The war in Iraq was a crime based on fraud. It was the first bunco scheme that qualifies as an international war crime. It was an unnecessary war of aggression, sold by thieves and con-men to a too-credulous American public that had been told for the previous 30 years that all politics was a shuck, and that the very principles of self-government made you a fool and a rube. The bloody irony was that internalizing those things made us the biggest suckers of all.

via Troops Leaving Iraq 2011 – We Are Not Leaving Iraq, and It Is Never Leaving Us – Esquire.

few are the days that i don’t reflect upon what it was like to be in a newsroom watching the drums beating in the run-up to our invasion of iraq.

i followed foreign media and saw hans blix saying there were no weapons of mass destruction. american journalists scoffed at the foreign media. i begged for a more critical eye. i watched colin powell testify in front of the U.N. and show satellite pictures of supposed mobile weapons factories that looked like an aerial shot of a stuckeys truck stop. i refused to sign the petition to support judy miller when she was jailed for protecting her anonymous source. i didn’t gloat (much) when the source turned out to be dick cheney who played her like a fiddle. i was yelled at and intimidated and threatened everywhere for my interpretation of what was happening. i saw fear grip us and make us insane.

but i wasn’t effective. no one could have been. we were going, no matter what. and we went. and we bombed them to hell and back. and we embedded journalists, hundreds of them who wanted to be our generation’s ernie pyle (whose photo hung on the wall near my desk). i remember a thanksgiving party with a friend, he told me he was going to cover it. i asked him why? he had small children, a wife? why risk it for this? he could have assigned someone else, but he had to have it. and he never came back.

the stories we filed weren’t much, honestly. and i think even the people who went, when asked honestly, once they get over their you don’t know what it was like nobility and all that, will tell you, we didn’t tell the american people much about what they really needed to know until it was far too late. we didn’t really know ourselves.

we killed, as a nation. we bled, as a nation. we orphaned children and a created a generation of battle scarred veterans. we put the war on a credit card, and gave the borrowed money to shameless profiteers and private contractors who rebuilt what we destroyed needlessly and we stuck our future with the bill, plus interest, so we could take away their health and education to balance our budget later. we didn’t sacrifice for the common good, because there was no good here. we rationalized it to ourselves. we lied, to cover up our own shame of the lie.

i cried when my brother was deployed. i hated that he had to go in harm’s way for a lie. and i cried again when he came home in one piece, but to a life that was wrecked and an infant son who was struggling and neglected.

we declared mission accomplished, but it never seemed to end. there were no weapons, but we deposed a dictator, who we once supported, but we weren’t nation building, because our president campaigned that nation building wasn’t a good foreign policy. and the people weren’t happy with us as liberators. they wanted us out. we surged our troops and order came, because the mission was actually rounding up young iraqi men and putting them in confinement. our soldiers and sailors were policemen and prison guards. and the only stories we told were along the lines of how many people blew up in a car bomb that day. over and over again. day after day. the same story.

and few are the days that i don’t wish i didn’t have to walk miles in the woods to restore the karma, the charity i am compelled to do to pay back the balance i owe for my own small part in it. because my conscience haunts me. because it was my job. because it fed and sheltered my family. it will haunt me. forever. it was wrong. everything about it was wrong. morally, strategically, economically, everything about invading iraq was wrong. everything.

the foreign media, the ones who said there were no WMDs, also said if the US invaded Iraq, it would be the end of our economy and our role in the world. and they were right, both times.

someone asked me what i was so mad about on the anniversary of september 11. i said i missed sitting on the capitol steps and watching the sun set. i’m ashamed of what we did, how we acted. i’m ashamed to tell my children, who have lived their entire lives during this war, what we did and why we did it.

the terrorists won. my nation, the nation i loved, died in the shock and awe as we bombed iraq. it was shocking, and awful. and i will never, ever, forget what we did and who we once were… before we gave it all away.

                          

I don’t fault any one host for throwing a party, or any journalist for attending. Many of them are friends. There’s nothing inherently wrong with savoring Johnnie Walker Blue with the politicians we cover.But the cumulative effect is icky. With the proliferation of A-list parties and the infusion of corporate and lobbyist cash, Washington journalists give Americans the impression we have shed our professional detachment and are aspiring to be like the celebrities and power players we cover.My late colleague David Broder once recalled how, when he began newspapering in mid-century, journalists embraced the credo that “the only way a reporter should ever look at a politician is down.” He said they “prided themselves on their independence, their skepticism, and they relished their role in exposing the follies and the larceny of public officials.”As I began to do the RSVPs for a few of this year’s parties, I thought about what our hardbitten journalistic forebears would make of Cee Lo and SamRo and the Donald. Then I made other plans for the weekend.

via How the journalist prom got out of control – The Washington Post.

