See, every time I read a Dick Day blog, I end up on YouTube clicking away.  It's so great.  Here are some of my favorites in the meditative category.

Los Super Seven: La Sirena
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvKidNFnzgA

Van Morrison: Into the Mystic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVAnlke_xUY

The Doors: Crystal Ship
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeTxHbtHTng&feature=related

Buffalo Springfield: Four Days Gone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA7HCHZIaBA

Aram Katchaturian: Aishe's Awakening
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kbMkoXdRc&feature=related

Manuel de Falla: Pantomima (El Amor Brujo)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNx5fQjHBdY

Rolling Stones: Waiting For A Friend
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0NYKWLMgx0&feature=av2e

Tiri Te Kanawa: O Mio Babbino Caro
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDOCONwjbwg

Super Session: Stop
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QzxtVvt9M0

Joan Baez:  Deportee
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjAzZKZV1Ek&feature=related

Oh heck, I can go on and on.  How about y'all?

THE DAILY CALLER

 

I'd never heard of The Daily Caller until delving into JournoList yesterday.  According to Wiki, TheDC was created by Tucker Carlson and Dick Cheney's former advisor, Neil Patel, and launched on line in January of this year.

TheDC broke the JList story this past June 25 - publishing selected leaked Dave Weigel emails taken from the JList by an unknown hand.  This led to Weigel's resignation from Wapo and Ezra Klein's shutting down the list server for good. (Actually, FishbowlDC was the first to publish JList emails - maybe more on that later.)

You might say that Weigel was a Shirley Sharrod prototype.  But folks, I think we need to pay very close attention to this shit.  TheDC and Breitbart are not letting up on this JList stuff, and I think it has the potential to do big time damage to Democratic aspiration in the coming elections.  These guys are the new Swirftboaters.

Here's the deal, from what I've been able to glean.  Before breaking the JList story, TheDC was getting 50,000 hits a day, and immediately after, it started logging 500,000 hits per day.  Who's paying attention?  Probably one hell of a lot of swing voters.  Since TheDC and other conservative commentators are wringing as much mileage as possible out of the story, and the message is that the public cannot trust anything that comes from the liberal press, since everything was contrived on this liberal elitist list server whose members conspired to repress the Reverend Wright story, the Teabagger's are racist story, attacks on Fox News, and yadda yadda yadda. (After all, one would expect a list server with 400 liberal members that started in 2007 to discuss everything in the news in the course of thousands and thousands of email exchanges.)

Take, for example, a story published in HufPo today on Palin: Sarah Palin Lashes Out At Media, McCain Campaign and JournoList, Maybe by Jason Linkins.  God knows that Palin is unlikely to be aware of JList, and Linkins points out that she didn't even use the term - the "connection" was supplied by TheDC's JList hit man Johnathan Strong.  Palin, in her "exclusive remarks" only alluded to "hordes of Obama's opposition researchers-slash 'reporters'" that descended on Alaska after McCain announced her as his VP candidate.  So it is Mr. Strong who is affixing the "JournoList" language to convince readers that the "hoards" were the product of conspiratorial mandates by JournoList members.

To put it in perspective, I think that Time's Joe Klein does a good job describing JList and his participation in it.

These conversations were private, as most good ones are. We were taking risks, testing our ideas against others--just as I had with the New Paradigm Society. On occasion, someone proposed some sort of joint action. This was ridiculous, of course; I politely ignored these efforts, as did all of the other experienced journalists on the list. The only joint actions that worked, to my recollection, involved meeting up at some bar. Journalists don't do joint actions; opinion journalists like me are paid to have our own thoughts--we hoard them jealously until we publish them. Today, the Daily Caller has printed one of my Journolist emails, in which I share my latest published thinking about the just-announced Republican vice presidential candidate and thank the group--in an ironic, overblown tone--for the conversation we'd been having on the subject. When seen through the lens of witless right-wing conspiracy mongering, this seems embarrassing. But there was no conspiracy afoot. I didn't need the folks on Journolist to figure out how to react to Sarah Palin: her lack of qualifications for the vice presidency--and her spectacular abilities as a stand-up politician--represented a fecund gusher of material that made even the most mediocre of columnists seem like geniuses. Writing about Palin was not hard work; it still isn't; it will never be.

