Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Richard Wolffe of Newsweek:

I think the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards in covering politics in general.

Fantastic!

Americans are keenly aware of how many U.S. forces have lost their lives in Iraq, according to a new AP-Ipsos poll. But they woefully underestimate the number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed…

Among those polled for the AP survey…the median estimate of Iraqi deaths was 9,890.

Fantastic!

As many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.

(Title borrowed from Saheli.)

…here’s a perspective I’ve always appreciated, from the political organizer Ernesto Cortes:

“A good organizer must be angry,” he says. “Not irritated or enraged, but angry. In the dictionary you’ll find that it comes from the Old Norse angr, meaning loss or grief.”

Cortés says his grief — his anger, in the Nordic sense — stems from America’s failure to fulfill the promise of democracy, the promise that all citizens can play a meaningful role in their own governance.

What Cortes says about the root meaning of anger is, in fact, accurate:

anger

SYLLABICATION: an·ger
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English, from Old Norse angr, sorrow.

There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with being angry. In fact, the weird people are those who don’t feel sorrow over what’s happening to this country. (More on this topic here.)

Recently Frank Gaffney, the poor man’s Michael Ledeen, was on the Alan Colmes Show with Glenn Greenwald. Gaffney explained that when we invaded Iraq in 2003, we found “a hot production line for chemical and biological agents…with the plans to ramp them up for use as terrorist weapons against the United States and Europe.” I explain in detail here how and why Gaffney’s brain made this mistake.

Tomdispatch has Bill McKibben’s new NY Review of Books piece on global warming. If you’re not scared already, reading this will fix that.

Then be sure to visit this site for information about the upcoming March 20th congressional action day on global warming, put together by the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, and many others.

Finally, go visit Step It Up ’07, the organizing point for the nationwide April 14th events McKibben mentions.

Here’s an article from Saturday’s Wall Street Journal by Sarmad Ali, a young Iraqi journalist living in the U.S.:

About 5 o’clock on a mid-December morning, I was awakened by a call from my brother in Iraq. “Dad is missing,” he said. He was upset and some of his anger spilled out at me: “You should be here,” he shouted. “You don’t seem to care.”

My father had left home in Baghdad that morning to go to the auto-repair shop across town where he works. Fifteen minutes after he left, car bombs exploded on his route to work and he hasn’t been seen since.

His disappearance set off a desperate search by my family through the netherworld of war-torn Baghdad. It also put me in the agonizing position of trying to help my family with the violent dislocations of civil war — over the phone, from thousands of miles away.

The rest. You can also hear Ali reading a version here.

(Thanks to Saheli, a friend of Ali’s friend Cyrus Farivar, for pointing this out.)