MMBlog

Desert escape

2010-06-26T17:06:00.001-07:00

By Mike McIlvain
BEATTY, Nevada – Traveling connected highways in a circle from this small Nevada town through Death Valley National Park connected me to a brighter personal understanding of a previously dark time.
Taking advantage of a $300 round trip airfare to Las Vegas in a slight window between semesters enabled me to breathe easy desert air, blissfully lose track of time, win – a little – playing slot machines, and experience Death Valley. All this in a Monday through Friday, late May trip to reconcile with a special place in my youth.
Snow-splashed peaks above and drab olive green desert shrubbery below dot my mind’s eye in lasting images from this brief time-defying escape out west.
I was forced to go by a step-father’s last name for many years, dating back to the ‘60s when living on the Central California coast. That step-father, Bob, enjoyed exploring Southern California deserts in his 4-wheel drive car, and Death Valley National Park was mentioned, but never visited as a family.
As far as I know, Bob never got to Death Valley after we moved back to Texas in ’68, but he continued to drive into Southern California’s deserts alone until he rolled his Bronco over. That accident had lingering health effects and eventually served to cut his life short through a heart attack in 1972. Bob and my mom were married only 10 years, but she made me feel obligated to carry his last name for another quarter of a century, and it took years to finally put all of that in its proper psychological file. Problems with a very troublesome older step-brother painted the Bob-era in sad shades of black, but this trip made the past much easier to live with.
Bob had a habit of buying treasure hunter magazines and leaving them around for others to read, and the other was usually me. Nevada-based imagination-stirring stories of prospectors, bandits, and gunfighters stood out in these magazines with very few pictures long before graphics became a regular sight in printed media. But the writers knew how to gain and keep attention, and they still had mine over 40 years later – attached to vague fantasies of fortunes waiting under out-of-place-looking brown and red rocks. Obscure, silent attractions like the Rhyolite gold and silver mining ghost town on the edge of Death Valley stepped right out of those old magazine pages.
My very affordable pay-as-you-go cell phone failed to pick up a signal out in this sea of desert and mountains – something I came to appreciate, seeing that it seemed to further drop me back into the past. Eight hundred-fifty friendly, waving people live in Beatty where I headquartered for two days and nights in my desert exploration. No standard issue chain grocery store exists there, too – often forcing locals to drive at least 90 minutes into Las Vegas for food. Beatty residents do not have to leave town to gamble with a casino sitting on its northern edge. Bikers, Mexican food, a club of locals frequently wearing western clothing, and a block of downtown bars built like 19th century saloons offer cold beer, bland chili, friendly conversation, and nearby mountain views.
There is plenty to see in a roadway circle slightly west of Beatty under dust-stirring gusty winds.
Rhyolite sits quietly over those surrounding mountains 4 miles west of Beatty, and was an active mining town 100 years ago. Rhyolitesite.com says it was the state’s third largest city at the time of 8,000 in those days. It also claims that 21 movies, documentaries, newsreels, or travelogues have been shot there. Rhyolite could look a little familiar once there, and some sculptures made by mostly Belgian artists stand out in white and rusty brown to give this ghost town a sometimes chilling, but attention-grabbing effect.
Taking a right out of Rhyolite leads directly into Death Valley National Park, and the California state line. Death Valley is home to the lowest point below sea level in the U.S., and remembered by some as the namesake of long gone western TV show – Death Valley Days.
Television helped give Death Valley its image of being a hot, tough, challenging landscape, but that didn’t hold up in a drive through in late May – a breezy mid-70s is not close to the 130, or more, of legend. Only a hint of heat crept into my shirt sleeve on the tail end of a breeze during a roadside photo stop in the soft, light brown and tan sandy shoulder.
The first turn north in Death Valley National Park leads to Scotty’s Castle, which is a host of stories told, and waiting to be retold.
This American castle was built Spanish-style in white stucco under red roof tiles as a winter home by Chicago insurance magnate Albert Johnson in the 1920s. It was officially named Death Valley Ranch, but friend Walter “Death Valley Scotty” Scott publically claimed it as his own, telling others that it was financed through a gold mine hidden under the main house. Johnson never said otherwise, and as word of this desert castle grew it came to be known as Scotty’s Castle. The federal government bought the property years later in 1970, including it in Death Valley with non-National Park Service tour guides wearing clothing appropriate to its heyday in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.
A tour guide said the castle was a film site in some early ‘30s talkies, but the movie room is a show-stopper with its built in player piano made to accompany the silent flicks of the time, too. The castle is based largely on Johnson’s college boy memories of Stanford University. Scotty’s Castle sits in California by only a few miles on Highway 5 North, which leads back into U.S. 95 – the Bonanza Highway. U.S. 95 leads back into Beatty.
Beatty only has one casino, but its slot machines beat their cousins in Las Vegas easily on this trip, yielding a $200 jackpot once, heightening the thrill of victory in this desert exploration. My smarter self scored over the dumber Mike once when knowing when to walk out of the casino when losing started to become a regular occurrence, despite the reverse psychology of the cashier who worked hard to sound like he was on my side. The significance of that was realized a few days later in Las Vegas when I heard another casino employee doing exactly the same thing in one of the bigger establishments on the strip.
But the real victory was personal, completing a trip only spoken of many years ago on the other side of these western Rocky Mountains.
The past might have had me find some way to blame Bob for any of the trip’s few lesser moments, but I think the internal realization of fulfillment after driving that circle means it is time to offer thanks, somehow.