I’ve been to the WHCD. I have lots of friends who go and I’ll probably go again some day. But, Dana is right on target.

                          

Darthcheeta // David Andrew Johnson

David Andrew JohnsonI was given the nickname “cheetah” long ago and have always used variants of it as my usernames, gamertags and chat handles for IRC, ICQ, and AIM. It is not after the cool fast cat, though, but the ape in the Tarzan movies – I’m Cheetah the Web Monkey.

In true early online nerdiness, the really skilled web designers, producers and developers in Scripps came to be known as The Jedi since our knowledge of the Web “force” was so strong – coders and scripters were very rare in journalism in the 90s.

So, of course, when I got promoted out of local properties and went to DC in 2000, the “Jedi” around the company said I had crossed to the dark side – and one registered the AIM screen name “darthcheeta” under my new email address as a going away gag. (Not enough characters for the last h). It stuck and I’ve used it for everything since.

via What’s in a name? Backstories to some personal brands.

                          

Liveblog of TBD/American University liveblogging workshop – @TBD Community | TBD.com.

                          

Our Carbon Emissions Were Down in 2009 – GOOD Blog – GOOD – StumbleUpon.

The common counter point to the climate change response with green technology is that it will kill economic growth. While it appears that the recent recession had something to do with this cut in carbon emissions whereby high fossil fuel prices caused people to cut back on consumption, the energy conservation hasn’t stopped economic growth. It has made businesses and individuals act more efficiently. We cut carbon as we rebuilt and strengthened the economy.

Another major factor in cutting the carbon was the major growth in renewable energy, particularly wind power, over the past several years. It appears that the only part of the economy that will not grow in the green future is the fossil fuel sector. Can you imagine what we could do if we strategically retooled for sustainable growth?

So keep changing those light bulbs, keep recycling, and keep walking and biking to work. Because it is working. And that’s great news, no matter if you work in facts or beliefs.

                          

Folks in Capitol Hill really love their neighborhood. Whether it’s touting the greatness of Eastern Market or raving about the recent influx of restaurants to the area, there is a lot of pride to be found among the inhabitants of the Hill. But while the trendy and family-friendly enclave is a happening place to live now, it wasn’t always that way. Ten or so years ago, sections of the Hill were no-go zones for house hunting and even walking at night.

“Where I live now couldn’t possibly be more safe,” said Nichole Remmert, a freelance fundraising development and events consultant who lives in the Lincoln Park area. “I wouldn’t have lived there in 1994. Whatever people’s personal thoughts on gentrification, there has been a decrease in crime.”

Remmert is one of several faithful Hill residents who write for the blog the Hill Is Home, which was founded by Kate McFadden last spring. Each of the contributors has seen the changes that have come to the area and are passionate about the neighborhood in which they live.

McFadden started thehillishome.com after being laid off from her job at AARP. She was looking to get some fresh writing clips and decided to do that by fulfilling a need she saw in the community. While other neighborhoods had established blogs, such as the Prince of Petworth and New Columbia Heights, Capitol Hill did not. So McFadden decided to start one.

via Bloggers Chronicle Neighborhood’s Changes – Roll Call.

                          

The old design of the blog dated back to the original Movable Type deployment and was ported to WordPress.

Welcome back and welcome to the new design. With a new year and new changes, it was time to update the look and feel of my personal site.

The original design dates back to when I first moved my site from static html to a blog many, many years ago. The first blogware I used was Movable Type, and I ported that design with a few updates when I migrated the site to WordPress a few years ago.

The original design implemented transparent png backgrounds and css before many browsers supported them (booo Internet Exporer). While it was a fairly cutting edge design then, it has felt dated to me for some time now. I also felt that it was not easy to read. I had been trying in vain to get crestock’s freebie image plugin to work, and finally decided to try to do a clean wordpress install to get it up and running. With that successful, I imported the old blog’s export file and cut the domain over. At that point, I figured a new skin was in order.

This new rollout uses the 3COL-RDMBAN RR Theme by Eric Crooks, and I’m pretty happy with it after a few minor modifications. I was tempted to use thesis or a framework and roll my own again, but in the end, I wanted to get back to working and not grind over the redesign. I chose the theme based on layout and my love for the orange and grey palate. It felt like a good fit with the old circuit design and color scheme in the old color scheme. With some stock photo searching for a few new abstract circuit images to mix into the rotating banner and quick slicing, I was ready to go with only a light effort.

Anyway, hope it is easier to read – the whole point – and visually pleasing. Thanks for any input.

                          

LS/ RDP/ DDDD

Red Devils reign | jconline.com | Journal and Courier.

                          

Picasa Web Albums – NavalLodge4 – Back to School Fun Fair.

                          

via Macsimum News – Twitter Vote Report wins Golden Dot Award.