The TheDC link Klein includes is worth a read, just to see how Strong is mapping out his conspiracy theory.  And Tucker's take is good too - Man-o-man, Carlson sure uses his baby-faced innocence:

To be clear: We're not contesting the right of anyone, journalist or not, to have political opinions. (I, for one, have made a pretty good living expressing mine.) What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption. Again and again, we discovered members of Journolist working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too.

Make-up or Photoshop?  Hahahaha (to quote Dick Day).  Well, Ezra Klein has a good story about Carlson trying to get on JList himself.  When Tucker Carlson asked to join Journolist.

The e-mail came on May 25th. Tucker didn't ask that it be off-the-record, so I'm not breaking a confidence by publishing it. Here it is, in full:

Dear Ezra,

I keep hearing about how smart the policy conversations on JournoList are, and am starting to feel like I'm missing out by not reading them. Could I join?

I realize you and I don't share the same politics, but I can promise you I have no interest in flaming anyone or even debating (I get enough of that). I'm just interested in knowing what smart progressives are saying. It strikes me that's the one thing I'm missing in my daily reading.

Please tell me what you think. If it makes you uncomfortable, ask around. I'm pretty sure we know a lot of the same people.

All best,

Tucker Carlson.

At the time, I didn't know Carlson was working on a story about Journolist. And I'd long thought that the membership rules that had made sense in the beginning had begun to feed conspiracy theories on the right and cramp conversation inside the list. I wrote him back about 30 minutes later.

We definitely have friends in common, and I'd have no worries about you joining. The problem is I need to have clear rules, as i don't want to be in the position of forcing fine-grained membership tests based on opaque criteria. Thus far, it's been center to left, just because that was how people wanted it at the beginning in order to feel comfortable talking freely. I've been meaning for some time to ask the list about revisiting that, so I'll take this opportunity and get back to you.

I'll leave it at that.  In summary, I think this issue will grow to haunt the elections in November.  From what I've seen of the actual JList emails, there is a lot of snark, jabs and derision in there - much like we're used to reading TPM comments and blogs.  So some JList members must feel intimidated by this attack and prefer to stay silent in the hope it will pass.  I just don't see any signs that it will pass.

This stuff is way above my head - but by golly it looks important.  Many of you may be up on the JournoList conspiracy being pushed by the right right now.  And it looks like Andrew Breitbart is the lead attack dog.  He'll pay you $100K if you give him the full archive of all the email exchanges of JournoList, a former professional listserver subscribed toby 400 liberal news reporters, and give you anonymity.  

This strikes me as "the mother or all left wing media bias" conspiracy theories. 

Yes, the mainstream media that came together to play up the false allegations that the "N-Word" was hurled 15 times by Tea Party participants at the Congressional Black Caucus outside the Capitol the day before the "Obamacare" vote, is the same MSM that colluded to make sure the American public accepted the smear, and refused to show the exculpatory videos that disproved the incendiary charges of Tea Party racism.

Breitbart names David Weigel as the Benedict Arnold of the Ezra Klein 400 JournoList.

Weigel had the professional courage to come out against 399 of his "JournoList" peers when he wrote:

I think we've seen a paradigm shift, and that the March 20 story will be remembered by conservatives as evidence of how the media accepts attacks on conservatives without due diligence.

But really...if you fallow the link you'll see that Brietbart has pulled another Shirley Sharrod:

And on Sunday, Rev. Jesse Jackson walked out in full view of protesters, inspiring a wave of boos and obscenities -- none of them (that I heard) racial, none that made the crowd look good. I taped this but didn't mention it in my stories on the protests. Organizers were concerned with some of the behavior that the media was witnessing, and reporters saw enough that the accounts of Carson et al. -- the kind of after-the-fact retellings that inform a lot of stories -- didn't come off as "smears."

I'm trying to find out what happened to Rep. Jesse Jackson's (D-Ill.) video, which several conservatives have asked for. It's not clear how much of the incidents he filmed, or what he captured. Whether or not he picked up these incidents, I think we've seen a paradigm shift, and that the March 20 story will be remembered by conservatives as evidence of how the media accepts attacks on conservatives without due diligence.