It's Not About The Tapas

2010-04-07T17:43:00.001-07:00

It's Not About the Tapas: A Spanish Adventure on Two Wheels by Polly Evans

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This reads like a brisk ride through a pleasing, scenic country road with nothing but clean air zipping into your nostrils, prompting a smile that won't stop.
It's Not About the Tapas is written by Polly Evans, a former Hong Kong-based British journalist out to regain some physical strength after deadlines, and such added on some flab. You can feel the personal and spiritual victories each kilometer, or word, gives her.
It heled my reading, knowing very well some of the places she peddled through, as well as the Spanish characterics she brought out so well in varying scenes -- be it large city or obscure village. She started in San Sebastian, working down into and through much of Catalonia before including Arcos de la Frontera, Grazelema, Sevilla and many other places that I wish I could visit fairly often.
There is a certain joy of life in Evans' writing, and that, I wish I could capture for myself, too. Tapas is inspiring and escapist. I really enjoyed it -- all the 1,010 miles she peddled, and the side trips, too.

View all my reviews >>

David Brinkley's last report

2009-12-28T15:12:00.000-08:00

Brinkley's Beat: People, Places, and Events That Shaped My Time by David Brinkley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I grew up watching the Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC, so I thought I knew what to expect -- I was very wrong. David Brinkley's observations over the many busy decades in which he lived surprised me all the way through.

I especially liked his places sections, and observations on Vienna, Austria, where a grad school friend now lives. The Viennese sound so laid back that I believe I really have to go there some day. Brinkley's somewhat introspective observations of the American South, and Washington, D.C., and the people associated with all of that made it much better reading, too.

Also, especially helpful, this is a large print edition, and I really appreciate that.

This is a great book for anyone interested in journalism, recent American history, or television news. It is pretty good.

View all my reviews >>

2009-07-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

Hot Rod Hundley: "You Gotta Love It, Baby!" Limited Edition by Hot Rod Hundley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It takes off fast. It is brilliantly edited storytelling that takes off like it is going to rip your hands off. You could read over a weekend, but why let the pure enjoyment slip away?

This should be offered to all those non-reading teens who insist they love the NBA. This could very well make readers out of them all!!!

I enjoyed staying up to 3 a.m. several times to read this one. It was truly enjoyable reading, and the kind of book I hope to find more of. The author really needs to come out with more books. This one really picks up toward the end, too, pushing buttons,sparking memories of NBA great moments, players, seasons, dynasties, and educates on the off-court things that us non-players never see.

I will definitely recommend this one to many friends. Author Tom McEachin was smart to recognize the storytelling ability of Rod Hundley, his place in U.S. basketball history, and capture it all in the former player turned announcer's words.

