Once again, the campaign goes on the road for a final push to get out the word and to take the signature drive way over the top. Along the way, we see the state and meet its people.
My friend Mark and I are now in Fairbanks after spending the weekend at the Southeast Alaska State Fair in Haines. We had a great time there – excellent food, music, beautiful weather and surroundings, and lots of signatures. So far, we’ve stayed with friends, and friends of friends – so no hotel bills. Many thanks to those who’ve helped.
We also found out that the Juneau Assembly decided to ignore the Planning Commission’s report and the will of the people, and by a 5-2 majority, voted to approve extending the dead end from Juneau. On our drive to Fairbanks we found the highway, in Canada and Alaska – the state’s one hard link to the “outside world” – in pretty rough shape, with numerous potholes and large frost heaves (global warming melting the permafrost?). Advocates of the Juneau road would do well to consider that after scraping together the $300 million (plus) for a brand-new highway, the pork apparently gets pretty lean. What will the highway look like after ten or twenty years of “going to pot”?

Before leaving Juneau, I was working on a post dealing with the Middle East crisis. I would write at night, sleep on it, and wake to news of fresh atrocities. In my concern for timeliness, it never got finished. Below are some fragments of that column.

In my last Gaza article, I referred to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s famous remark on “Sixty Minutes” that the death of over half a million Iraqis under the age of five, resulting from the sanctions of the 1990’s, was “worth it”. As I said then, I’ve never understood what “it” was that they were “worth”. Was “it” to ensure that Iraqis would greet the future army of “liberation” with candy and flowers? If so, it appears there was a slight mistake somewhere in the arithmetic. Now, with bodies piling up in the heat outside of Baghdad morgues, and hospitals overflowing with the maimed, who has the time for such statistical niceties as “excess mortality”?
In the earlier posting, I wrote that current Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was vying to match her predecessor’s record of callous indifference to mass murder, by equating one Israeli soldier with 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. Since the Israeli assault began over a month ago, more than 150 Palestinians have been killed, many more wounded, and in the awful conditions, the excess mortality must be – well, forget about it. We can only hope that some time in the future a reckoning will be made, and the victims given belated respect, just as Jewish victims of the Holocaust have been given some accounting, and respect.
The Israelis haven’t been idle in the larger West Bank either, where the body count mounts. If war is an extension of politics by other means, Israeli policy toward Palestinian independence was made pretty clear by the total demolition of the Palestinian Authority complex, the muqataa, in one of the largest Palestinian cities, Nablus. In that operation, the Israeli military actually claimed that they were flushing out Hezbollah(!) fighters who had infiltrated the Palestinian security forces!

But all this is hardly considered newsworthy, as the American media focuses almost entirely on the carnage in Lebanon, and it is here that I believe Rice has secured a place at least equal to Albright’s in the pillory of eternal infamy. Her describing the destruction of Lebanon as “birth pangs of the new Middle East” takes obscenity to a new level. Imagine! Bombs falling on babies’ heads are…birth pangs!
The Congress is totally supine. The Senate passed unanimously, and the House by a 410-8 majority, resolutions commending the Israeli genocide. One Democratic Congresswoman, Jane Harman of California, deserves special mention. Her catch-phrase, repeated often, is that Israel is “draining the swamp” in Gaza and Lebanon. While her formulation may lack the cold-blooded pithiness of Ms. Rice’s, I think she deserves extra credit for describing the brutal mass murder in terms of pure, unadulterated racism.


The Bush Administration blames Iran and Syria for providing the Lebanese Shia with some rudimentary weapons for self-defense, while rushing through an order for a hundred 5000 pound satellite- and laser-guided “bunker buster” bombs, to be flown on American-made fighter jets, supported by American helicopters and tanks, part of the billions the US gives annually to the Zionist war machine. Was it one of these bunker busters that killed some 56 women and children, in Qana on Sunday?
Hezbollah is not likely to commit the mistake the PLO fighters made in 1982. Bowing to intense pressure, and a promise by President Ronald Reagan to guarantee the safety of Palestinian civilians, they departed Lebanon. Within a couple of days, the massacre of thousands at Sabra and Shatilla took place. (Remember this the next time you read about militia fighters who “deliberately operate from civilian areas”; read: “people who defend their families where they live.”) Hezbollah is not likely to repeat that mistake, and Inshallah, they also recall the tragic, poetic words of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe: “The white man made many promises, but he kept only one. He said he would take our land, and he did.”