In the entire piece Weigel does not mention Journolist and its members, nor does he "spill the beans" on a vast left wing news conspiracy.  He basically wrote that given the lack of any smoking gun evidence, the conservatives win their point.  But Dr. Distorto nevertheless writes:

Dave Weigel is a portal into the dark world of hardcore liberal bias in the media. This opening gives us a deeper insight into the insidious relationship between liberal think tanks, academics and their mouthpieces in the media.

Anyway, this is an intimidating topic, since it is endless.  Some figures associated with JournolList advocate pushing the FCC to pull Fox's broadcasting license, for example, and others have been accused of trying to block Fox News from getting Helen Thomas' vacant, but coveted, White House Press Corp seat. 

The Volokh Conspiracy web site (conservative lawyers) has been running JList blogs for the past few days.  Worth a look - scroll down the page.  If nothing else, there are good links to some of the players.

Oh, I forgot.  Brietbart has discovered that the sanctum santoriim of the JList conspiracy is...ta da ta da ta da...MediaMatters.

I really enjoyed Rachel Maddow's hit piece on John Boehner last night. The "Ready, Fire, Aim" banner was too precious.  But golly, the clips from the Cleveland interview sure looked like the man was three sheets to the wind.  Did anyone else notice?

Apparently Joe Scarborough noticed.  Although he focused on Boehner being lazy, his sub-text pointed to the after hour taverns.

And it's been noticed: here's a blog ("Drunk Boehner") devoted to the congressman's drinking habits

The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America Inc. PAC has donated a lot of money to John Boehner and his PAC, the Freedom Project over the years.

So have the National Beer Wholesalers Association PAC.

The blog has a terrific series of videos under the title "Signs you may be drunk #n"

Well, anyway...just asking.

.

B. Raman at South Asia Analysis Group has an interesting take on General Stan's movida.  In a nutshell, Raman observes that faced with failute, the events of the past few days were the best possible outcome for the Obama Administration. 

His [McChrystal's] irreverence enabled Mr. Obama to rid himself of a General on the brink of battle failure on grounds of misconduct instead of on grounds of battle failure which could have reflected on Mr. Obama's political and professional judgment.

The implication is that General Stan threw himself on the tracks to protect Obama, or, say, Emmanuel cooked the whole thing up and compelled Stanley to do it.  Yes, I'm wearing my tin foil hat as I write.

What I actually found most interesting in Ramen's piece is his analysis of the COIN strategy viz Iraq and Afghanistan.  His article is titled Will Petraeus Succeed Where McChrystal Failed? after all.

4. What worked for the General during his previous posting in Iraq----his skills in special operations and his ability to divide and prevail over Al Qaeda and its ex- Baathist allies from the disbanded army of Saddam Hussein---- did not work in Afghanistan. The Taliban in Afghanistan is a united force, which has successfully resisted US-inspired attempts to create a split between the so-called Good and Bad Taliban. In Iraq, Al Qaeda with its volunteers from outside---mainly from Saudi Arabia---- was in the forefront of the battles. It was easy to create a divide between the outsiders in Al Qaeda and the native Iraqis, who hated the Saudis of Al Qaeda as much as they hated the Americans. They were prepared to temporarily swallow their dislike of the Americans and collaborate with them against the outsiders of Al Qaeda. 

5. In Afghanistan, the native Pashtuns of the Taliban have been in the forefront of the battles against the NATO forces. The role of the outsiders of Al Qaeda in the battles waged by the Taliban against the NATO forces has been minimal. Conditions for a successful divide and prevail strategy did not exist in Afghanistan and do not exist even today. Moreover, in Iraq, the role of Iran, despite its aversion to the US, was beneficial to the US operations against Al Qaeda and its associates. In Afghanistan, the role of Pakistan, while seemingly beneficial, has really been detrimental to the US war efforts. 

