THIS MODERN WORLD

My friend Peter Kuper is currently living in Oaxaca, and this weekend he sent a report from the ground on the turmoil there, along with a couple pages from his sketchbook:

Since you may have been hearing news on Oaxaca, I figured I send you an update straight from the caballo’s mouth…

After almost 6 months of striking it looks like the xit has hit the fan.

Yesterday undercover police “Poros” (thugs working for the governor Ulises) attacked the radio station at the university–the last free radio or TV in Oaxaca) and then in other parts of town started attacking people on the barricades. As you’ve perhaps heard Brad Will, an American journalist who was filming a documentary here, was killed along with a number of other people. A photographer friend of ours was at the scene (I was supposed to meet up with him and was awaiting his call to let me know where things were at since Friday was a huge expanded strike closing the city).

When he finally called he was holed up in a building with other journalists who had hightailed it when the shooting started. In a strange twist (not to be compared with getting shot) I had gone to pick up my daughter from a playdate around that time and got caught in a storm that turned into a flash flood. The streets turned into muddy rivers. With new barricades set up–buses blocking streets–traffic was a snare of confusion in this flood and it was a small miracle the car didn’t stall mid-rio. Suffice to say it was a tension inducing afternoon.

So today(Sat.) the word is Presidente Fox is sending in a police force to remove the barricades and chase the protesters out. They won’t leave without a fight(?) so everyone is holding their breath. The only way Fox can resolve this is to pull the governor Ulises out of power and negotiate with striking teachers/Appo(?) Without this I’m afraid it will be a police state with troops on every corner to keep the disorder in place(?)

As you can see there are alot of questions.

Since we’re not in the downtown area (we’re a whole ten minutes up the hill in San Felipe) we have been safe. Throughout our time here(four months now) these problems have been hanging over Oaxaca, but we have nonetheless been having a fantastic experience. Today we actually had a belated birthday party for my wife. Though many people who would have to pass barricades cancelled, most came and it was a surreal uplifting event in this time of crisis. As the saying goes–better to hang out together then to hang out separately(or something like that.)

The situation is changing by the hour so it is impossible to know what is happening at this point. I know that the troops arrived (One of our friends had to go out to the airport to fetch her Mom and saw the troop planes). Another reliable source said this will give Ulises the thumbs up to send his henchmen on a rampage.I also heard from our photographer friend that Appo will not be fighting and a resolution may be imminent! Another casualty of war–verifiable information.

(Some earlier photographs and sketches here.)

I think it’s great that bloggers have forced open the doors of public discourse. But with all due respect to those taking part, the idea of an on-air blogging party is just painful.

Political cartoonists run into this a lot also. We may be people whose very profession requires us to pay attention to the news and to have lively opinions about same — but we are rarely invited to sit at the big kids’ table. If a cartoonist is on-air, you can bet there’s a chalkboard or a large sketchpad set up on an easel nearby so they can sketch out their wacky, wacky ideas. Watch the pony do his trick! How much is two plus one? Stomp! Stomp! Stomp! Everybody cheer!

In the case of blogging, of course, what we’re essentially talking about is on-camera typing.

CNN is trying to incorporate bloggers directly into its coverage of next week’s midterm elections by inviting them to an “E-lection Nite Blog Party,” an event aimed at corralling some of the top online opinion makers in one place to provide instant reaction as the results come in.

The cable news network plans to host more than two dozen bloggers from across the political spectrum — including sites like RedState and Daily Kos — at a Washington Internet lounge where they can monitor the election returns on a slew of flat-screen televisions. (Each blogger will get his or her own monitor, which can be tuned to any channel.) There will be free wireless access — and plenty of food and beverages, natch.

Natch.

Seriously, you don’t ask newspaper columnists to sit in front of a laptop and write their columns on air, and we’re way past the point that bloggers should have to humiliate themselves like that in order to get a few seconds of airtime. This isn’t 2002, we all know what blogs are. If bloggers have something to contribute to the conversation, let them sit at a roundtable on election eve and contribute their thoughts like any other opinion writer, without treating them like teenagers at a TV dance party circa 1962 who need to be lured into the studio with “plenty of food and beverages, natch. “

Enough of you have written in to point out the similarities between this Sunday’s “Foxtrot” strip and my own Halloween cartoon from 2003 that I thought I should address this. (Click images to see larger versions.)

Despite the similarities, I don’t think there’s anything nefarious going on here. I’m not closely familiar with Foxtrot, but it really doesn’t seem like the sort of cartoon whose creator needs to troll three year old TMWs for ideas. This seems like a pretty basic case of Cartoonist Minds Thinking Alike to me: electronic voting machines have been in the news quite a bit lately, and the thought that their vulnerabilities might actually allow someone to undermine the democratic process is pretty scary, and hey, speaking of scary, Halloween is right around the corner …

Like that.

The one thing I will point out, with no slight intended to the Foxtrot guy, is that I was on this one three years ago. Of course, there are a lot of topics that I was on top of three years ago, for all the good it did anyone.

Paul Burgess, former Bush speechwriter, has been getting some attention for this recent friendly op-ed:

Friends, neighbors, and countrymen of the Left: I hate your lying guts

I never used to feel hatred for people such as Cindy Sheehan, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, or other pop-culture notables who, for example, sing the praises of Central American dictators while calling President Bush the greatest terrorist on earth. I do now…

I have also grown to hate certain people of genuine accomplishment like Ted Turner, who, by his own contention, cannot make up his mind which side of the terror war he is on…

I now hate Howard Dean, the elected leader of the Democrats, who, by repeatedly stating his conviction that we won’t win in Iraq, bets his party’s future on our nation’s defeat.

I hate the Democrats who, in support of this strategy, spout lie after lie.

This is obviously notable for the view it gives us into the, uh, emotional state of the Bush administration.

But there’s something else worth pointing out too. Let’s take a look at one paragraph again:

I never used to feel hatred for people such as Cindy Sheehan, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, or other pop-culture notables who, for example, sing the praises of Central American dictators while calling President Bush the greatest terrorist on earth.

The “dictator” Burgess has in mind is obviously Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. (An article about Sheehan’s January visit to Venezuela is here.)

And what’s funny about this, and makes me think we have the worst-run empire in history, is that:

1. According to this op-ed, Paul Burgess was “director of foreign-policy speechwriting at the White House.”

2. VENEZUELA IS IN SOUTH AMERICA

Damned liberals misinterpret everything.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House said Friday that Vice President Dick Cheney was not talking about a torture technique known as “water boarding” when he said dunking terrorism suspects in water during questioning was a “no-brainer.”

Human rights groups complained that Cheney’s comments amounted to an endorsement of water boarding, in which the victim believes he is about to drown.

President Bush, asked about Cheney’s comments, said, “This country doesn’t torture. We’re not going to torture.” He spoke at an Oval Office meeting Friday with NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.

Earlier, White House press secretary Tony Snow denied that Cheney had endorsed water boarding.

“You know as a matter of common sense that the vice president of the United States is not going to be talking about water boarding. Never would, never does, never will,” Snow said. “You think Dick Cheney’s going to slip up on something like this? No, come on.”

In an interview Tuesday with WDAY of Fargo, North Dakota, Cheney was asked if “a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives.”

The vice president replied, “Well, it’s a no-brainer for me, but for a while there I was criticized as being the vice president for torture. We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in.”