Jose Reyes hits a leadoff home run in this AP photo. The New York Mets forced a seventh game in the National League Champ- ionship series by beating the St. Louis Cardinals 4-2 at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York.

Dick Cheney makes rather light of people’s “concern” about Iraq, as he puts it (via thinkprogress.org):

“Well, I think there’s some natural level of concern out there because in fact, you know, it wasn’t over instantaneously. It’s been a little over three years now since we went into Iraq, so I don’t think it’s surprising that people are concerned.

On the other hand, this government has only been in office about five months, five or six months now. They’re off to a good start. It is difficult, no question about it, but we’ve now got over 300,000 Iraqis trained and equipped as part of their security forces. They’ve had three national elections with higher turnout than we have here in the United States. If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.”

Another assessment of the “general overall situation” comes from the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins:

“Since accurate reporting is near impossible, the scale of that country’s collapse under three years of US and UK occupation is hard to measure. Civil war is normally indicated by death rates and population movements. Whether the figure of civilian deaths is 50,000 or ten times that number is immaterial; either is a horrific comment on the impotence of the occupation. The UNHCR estimates 365,000 internal refuges in Iraq this year alone. More are seeking asylum abroad than from any other nation.

A third of Iraq‘s professional class is reported to have fled to Jordan, a flight of skills worse than under Saddam. UN monitors now report 2,000 people a day are crossing the Syrian border. Over a hundred lecturers at Baghdad university alone have been murdered, mostly for teaching women. There are few places in Iraq where women can go about unattended or unveiled. Gunmen arrived earlier this month at a Baghdad television station and massacred a dozen of the staff, an incident barely thought worth reporting. The national museum is walled up. Electricity supply is down to four hours a day. No police uniform can be trusted. The arrival anywhere of an army unit can be prelude to a mass killing and makes a mockery of the American policy of “security transfer”. All intelligence out of Iraq suggests this is no longer a functioning state.”

Rounding up the grim news in Iraq, Juan Cole counts the bodies and reports on the endemic corruption of the American-backed Iraqi government:

“Reuters reports political violence in Iraq‘s unconventional civil war. It lists about 20 persons dead and dozens wounded in bombings and shootings.
AP gives a separate and mostly different list than Reuters of the dead and wounded, mentioning attacks in Balad-Ruz, Fallujah and elsewhere.
Then AFP reports at least 10 assassinations in the southern port city of Basra, which the other wire services didn’t manage to find out about.

The Interior Ministry fired 3,000 men on Tuesday on suspicion that they had been involved in the extra-judicial killings that have plagued Iraq.”

James Baker can say whatever he wants, but having Baker lend cover for backing away from “victory in Iraq” and “stay the course” along with meeting Sean Hannity and other extremist right-wing talk radio hosts at the White House won’t solve George W. Bush’s political problems. Nothing ever will with such a literally atrocious record. November would be as good a time as any
for Bush and Cheney to both resign, or be impeached and removed by Congress if they refuse.

Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton have long colluded with the Bushes on issues from the Iraq war to flag burning. Now they are shilling for torture, Bill on NPR and Hillary in this New York Daily News blog:

“But at yesterday’s Daily News editorial board meeting, it emerged that she’s not actually against torture in all instances, and that her dispute with McCain and Bush is largely procedural.

She was asked about the “ticking time bomb” scenario, in which you’ve captured the terrorist and don’t have time for a normal interrogation, and said that there is a place for what she called “severity,” in a conversation that included mentioning waterboarding, hypothermia, and other techniques commonly described as torture.

“I have said that those are very rare but if they occur there has to be some lawful authority for pursuing that,” she responded. “Again, I think the President has to take responsibilty. There has to be some check and balance, some reporting. I don’t mind if it’s reporting in a top secret context. But that shouldn’t be the tail that wags the dog, that should be the exception to the rule.””

Certainly Bush and Cheney are a great part of the problem but as can be seen from the Clintons the country’s authoritarian and war-mongering trend is from many sources–and many people are small, sometimes unwitting accomplices to this “conservative” ideology of madness that America has been under. As Arthur Silber points out in this republished essay, something has stopped many people from trying to understand the complexities and specifics of the world beyond our shores:

