreciates Lucas’s story and understands that Lucas never took the implications of his theme seriously. Which is to say that Rowling appreciates how attractive evil and power and fear are. To Lucas, not giving in to the Dark Side is a matter of just saying no. Rowling, I think, wants to show that it’s a matter of sorting out the Dark Side from the Light and finding a reason to resist. When Voldemort seemed on the point of complete victory and almost every witch and wizard had either joined him or gone into hiding, Peter Pettigrew’s decision to join up with him would have appeared more sensible than Lily and James Potter’s and Sirius Black’s decisions to resist and risk death.

In Goblet of Fire, Dumbledore tells Harry that the time is coming when everyone will have to choose between what is easy and what is right. Dumbledore and Rowling know, as Lucas doesn’t seem to, that most people choose easy without even knowing they’ve made a choice or had one.

But Rowling still seems reluctant to allow evil to make its own case.

The Triwizard Tournament is not a result of Rowling wanting to be like Lucas. It’s a result of her not finding a way to stop being Rowling.

Part of Rowling’s success is that she struck on a winning formula in her first book and stuck with it. Every Harry Potter book follows the same pattern set down in The Sorcerer’s Stone. And a chief feature of the pattern is that the stories are told exclusively from Harry’s point of view.

This limiting of the novels’ narrative possibilities worked fine for the first three books, which were essentially mystery novels. Harry is given a puzzle to solve at the beginning of each, he collects clues along the way, makes wrong guesses, and stumbles into the mystery’s dangerous conclusion still in the dark, then he solves the mystery in the nick of time, saving himself and his friends at the last minute by finally coming up with the right answer.

But Goblet of Fire is a transition in the saga. The subplot of the first three, Voldemort’s struggle to return to power, breaks through to become the what will be the main plot of the final three novels. This is as it has to be. But it’s no longer a mystery novel. It’s a revenge drama.

Voldemort’s revenge.

The problem is that Voldemort has been and continues to be working his magic off stage (and offscreen). Harry and he have up until Goblet never met face to face since their first and nearly fatal for Voldemort encounter when Harry was a baby. In the first two books and movies, Harry fights off avatars of Voldemort. In the third, Prisoner of Azkaban, he thinks he’s threatened by another representative of the dark wizard.

In Goblet of Fire Rowland has Voldemort’s proxy disguised so well that nobody even suspects foul deeds are afoot. Harry has no clue. And because we only know what Harry knows, we have no clue either. Harry, and his audience and readers, are blind to what is in fact the main plot of the story, Voldemort regaining his power and setting out to destroy Harry.

With the main plot taking place out of Harry’s sight (except for little bits he glimpses in dreams whose significance he doesn’t grasp), Rowling uses the Triwizard Tournament as a substitute. It’s meant to provide all the action and suspense and visual thrills.

It’s a giant red herring.

Rowling would have been better off breaking away from the limited first person point of view and following other characters on their adventures, one of those characters being Peter Pettigrew who takes part in two murders and a kidnapping offstage, and who spends a lot of time in the company of Voldemort.

Critics, but not young fans of the novels, complained that the first two movies hewed too closely to the books. They were faithful to the point of turning themselves into dynamic illustrations for the novels, like the moving paintings that line the hallways at Hogwarts. Prisoner of Azkaban broke free of the book only by adopting a brand new visual style, grittier, more gothic, and yet more realistic. Otherwise it stayed faithful to the novel.

Goblet of Fire is the first of the movies to make substantive changes to the storyline. But that’s a relative statement. Mostly it’s a matter of having one secondary character do in the movie what a different secondary character did in the book.

Director Mike Newell and screenwriter push at the narrative outline, stretching it where they can, rearranging some plot points, but they don’t break away from it significantly, except to leave out as much exposition as they feel they can afford to leave out, which turns out to be a bit too much, their judgment on how much the audience can pick up on the fly or fill in from their memories of the book being a little too optimistic.

If only they had thought to dramatize what gets explained hurriedly at the end and given us some scenes with the delightfully cringing and rattishly disgusting Timothy Spall as Pettigrew/Wormtail and Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort, who I expect will be terrific in the next movie, Order of the Phoenix, but who in this one is given no chance to develop his character. He literally explodes onto the scene on the attack and his only dialogue is the usual talking villain stuff of too many action movies. He starts monologuing, as they say in The Incredibles, yakking about his motivations when he should just act on them and kill Harry straight off.

As it turns out, with the Triwizard Tournament being meaningless and the main plot happening out of sight and the adult eccentrics reduced to quick sketches of their formerly detailed Dickensian caricatures, the heart and soul of the movie is the relationship between Harry, Ron, and Hermione.

The three are as much in transition as the plot of their novel. Ron is struggling to break free from his role as Harry’s sidekick. Hermione is struggling to break free of her role as nerdy tom-boy chum. She wants to become a romantic heroine in her own right. And Harry, who previously has been incredibly generous in his regard for both of them and depended on their work as a team, is asserting his own hero’s ego.