Finding any error was difficult, but finally, a few extra spaces and tossed out helping words were missing toward the end -- other than that, it is a major hidden sports literary treasure. I think a number of non-basketball fans would find it enjoyable, too.

View all my reviews >>

Annette Olsen-Fazi International Film Festival

2009-05-31T16:40:00.000-07:00

Being in the right time at the right place sometimes means recognizing that that is happening. It happened for me a few steps from the job here at Texas A&M International University, in Laredo, attending nine of the numerous films shown in the festival named for the late Dr. Annette Olsen-Fazi who left us suddenly early this year.

She selected several of the films in the festival which started just a few years ago to help students and others get more French in their ear. She taught French and English.

The wisdom of her selections again helped to show what a tragedy her unexpected departure meant.

The festival was made possible through a grant from Humanities Texas, and I personally appreciate their help: especially on an adjunct's very shallow budget, and because I like good movies.

I saw, and thoroughly recommend, Amelie, Les Choristes, Soñar No Cuesta Nada, Der Untergang, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, Audiencia, Señorita Extraviada, Finding Dawn, De Nadie. Audiencia as TAMIU films lecturer Marcela Moran's own production about Mexican wrestling fans in Laredo.

Some of the movies were documentaries and very powerful. Hopes are to move the festival to April of next year when more students, and viewers, will be around.

Worthy of note

2009-04-28T21:21:00.000-07:00

Texas Christian University is bringing on former Dallas Associated Press Bureau Chief John Lumpkin as its new Journalism school director.

Notice that it is not Dr. John Lumpkin. I am not even sure if he has a master's, but he brings in tons of experience in various positions, including his former Dallas post from which he frequently ventured out into numerous newsrooms around the region. His face is one well known to many current and past Texas journalists.

Obviously, TCU has decided to move quicker toward the future, and all the rapid changes in journalism, spurring well ahead of traditional hirings of scholarly PhDs. Those Posthole Diggers, as some like to call themselves, are OK, but this looks like a wise and timely move on the part of the Horned Frog journalism people and their administration -- as seen from this corner.

Read more at http://www.newsevents.tcu.edu/1412.asp

Golf story

2009-04-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

If playing golf in Texas interests you, then my latest online story might be worth looking up. You will find it at http://www.worldtravelguide.net/feature/127/index/Golf-in-Texas.html

South Texas Writing Project release

2009-01-27T09:33:00.000-08:00

Note: The following is a feature-style press release I wrote for the South Texas Writing Project.