On the eve of the Gaza invasion (June 26) I wrote that the conflict could become the straw that breaks the back of the US client regimes in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc. Sure enough, those regimes are feeling serious heat from their outraged populations, and it’s bound to get worse. If the goal in Iraq was to unite Sunni and Shia in an anti-American alliance, then the Lebanon invasion was the perfect catalyst.
It would be easy to conclude that the “birthing of the new Middle East” as envisaged by the U.S. and Israel requires a general conflagration in the region, but this would assume that the Bush Administration has some clue about what it is doing, an assumption that the war in Iraq makes clear is totally unwarranted.

Below is a piece that I have submitted to the Anchorage Daily News. Slightly different versions were sent to the Juneau Empire and to the Juneau Assembly:

Just as many of us in Southeast Alaska are not very well-informed on the Knik Arm bridge, some of your readers may wish to know more about another huge federal/state capital project, the "extension of the dead end" from Juneau.
On Wednesday July 26th , the Juneau Assembly will make a final decision on whether the proposed Juneau road extension meets the city’s land-use code and comprehensive plan.

Berners Bay is one of the richest and most diverse ecosystems in Alaska, if not the world. Since it is easily accessible from Juneau, its protection is of special concern to residents of the Capital city.
With halibut, pacific cod, all the species of northwest salmon, and other fish; with king, Dungeness, and Tanner crab; with deer, moose, bear, mink, and otter, to name a few of the mammals; the importance of Berners Bay to commercial, subsistence, and sport hunting, fishing, and trapping cannot be overestimated. Anyone who questions the significance of the commercial salmon fishery has not transited the area during the peak of the season, when the concentration of gill-netters, “thicker than thieves”, requires larger vessels to make a wide detour to the west to avoid them.
The oceanography class at Juneau Douglas High School this year prepared a paper on Berners Bay, with particular emphasis on the annual run of eulachon (hooligan), “one of the most significant biological events in Southeast Alaska. For roughly one calendar week, 10 to 20 million eulachon move down the northwest side of the bay toward the Lace River delta.” Humpback whales, harbor seals, and up to 1000 sea lions enter the bay during the peak to feast on the small, oily fish. “Sea lions utilize the eulachon significantly, as the production of milk for pups requires the nutrition and energy from the spawning eulachon.” Thousands of gulls and other species come, including bald eagles from as far away as Kenai Peninsula, making it the 3rd or 4th largest eagle congregation in the world. The fish were an equally important food source for the original native populations, after the harsh winter. Eulachon oil was also an important trading commodity, and it remains culturally significant.
Clearly, the loss in tourist dollars from endangering the sea lion population (for example) only begins to quantify the risks entailed in building the road north from Juneau. Since road construction will have an irreversible effect on the Berners Bay ecosystem, I urge the Juneau Assembly to follow the Juneau Planning Commission’s recommendation and reject the road extension.
Apparently, the present discussion involves the road only as far as the proposed Kensington mine, at the northern end of Berners Bay – itself a serious threat to the environment, including the eulachon run. Is the road going to stop there, as many locals think – a corporate welfare project costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars?
If the road is extended further up the east side of Lynn Canal – to another ferry terminal – it would be another tragic loss to residents and visitors. The Kakuhan Range, rising some 6000 feet nearly straight up, with its glaciers and mountain goats, is certainly one of the most beautiful sections of the Inside Passage. To be appreciated, it must be seen from the air or the water. You won’t be able to see it from the base of the mountains, no matter how many turnouts are provided. And building the road means eliminating the ferry route.
Most residents of Juneau, Haines, and Skagway oppose the road. Of those who favor it, some – e.g., the construction industry – expect to make a lot of money on it. Most of the others, I believe, are simply fed up with the high prices and deteriorating service of the state ferries. The hundreds of millions proposed for the Juneau road would be much better spent on revitalizing the ferry system.