In short, their story is all about hurt feelings and the sort of painful misunderstandings that occur when friends who used to take each other’s love and support for granted discover that they are isolated individuals, strangers to each other at the core. We can guess that this bodes well for Ron and Hermione who need to get to know each other all over again as a young man and a young woman.

What it means for Harry though is likely a future loneliness. Heroes do not make good friends. They can’t be there for you because they have to be there for everybody.

I don’t know if Rowling intends to take things that far, if by the end of the last book Harry will be estranged permanently from Ron and Hermione. But that possibility certainly seems to have meant more to Mike Newell than the magical side of the story.

Not surprisingly then, the most gut-wrenching scene in the movie isn’t the death of an important and likeable character. It’s a single scene at the Yule Ball. Harry and Ron are sitting sulkily in a corner away from the dance floor, taking out their own hurt feelings on their dates, hardly acknowledging either girl’s presence except to refuse to dance any more with them.

The scene ends with a shot of several girls, abandoned or insulted by their dates, crying and comforting each other, with our heroes walking off.

It’s a painful moment and Newell holds it, as if he wants his young audience to take notes. The lesson of the day is that even in a world full of dark wizards, fire-breathing dragons, Death Eaters, dementors, and water demons, sometimes the worst hurts are those we inflict on each other through small acts of selfishness, spite, and misplaced pride.

WASHINGTON : The White House has for the first time claimed ownership of an Iraq withdrawal plan, arguing that a troop pullout blueprint unveiled this past week by a Democratic senator was “remarkably similar” to its own.

It also signalled its acceptance of a recent US Senate amendment designed to pave the way for a phased US military withdrawal from the violence-torn country.

The statement by White House spokesman Scott McClellan came in response to a commentary published in The Washington Post by Joseph Biden, the top Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he said US forces will begin leaving Iraq next year “in large numbers.”

According to Biden, the United States will move about 50,000 servicemen out of the country by the end of 2006, and “a significant number” of the remaining 100,000 the year after.

The blueprint also calls for leaving only an unspecified “small force” either in Iraq or across the border to strike at concentrations of insurgents, if necessary.

Less than two weeks ago, McClellan blasted Democratic Representative John Murtha, saying that by calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the congressman was “endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore,” a stridently anti-war Hollywood filmmaker.

Biden’s ideas, relayed first in a November 21 speech in New York, however, got a much friendlier reception.

Even though President George W. Bush has never publicly issued his own withdrawal plan and criticised calls for an early exit, the White House said many of the ideas expressed by the senator were its own.

In the statement, which was released under the headline “Senator Biden Adopts Key Portions Of Administration’s Plan For Victory In Iraq,” McClellan said the Bush administration welcomed Biden’s voice in the debate.

“Today, Senator Biden described a plan remarkably similar to the administration’s plan to fight and win the war on terror,” the spokesman went on to say.

Oh? The administration has a plan? That they’re willing to reveal after saying such a revelation would benefit the insurgency? And after all the faux melodrama and name-calling, they now have the chutzpah to claim that Biden’s plan is like theirs and not vice versa?

What, are they planting a suggestion that Biden’s plagiarizing (again)? Are they firing the opening salvos to 2008?

The White House has resisted explaining its strategy and has never committed to a withdrawal plan of any kind that includes any time frames at all. Now that Dems are offering plans, they get to review them all till they find one they like, and claim it as their own.

How pathetic that this is what passes for leadership now. A White House frozen into inaction, jumping at a lifeline that might extract us from the mess they created. And then they claim to have invented that lifeline.

Does anyone in the White House retain any capacity at all to speak out loud without it being a lie?

The Washington Post reports on the political scene in Ohio:

With Ney under a cloud and Taft’s approval rating diving to a historically low 15 percent in a Columbus Dispatch poll, Democrats hope to harness the scandals as part of a national campaign to paint their opponents as purveyors of arrogance and greed.

“My great fear politically is the Republicans will push him out of office,” Rep. Chris Redfern, leader of the Democratic minority in the statehouse, said of Taft. “Keeping him in office is better for the Democrats than allowing him to leave under the cover of darkness.”

Do you ever get the feeling some Democrats are like coyotes circling a pack of feeding GOP hyenas, skulking in hopes that the hyenas will spook so they can get some scraps of carrion?

That seems to be the approach some take to getting elected and is it any wonder that it’s not inspiring? There’s the potential for a proactive agenda, or at least reactive to existing problems, with a platform that’s easy to digest. It doesn’t motivate me to go to the polls when the message is “they’re more crooked than me.” I just don’t buy the lesser of two evils logic, nor do I want to replace the GOP’s stale bread crumbs with white bread; give me something nutritious, please.

Organizing and strategizing are important, but it’d be far better if Dem candidates would stop checking the air to test the wind direction and just start talking real dynamic change. The electorate is hungry for plain, honest talk and candidates willing to demonstrate that kind of leadership, not a party that plans to win by picking up the spoils of crooks.