By The South Texas Writing Project
Word play-based sensory stimulation, designed to awaken sleeping creativity within, engulf student writers and writing instructors in each gathering of the South Texas Writing Project.
South Texas Writing Project events aim to stimulate dormant, or fatigued, writing skills through word games and writing exercises. Current STWP events include a fall conference for students and instructors, and gets instructors together in a summer session at Texas A&M International University. The STWP is the local chapter of the National Writing Project.
STWP events are frequently led by national-level writing instruction gurus such as Bruce Ballenger who flew in from Boise, Idaho in October for the fall conference where he guided some 100 students through self-improvement steps before helping around 40 writing instructors see their creative thinking potential through word-building and language use exercises.
Ballenger, an English professor at Boise State, and author of several writing-related books, was impressed by the local students he worked with shortly after arriving.
“I’ll never forget what I witnessed that night. No matter what the writing prompt, 100 mostly Hispanic students enthusiastically picked up their pens and filled blank pages with writing,” Ballenger said by e-mail. “And they wanted to talk about it.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever had a more receptive student audience. These students were hungry to write and talk about writing.”
Ballenger’s lively connection with Laredo-area students didn’t stop there. The stimulation demonstrated by the students left a high water mark in his mind.
“They seemed to appreciate, more quickly than other students I’ve taught, how powerful writing can be as a method of discovery, a way of organizing and even attaching meanings to their experiences,” Ballenger said. “When I showed them the door through expressive writing they seemed excited about going through it. In the last year or so, I’ve traveled to about 30 campuses across the U.S. to talk about writing and teaching writing, but my visit to Laredo was one of the more extraordinary experiences I’ve had.”
Parents and writing educators share hope that one, or more, of their charges might eventually write great novels and achieve literary greatness, but the writing project hasn’t given up on their mentors, either. Writing project leaders also see writing teachers being better at their jobs by working to become better writers, too.
STWP Director Bernice Sanchez-Perez notes the project’s aims are inclusive, seeking to raise the capabilities of the area’s writers, and would-be writers.
“The overall goals of the STWP are to continue to build communities of writers within the college, public schools, and private school communities,” Sanchez-Perez said. “One of the main goals of the STWP is to provide professional development opportunities in order to enhance the teaching of writing. We are seeing larger numbers of elementary teachers wanting to get involved in the STWP.”
Sanchez-Perez added that STWP plans to continue to bring in motivational speakers of Ballenger’s level who will bring in effective strategies and new methods to teach writing.
Ballenger’s second day session with writing instructors from Laredo elementary through university campuses focused on inquiry-based approaches that address TEKS mandates, requiring students to develop a research plan that addresses open-ended research questions. The session included issues of self-improvement perspectives, using much of the same thinking that went into “The Curious Researcher,” one of his several books.
Ballenger and the instructors examined the qualities of a good question, research patterns, extending the open inquiry process, and several points he trusts when seeking information.
“There are no boring topics, only boring questions,” Ballenger said. “Suspend judgment and tolerate ambiguity.
“Questions are like knives. Research writing is wrestling.”
Second day morning and afternoon sessions divided writing instructors between the elementary, middle, and high school levels with instruction focusing on becoming a better writer through reading; multi-author story writing, word choice and sentence fluency; mini-lessons in sentence construction; reading and writing across the curriculum. Powerful photos from the Holocaust added emotion, and the senses to a lesson connecting reading and writing to history, politics, psychology, and life experiences with knowledge gained on the topic.
Several of the lessons involved free writing, in which participants write non-stop for several minutes, using their memory with smell, sight, hearing, and taste.
 Mike McIlvain

The wonders of Cabeza de Vaca

2008-10-29T21:05:00.000-07:00

Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America by Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
A real imagination capturer. This translated version of Relacion by Cyclone Covey, takes any amateur traveler, or narrative fan, deep into what we have come to call the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, but one senses the awe both Spaniards and Native Americans felt in this experience that anyone should read. There is a lot to be learned here.

The magnetism of Cabeza de Vaca's journey, and writing, continue to inspire more research and writing. Historian Andres Resendez recently came out with a new book on de Vaca, and said he found a few new facts in the process. I spoke briefly with him in a booksigning at Texas A&M International University for A Land So Strange, and he told me the new facts were found the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain. Conquistador in Chains is another must read -- about de Vaca in South America -- for anyone curious about what really went on when Europeans invaded the Americas.

View all my reviews.

Perspective revisited

2008-10-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

Assault on Germany: The Battle for Geilenkirchen by Ken Ford

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
The stories of World War II that I grew up with came, largely, from this time in that conflict from my late first step-father, Bob Wagner, a medic in the 84th Infantry Division. I hadn't heard those stories in years -- he passed away in 1972 -- but, Ford's book very closely ran a parallel to what I heard as a boy in California.

Ford's book is more interested in historical account and readability than substance in style, but is worth the read for anyone familiar with that time.

I read it in research of a particular bloodless incident that I heard about long ago -- one in which Scottish bagpipers played all night long, effectively scaring off a larger German unit shrouded behind a nearby fog when it lifted. That incident was not in this book, but Ford brought me closer to it, and aided my insight into the horrors one goes through at that time, and for an instant, took me back to those days in the '60s when Bob thought it was important that I understand why war is so horrible.

Despite how hard it might be to talk about at times.

View all my reviews.

Fumbling handled well at goal line

2008-09-22T16:39:00.000-07:00

Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure, and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago by Kerry Egan

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
It could be much stronger, without all of her religious rants, but some are relevant, too, and she is a chaplain. Still, I like it, in part, because I actually walked a few miles of the Camino de Santiago, or Way of St. James, several years ago when I had a girlfriend up in the province of Navarra, Spain.