Hurrah for Valerie (Plame) Wilson and her husband Joseph Wilson! Standing up to arrogant and corrupt power and shouting “I accuse” demonstrates courage that is an inspiration to us all. What a breath of fresh air it sends across the fetid swamp of Washington politics! Needless to say, it also recharges my batteries.
The Administration’s lawyers will probably succeed in keeping the lawsuit from getting a hearing in open court until the departure of the Cheney-Rove Gang, but it should make them squirm a bit, and more importantly, it places the question of abuse of executive power squarely in the public eye
.The articles of impeachment drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee against Richard Nixon contained substantially three accusations: that the White House used its position to intimidate and punish its opponents, and in particular, it used illegal electronic surveillance to accomplish its ends; and that the White House tried at every turn to impede the Watergate investigation. The Bush gang admits – even boasts of – illegal wire-tapping, and with the Fitzgerald investigation and the Wilsons’ lawsuit, the circle is completed. If the Congress ever summons the courage to exercise its constitutional duty, all they’ll have to do is dust off the old Nixon articles.
But Bush and Cheney are not content to simply match the Nixon record; they’ve added prosecuting an illegal war of foreign domination, torturing and murdering detainees, attacking the separation of church and state, violating treaties, etc., etc. to their rap sheets.

So where is the “loyal opposition”? The spineless Democrats, Hillary and the rest, have given Bush a blank check, both in his “Nixon” crimes and in his foreign policy of unrestrained world hegemony. Has one Democratic (or Republican) leader had the elemental audacity to comment on the Wilsons’ lawsuit and its implications?
Has one expressed the slightest reservation over Bush’s (alone against the world) full support of Israel in its barbaric wars against its indigenous and neighboring populations? That Bush and the Olmert government are acting in unison was made clear by their simultaneous threats against Syria and Iran. What are these dangerous idiots thinking? To use further war to justify tightening the grip on an already deeply dissatisfied American people? Or is it something more sinister? Is there some Apocalyptic prophecy about destroying the infidel population of the Biblical lands – the logical outcome of bombing Iran – and establishing a Christian and Jewish Empire? Does that end with the destruction of the Jews, and then, and then….…THE RAPTURE!?

In my signature drive, I obviously can't reach more than a small fraction of the Alaskans who support the idea of putting impeachment on the ballot. Those who wish to help by signing can e-mail me at "impeachmentalaska@yahoo.com" and I will e-mail a copy of the signature page. One signature is great; two or fifteen is even better. You can also write me @ Box 22394, Juneau,AK 99802, and I will mail a copy. All originals should be sent to that address, no later than 15 August.

In the near future, I will post an article on environmental issues, including ANWR, the Juneau road, and unwanted bridges to nowhere. I would like readers from around the state to write and share their thoughts about local environmental - and other - concerns, so we can all get a fuller picture of the issues facing the state.

Thanks, Bill

Al Gore is probably one of the best informed people on the planet on the subject of global warming, in all its many aspects. As he tells it, he was fortunate enough to have as a college professor in the 1960s, the scientist who first measured atmospheric CO2 over a period of years and who first sounded the alarm. The professor inspired Gore, for whom the issue has been an abiding passion. His latest effort is the acclaimed documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth”. I saw most of his interview with Charlie Rose around June 20, and I saw the movie last week.
I thought the interview was more informative than the movie, as Gore got to demonstrate his erudition and persuasive charm. The movie had the advantage of greater length, pictorial and graphic images, but it spent too much time on Gore’s “life”. When not following him on his world travels, the movie is basically the slide show he has been developing for some 17 years.
In the movie, Gore proselytizes that “the two parties” just have to get together to solve this problem; that’s the only way. The man, whose father preceded him in the Senate, appears organically incapable of thinking outside the constrictive two-party box.
Later he recalls arriving in Washington as a freshman congressman in 1975. He figured he’d just lay the facts out, everybody would see the threat, and the problem would be solved just like that. Of course, it didn’t work out that way – it was “inconvenient” to the capitalist interests that control both parties. With the country’s environmental policy now in the hands of ExxonMobil, you might think that after three decades of beating his head against the wall, Gore would have got some sense. But no, he’s a Democratic politician first – he was born to it – and an environmentalist second.