6. In Afghanistan, a different mix was required----better conventional capabilities in Afghan territory, better covert capabilities in Pakistani territory to target the Taliban sanctuaries and rear bases and the political will to call Pakistan to order and to force it to stop playing its strategic games in Afghanistan. Instead of devising such a strategy, McChrystal followed a strategy largely based on illusions------- illusions of a coming split in the Taliban, illusions of a diminution of public support for the Taliban and illusions of Pakistani co-operation in dealing with the Taliban.

I can't help thinking that as that difference materialized ultimately in the minds of the war planners, and victory on the ground appeared ever more remote. 

Yep, the anti-immigration act is bad enough.  But these crazies won't stop there.  HufPo has a story up now about the new Arizona Education Policy that will be on Brewer's desk shortly. 

Under the ban, sent to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer by the state legislature Thursday, schools will lose state funding if they offer any courses that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

There's more:

Meanwhile, in a move that was more covert until the Wall Street Journal uncovered it, the Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with "heavy" or "ungrammatical" accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes.

I think we need to revisit that Palast article that TJ linked to yesterday: Behind the Arizona Immigration Law: GOP Game to Swipe the November Election. This is all starting to fit in with my suspicion that the anti-immigration movida was really directed a not undocumented workers, but at Arizona's voting Hispanic population.  Let's watch the voter registration rolls start getting scrubbed more and more until November.

Will Elder/Harvey Kurtzman wrote "Curb your motal!" on a fence on page two of their "Mickey Rodent" (by Walt Dizzy) story in early Mad Magazine (Mad #18, 1955).  In this world populated by Disney characters we humans were the pets - in a panel before "curb your mortal!" we see a pet shop with little naked humans in the window, and after with a fence sporting a "Beware of human" sign.  I remember, as a kid, quoting "curb your mortal" all over the place - I loved it.

Was it youth, or the national optimism in 1955 that made the world look so great?  Sure, we had Atomic Bomb drills and I Like Ike buttons, but all in all things looked good - jobs, retirement, new homes, cheap gas and so on.  (Even at age 12, I didn't really believe the Russians wanted to kill themselves.)  In 1955, you could drop in at Yosemite National Park with no appointment and get a camp site - that's how good it was.

But somewhere along the line the old optimism exchanged to pessimism.  Hope became dread.  I don't see good things ahead, in other words.  Last night I started to have a dream that startled me awake halfway through scene one - and these words were ringing in my head:

Everybody can't have cars!

It seems like a truism to me.  Haul out your calculators and do the math.  Legend has it that there are over 600 million automobiles in the world today. There are around 6.7 billion people in the world.  So even considering one car per family of say, 5, we would need 1.34 billion automobiles to fill the bill.  And of course as the new cars are being built, the population is growing.  And how about families that have one car for mom, dad, and three teenager kids?  Wouldn't they be miffed.  But automobile ownership is just an example...I'm really talking about commodities generally.  While our planet might have a hard time dealing with another 600 million automobiles, it will also have a hard time dealing with more soy bean production, Portland cement and Dixie cups. 

These ideas were bombarding me after that dream - that''s how I got from Everybody can't have cars! to Curb your mortal!

In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard wrote in his The Postmodern Condtion: A Report on Knowledge, almost as an aside, that the new arrangements in global politics and economics that were hardening at the time were permanent, that which humanity could count-on to be the landscape of human life in the future.  What is lacking in this vision of the future (which was Lyotard's essential premise in his book) was the idea of progress itself, as part and parcel of the grand narratives of modernism, i.e. the enlightnment, marxism or any other totalizing ideology that people believed in that would lead us towards an imagined utopia. 

Today, we see change in the world, and it may appear of progress viz. through any lens we may be viewing it.  So we can say China is progressing - its per captia income is growing, business is booming, capital is strong. But is this progress on a general human scale, or it is an economic displacement? As the Chinese man-on-the-street grows wealthier, who is growing poorer? 

More appropriately, as an individual Chinese (finally) can purchase an automobile, how many Africans or Americans can no longer afford one?

We can't all have cars!

The Rx, of course, is to Curb your Mortal! Even this crazy mutation of capitalism we are living with now has desire as its engine.

As the dust settles it turns out it was the Laguna Salada strike fault that went off on Easter.  It runs north/south at the western edge of the Mexicali Valley, paralleling the Sierra de Cucapa mountains.  The elevation is about 30' - 40' above sea level.  West of the Sierras de Cucapa is the Laguna Salada depression, which is 33' below sea level, the lowest point in Mexico.