It's good narrative-descriptive, aside from the religious parts, and I see it as something of a guide -- to both writing and a desire to walk the whole thing one of these days. The food, water, wine, nightlife, scenery, and photo opportunities along almost all of the trek is awe-inspiring, so when it seems that walking the 500 miles, or so, works for book material for so many other authors -- and it could help shave off a few pounds -- why not?

Egan's ability to close strong upgraded her from a three to four star read from my perspective. Egan carried some tangents too long but, in the end, didn't fumble Fumbling.

View all my reviews.

Bragging on a friend's writing

2008-07-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

Note: I have known Chuck Steward since he hired me to take his place as sports editor of the Alice Echo-News back in 1984, as he moved up to the managing editor's post. I have seen Chuck's writing improve over the years, and I am very glad he shares some of his works with me. I feel blessed, as the following narrative entry will tell you. He took the photo of the seawall, too.

Tales of Brave Ulysses

Tuesday July 22 Hurricane Dolly is still in the Gulf approaching Brownsville.

I arrived at Horace Caldwell Pier in Port Aransas at about 1:45 p.m. The waves were breaking just beyond the "T" at the end of the pier and coming in hard and fast enough to send up big splashes as they rolled through the concrete pilings beneath.

There were a few more surfers here than usual, especially for a Tuesday afternoon. On the beach the sargassum seaweed along the shore stunk like something dead and the sand in this area had a gooey feel as one walked through it. The water, however was very clear with just a little seaweed. There were no breaks near the shore. The first set looked to be about 150 yards out.

As I got into the breaks I noticed the water had a shove from north to south and there were pockets of colder water as I paddled to the second set. It was exhausting paddling my 205 lbs. on a longboard. I had to try and maintain my place in the second set (five to seven feet high) and catch my wind. I was very tired and I hadn't caught a wave yet.

I finally jumped a break of the rolling thunder variety: A slope with white water at the top that gradually rolls down. There was considerable force in the waves as this slow roller took me about 200 yards to near the shore. As I turned to go back out I saw some surfers coming in from the outer breaks beyond the "T." They were catching rides of 500 yards or more. There were times it appeared there were surfers dancing on waves to the front, the left, the right and even behind me. They were everywhere. There were a couple of kite surfers catching the wind and the waves. Their kites looked dangerously close to the pier a couple of times. Also, I saw one surfer hugging the pier a little to close where he had to bail just before he hit a piling. He kicked his board away from the pier before flopping in about a yard from the pier.

The water continued to be inconsistent. There would times when there were long spaces between the waves and other times when there five or six waves within a few yards of each other. There were also swells that came from all angles make what looked like a good wave become flat surface in an instant.

The next wave I caught was a nice clean break, but within seconds after catching it a cross wave cut through my wave at a 45 degree angle and boom! I hit the water butt first in an instant and was tumbling in the sand.

The next wave was probably my best of the day. It was a clean wall about seven feet tall. A north wind had picked up and the waves were lining up clean. As I peeked back I could see this one had my name on it. It was swelling up with a fine curve and slope. I paddled hard for this one. I caught it at the upper lip and dropped in nice and smooth. It broke behind me and I cut toward the north over glassy water with enough momentum I could "ride the line" with considerable speed. I have no idea how long this lasted...time stopped. Sometimes the water is your friend. It is very rare when I have caught a wave like this where it has the speed to shoot you along near the top of the crest just before it breaks. These are moments when you rule the world. Nature has crowned you with sweet grace.

I nearly caught another wall like this when a kid on a short board cut in from below. I pulled back and watched as the kid jumped in. It must have been a strong wave...so fast it looked like he was going to fly like a rocket on this wave. He did. It shot him off and over his board in an instant. He was airborne and flying fast. He came up moments later so I knew he was okay.

I went toward the shore for a breather when two teenage girls approached me and asked if they could try. I launched them both after I told them the usual, "Keep your belly button on the board and your toes at the back." They both enjoyed nice "boogie" rides. While one asked to do it again, the other came back with three more friends. All five girls had nice rides and one of them even stood up for a few seconds. They said they were from San Antonio. I told them they could tell their friends back home they surfed in Port A during a hurricane and have the witnesses to prove it. The parents of one of the girls both thanked me. I thought of my son Casey, at work, and how much more he would have enjoyed letting five teenage "sirens of the sea" experience the thrill of shooting across the water on a surfboard.