“The U.S., and most of the American media, have been and remain resolutely determined to look at the wrong history. They act as if Iraq‘s own history, including its long, bloody history of ethnic strife (pace Wolfowitz), is entirely irrelevant. It is hardly a mystery why they are then unable to grasp what is right before their eyes. They look at events in Iraq (to the extent they do look at them, which is far from comprehensive as Cockburn makes very clear) through the prism of ideas they have gleaned from other countries’ histories — and the reality of Iraq itself never assumes solid shape before them.
This determined refusal to look at and understand the relevant facts, including the crucially relevant history, is a significant part of the reason why Bush’s repeated mantra that “everyone wants freedom,” and moreover that everyone wants freedom in roughly the same form that we enjoy it, is so hollow and so unconvincing. It was not true in Vietnam, and it is not true in Iraq. Peoples’ attitudes, objectives, alliances and enmities are uniquely shaped by their particular history — not by ours, or by no history at all. And it is the latter that is unavoidably implied by the attitude revealed by Bennet in his article, and by the Bush administration: they seem to believe that “freedom” and “democracy” are abstractions that are plucked by people from the sky overhead — and then applied by everyone in precisely the same manner, regardless of history, geography, culture and every other aspect of their specific lives.
…
[T]his is yet another reason why I maintain, as I explained yesterday, that we should leave immediately, or as close to immediately as we can — and set a time limit of six months at the outside, for example, for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops. Not only are we a significant source of the ongoing violence, but we continue to refuse to learn about the nature of the Iraqis themselves, and what their perspectives and their aims are.”

Glenn Greenwald blogs at Unclaimed Territory about the draconian, unnecessary law on detainees:

“The so-called Military Commissions Act of 2006 (.pdf), signed into law yesterday by President Bush, is replete with radical provisions, but the most dangerous and disturbing is that it vests in the President the power to detain people forever by declaring them an “unlawful enemy combatant,” and they then have no ability to contest the validity of their detention in any tribunal. The President now possesses a defining authoritarian power — to detain and imprison people for life based solely on his say-so, while denying the detainee any opportunity to prove his innocence.”

NPR gives this update on the spike in violence in Iraq:

“The Pentagon confirms the deaths of 10 more American soldiers in Ir
aq in the past 24 hours, raising the death toll for October to 69. The Muslim season of Ramadan has been violent in each of the four years U.S. troops have been in Iraq.

But this year, as American troops get more involved in the struggle for control of Baghdad, they are increasingly caught in a crossfire between Shiite and Sunni militias gunning for one another.”

[photo: Reuters via Yahoo]

[Pictures from the Outer Richmond in San Francisco]

Another, slightly earlier visit to Ocean Beach on 10/17/2006 yielded some new twilight photos of San Francisco’s coast.

I took a few pictures of a dark grey dusk near Cliff House at Ocean Beach.

A ship exits the Bay;

Come back again soon

with much good cargo

I arrived at San Francisco’s Baker Beach a bit after sunset, and I got some pictures of a beautiful dusk.

North Korea tested a nuclear device, they claim, and now the world's
leaders and diplomats are basting in self-righteous rage. Once again
the shadow of the Iraq War is cast–Saddam didn't have any atomic
weapons (many knew that) so he was a plausible target. Now the two
countries named by George W. Bush as co-captains in the "Axis of
Evil," rather than learning the sort of lesson that Bush and Cheney
demanded they learn after watching Bush's "crusade," have decided to
arm themselves to the teeth with doomsday weapons (and many expected
that).
Mocking the Nuclear-non-proliferation treaty the way Bush did in his
dealings with India, refusing to join the International Criminal Court
or the Kyoto Accords, violating and trying to re-write the Geneva
Conventions, these are not helpful gestures to the international
community.
Bush made his bet on the intimidation and fear he expected from the
rest of the world after a brutal and unnecessary occupation of Iraq.
Having declared the United Nations "irrelevant" for not
rubber-stamping his war-mongering and corruption, his alternative
plans for a "uni-polar" world are collapsing by the day.
But what of deterrence? The United States has the military power to
defend its homeland, but these strained soldiers and resources need to
be redeployed away from Iraq. As for attacking the rest of the world,
America is now the one finding itself deterred.

I caught a picture of what looks like a bluebird, who is an occasional visitor to the the top of the power line post outside the window of the apartment that Jessica and I share in the Richmond neighborhood.

From the New York Times:

“In the quest for other worlds beyond the solar system, astronomers keep turning up planetary systems with curiouser and curiouser traits. Yesterday, astronomers who use the Hubble Space Telescope announced that they had done it again, this time locating the fastest moving and most distant ever found.

Among a batch of new planets found by training the Hubble telescope on a small patch of sky far across the galaxy in Sagittarius are as many as five that orbit their home stars in less than a day.

[…]

As potential planets are found in increasing numbers, Dr. Boss said, the odds increase that planets and planetary systems like Earth’s would be found.

Mario Livio, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a member of Dr. Sahu’s team, said, “There are literally billions of planets in our galaxy.””