A carload of Spring Breakers were returning home from San Felipe on the Gulf of California when the earthquake hit.  They shot this outstanding video clip (I think they are about 10 miles north of ground zero):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPKVIW6lymM&feature=player_embedded

The mountains are west of the highway and camera.  When the camera pans to the south, where the mountains end on the horizon is ground zero.  The Cucapas are very steep, and what we are seeing is a mega dust cloud from thousands of land slides that the jolt triggered.

NOAA has a complimentary clip from space:

In this stop-motion animation you can see the dust form in the Cucapas and blow all the way over to Yuma, Arizona.  I think the image(s) is utterly amazing.

Notice the terrain in the video clip.  It is desert - actually desertified wetlands.  This is the delta of the Colorado, and just 70 years ago it was the largest desert wetlands in the world. It supported a unique species of deer, which I believe survive in small numbers today in the San Pedro Martyr mountains to the west of the delta.  It also support a population of Jaguars - I think by the 1940s some of the bigs cats were spotted, but they are gone today.  Racoon, Beaver, Coyote, Fox etc.  And the wetlands were a major stop on the Pacific Migratory Waterfowl corridor, so you could have counted Geese, Ibis, Ducks, Curlew, Avocet etc. in the hundreds of thousands.  The annual rise and fall of the Colorado dumped millions of tons of nutrients into the delta and northern gulf - which resulted in an astounding diversity of marine organisms.  Today the giant totoaba (6' - 230 lba) is on the brink of extinction in the northern gulf.  Obviously the Mexican fishery has played a hand, but the fact remains that the totoaba breeds in the fresh water estuaries  of the Colorado, which has been stoppered by water development upstream.  Another species on the seriously endangered list is the Vaquita dolphin, the world's smallest porpoise -  unique to the northern gulf.

When Hernando de Alacaron "discovered" the Colorado River Delta in 1540 (and also discovered that California was not an island) he reportedly saw thousands of Cucapa tribal people, who occupied this great cornucopia.  The Cucapa are still there - they are the poorest of the poor in the valley - the source of cheap farm hands for Mexican farmers.  They are scattered throughout the delta in small ejidos and colonias.  I'm bringing this up because these are the people who's houses sank into the ground during the earthquake - as if they didn't have hard enough time to begin with.  It must have been super-liquifaction.  Remember, all this "land" in the Imperial and Mexicali valley is in fact the sedimentary alluvial fan of the Colorado River.  Without the river, the Gulf of California would extend all the way to Palm Springs. So it's just the kind of soil that liquifies in an eathquake.  Add to this the high water table of the old wetlands, and you get super liquifaction.  So as the houses sank down, the water rose to the surface.  I've heard that it's a checkerboard of mud and shallow ponds all around the area near the souther extention of the Sierras. 

So it looks like the Cucapas were hit hardest.  Mexican relief agencies are hard at work, and I hope they are effective.  Ooooooh - sounds like socialicism - egad!

It was a big one.  I was at the patio table, and things started to shake.  I kind of froze, waiting to determine how big it was going to be, and it got stronger and stronger and stronger, I grasped the table and the chair arm and I really thought I was going to be pitched out of the chair.  Dang, it seemed like it went on for five minutes - but I understand it was 40 seconds long.  I heard some crashing sounds at some point, and there was a deep earth-rumbling - like a far off explosion.  Then it ended.  The crashing was a wheel-barrow that was propped up falling over.  Inside the house, a few things had fallen on the floor, a portfolio folder tipped over, and all the filing cabinet doors were open.  Nothing was broken.

Just after the quake the Internet was down, but it went back up a in a few minutes.  USGS reported it as a 6.9 with an epicenter near Colonia Guadalupe Victoria, Baja California, which is about 50 miles to my SSE.  This is the typical location for the most frequent shakes we've had in the past few years, an area very near the Cerro Prieto Geothermal Plant SE of Mexicali.  Nothing's been "proven", but there is a strong data correlation between the shakes and water injection into the thermal wells.