When I went to my truck for water I saw a fellow about my age get out, put his board down and look out at the water. He continued to look as I drank my water. After the water break I went back out and caught a few more rides before calling it a day. Two of these rides were "on the line" including one where I zoomed by a couple of girls in chest high water who looked up at me with their jaws dropped. I smiled and shrugged like it was nothing. Actually, I was gassed. Back at my truck, the man who had appeared to get ready to surf had put his board back and left.

When I got back to Rockport I could barely get out of the car. I took a long hot shower before I felt half human again.

You gotta read The Tecate Journals!

2008-07-25T15:16:00.000-07:00

The Tecate Journals: Seventy Days on the Rio Grande by Keith Bowden

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is one helluva book, and one a lot of people elsewhere should read. It flows faster than the river ever did.

I finished the second half of the book's 291 pages all in one day when classes were cancelled due to Hurricane Dolly. It had a habit of leaping back up into my hands: much like a friendly puppy. The difficulties Keith faced on his journey down the Rio Grande weren't always any friendly puppy, but I certainly don't regret giving the book to four people in various parts of the U.S. and Sweden. My mom liked it quite a bit, and I have to back up her claim, and not just because she's my mother.

The dangers one potentially faces along this "natural border" certainly can be a mother, but Keith's journey, and writing, should help draw attention to the river's needs. Easily, conservationists should be marching down to the Rio Grande en mass to clean it up, or have it done so. I hope Al Gore reads this book.

And, let's face it, Tecate should reward Mr. Bowden for all the free advertising they got, and will, from this book. My only next question is -- who's going to play him in the movie?

It's not Into the Wild, but there's potential for more things to spring from The Tecate Journals. Just read it. You'll know what I mean.

I really like this book, and I can say, smiling, "Hey, I know this guy!"

View all my reviews.

The Danish Poet

2008-07-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

Credit the ever-brilliant Solana Larsen for this one. I originally saw and heard this short from You Tube on her blog, but it's worth posting here. It really does make you think -- especially if you are one to travel, as I have whenever I got the chance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTef0HWbW_M

In Good Company

2008-07-08T18:34:00.000-07:00

I recently had the good fortune to be involved in the South Texas Writing Project -- a local wing of the National Writing Project -- here at Texas A&M International University in Laredo.

The amount of material, and its depth -- aimed at teaching instructors how to teach writing -- is hard to fathom: even a little over a week after its four weeks concluded. Lesson-after-lesson whizzed before our small group in Pellegrino Hall Room 203 with breakfast provided by STWP instructors and fellows. I just tried to be a good fellow, and it was good to be a fellow.

Several of our writing projects were enhanced through revision, feedback, and more feedback. Feedback is hard to get, too.

After being a fellow, I have to advocate participating in NWP actions. We were lucky to have been directed by Dr. Ellen Barker and Dora Flores. Barker will soon be teaching at Nicholls State University, but Flores, who teaches at Laredo Community College, remains. Dr., or soon to be, Bernice Sanchez-Perez, of TAMIU, will become the new on-site director for the STWP.

Learn more about the NWP online at http://www.nwp.org/

A university blog

2008-05-20T18:31:00.001-07:00

If I can, I would like to recommend taking a look at the blog Dr. Manuel Flores has put up at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. It looks quite nice, and rather professional. It is an example of what can be done with a blog in college journalism.

City University in London has some, too, mostly run by journalism professors, and they are good reads as well, but for now, if you need to see a good college-type blog, take a look at this one:

http://javelinajournalism.blogspot.com/2008/04/tamuk-students-compete-in-aaf-national.html

To Search Committees: Modernize

2008-04-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

Brandon Withrow wrote a very insightful, and relevant, story for the online Chronicle of Higher Education, which deserves serious consideration by anyone considering this, or any other candidate for a faculty position somewhere. Read the blog first, don't be so narrow minded that an applicant simply having a blog is an immediate kiss of death.