Our son and his family 10 miles south in El Centro had a worse time of it.  Their big screen TV fell over and shattered.  A China Cabinet fell over.  And water pipe leakage.  A lot of power outages in the Valley (we were spared).   And gas line leakages around, making everyone nervous.  Some structural damage reports are seeping in - nothing for sure yet.

Now you have to get the picture for this next part.  The towns of the Imperial Valley are pretty small - There are about 23K of us in Brawley, and 40K in El Centro, 38K in  Calexico...and so on with 5 or 6 smaller towns.  Just over the border, however, Mexicali, Baja Californis Norte, is a city of 1.25 million.  So what was the impact of this earthquake, which now has been upgraded by USGS to 7.2, on Mexicali.  As far as our media is concerned, Mexicali might just as well be in the middle of the Goddamn Gobi Desert.  I mean no reports are arriving as I write, except for some very tentative ones at NPR.

Remember, the Haitian quake was 7.3, and the Chilean quake was 8.8.  And of course we've learned, subsequently, that size doesn't (necessarily) matter.  But 6 months ago when a 5.4 terramoto hit Guadelupe Victoria, it knocked out power in a large block of southeast Mexicali, and damaged a school building.  I know that Mexicali has suffered damage from this one - it's just logical.  But there is barely a trickle of news coming out.  One death when a man's house collapsed on him, and "several" collapsed buildings in the city, and widespread power outages.  That's about it...so far. 

A reporter from the LA Times or San Diego Tribune could have borded a small plane and landed in Mexicali one or two hours after the quake, but I don't think that happened.  It seems like to the Gringo Press, Mexicali exists in the Land that Time Forgot.

Just to paint the picture - I once lived in a rural community in Northern California, and there was an intersection of two county roads that was very hazardous.  No stop signs, and each year the cattails grew in the irrigation ditches which blocked the view of cross traffic in all directions.  Consequently there were frequent auto collisions at the intersection, about a quarter resulting in injury to the occupants.  The majority of the accidents involved people who lived in this community.

My neighbor Don, a hard-working dairyman, was grumbling about this shortly after his wife  collided with another vehicle and came out of it with a broken arm.  He said that several individuals in the community had been asking the county to install stop-signs over the years, to no avail.  The county would respond with a traffic counter, which in turn would show that there was not enough traffic on the two roads to justify the expense of stop signs.  Traffic volume trumped crashes in the county regulations, so no stop signs regardless of the obvious need for stop signs.

So I told Don:  "I'll make the signs if you will put them up."  His face screwed up and he said "You can't do that!  It's against the law."  I didn't press him on it, but in my imagination I was playing out the scenario.  The signs would be installed, the county would take them down, possibly issuing citation to Don and I, making us martyrs for the cause of public safety and a very juicy headliner for the Red Bluff Daily News. The accident stats would be aired publicly, and in the end the Board of Supervisors, perhaps out of embarrassment, would "discover" a workaround to the regulations that would allow the stop signs to be installed.  What do you think? A 50/50 chance of success?

Even if it failed, the members of the community would have taken the first important step towards "the radicalization of the proletariat" that would allow the stop-sign battle to continue on to a second assault (in my imagination, at least).  It reminds me of Frank Water's terrific novel, The Man Who Killed The Deer.  In the story, each time the Feds attempted to meet with the governors of Taos Pueblo on current issues, the governors would block discussion on any issue until the Sacred Blue Lake was returned to the Tewa people.  This went on year after year (Frank Waters wasn't making this up), and continued after the novel was written and published.  The Taos governors were perfectly persistent with their demand, and finally - during the Nixon Administration,  Blue Lake was returned to Taos Pueblo.

The above is just to flesh out my question about health care.  I've been trying to imagine how we, the people, could develop strategies for popular actions that would ultimately lead to single payer universal coverage.  I confess my imagination fails me, so I appeal to the brainiacs among TPMcafé denizens for help.  It seems to me that the over-arching problem is that health care in the U.S. has become commodified, and the struggle is about property rights v. human rights - a conflict that has been played out endlessly in our courts and legislative institutions since this nation came to be.  But I'd like to hear from folks here what they think could be done to achieve the goal that so many here share.