My blog, which I ignore too much, is basically an online clip file. Not much more. If I was going to get political I would start a separate blog. I am a centrist, anyway.

Here are a few excerpts from Withrow's article, and a link. Please read.

To the senior professors and members of search committees, I offer three points that are crucial to understanding the next generation of scholars:

Be realistic -- when a search committee sees that a candidate has a blog or a space online anywhere, it should not be a surprise.

Be relevant -- embracing technology connects you not only to your students, but also to a world of better research through time-saving and exhaustive online databases.

Be reasonable -- as scholars, we are all constantly pursuing new ideas, and that the opinions you read on a candidate's blog may not be his or her final position on an issue.

Our ability to work, live, and remain assets to our institutions requires all of us -- students, candidates, and senior scholars -- to embrace the inevitable. Blogging, then, will remain a part of my life. See you at my (Google) site meter.

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/04/2008041501c/careers.html

Like Withrow, I have also signed up for Google alerts.

Digital fatigue

2008-01-09T17:10:00.000-08:00

Note -- Just try and keep up with all the changes and news about the digital world. I dare you. Just try to.
I took a quick look in early December of 2007 and was impressed with all the activity labeled "digital."

By Mike McIlvain

Digital researchers could find themselves feeling much like reporters, detectives and occasional diplomats all rolled into one with rapid-fire developments in this relatively new science blazing through news media skies and the cyber world like lightning bolts in an intense electrical storm.
More ways to see, read and hear information are enhancing digital storytelling and political engagement through traditional and non-traditional means probably well beyond the imagination of any of our grandparents.
San Diego, California blogger Jim Pinto might have coined it best, using a June 2000 story published in Controls Intelligence and Plant Systems Report:
“In the last century, new products took 3 years to develop. In the Internet age Time is critical and clearly a competitive weapon. With accelerating technology, some products are obsolete within months. Move fast, or become history.”
America’s Cable News Network’s ongoing YouTube Debates are one of many new innovative wrinkles involving both digital media and politics. Public-based questions from digitally-pictured citizens asking questions almost directly to the presidential candidates, and the viewing public simultaneously are educating US observers and bringing the US public closer to its next eventual president in virtual face-to-face meetings. Thanks to YouTube, numerous blogs and digital media, political journalism does not belong exclusively to journalists, anymore.
Potential questions are screened by CNN, allowing the world to see and hear the more clearly-stated, better understood questions while also noting facial expressions, age, and tone of the various questioners from YouTube. This digitally-enhanced advancement gives the viewing public perspectives it never had in more traditional presidential debates limited to questions from familiar reporters usually either entrenched in their capital city environments or weary of the campaign trail.
Similarly, the campaign to map out, understand and help link digital forces together could leave Leeds digital hunter gatherers a bit weary at some stopping point later on, or when it is necessary to hand the computer mouse and office keys over to new researchers. The trail seems to be warming up by the minute now and adrenaline flow should certainly make a three year research campaign go very fast.
Digital researchers anywhere are likely to be on the telephone or in longer and more frequent e-mail exchanges than they might have been only a few years ago. Technicians and executives in the various related businesses and institutions could be asking as many questions as they might be receiving.
People continue to show a strong desire for information – even if there appears to be an overload of available news. British newspapers are noting record jumps in online attention.
A Nov. 22, 2007 story by Oliver Luft on Journalism.co.uk reports that “the websites of the Guardian, Mail and Telegraph all received record traffic in October, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic.”
Luft’s story says the Mail saw the number of users on its site leap nearly 16 per cent from 13,531,174 from 11,689,985 in September.
An online seminar advertisement speaks to the exponential global growth of the Internet and what could happen as result.
“A disconnect looms between traditional internet architecture and consumer demand as the Internet struggles to keep up with increasing multimedia and mobile internet-based traffic. As video downloads, telephone traffic and other burdens multiply, the Internet’s basic technology faces collapse unless several key actions are taken soon,” reads the advert for a journalists’ gathering in early December 2007 in San Diego, California.
The Foundation for American Communications tele-seminar was entitled, “The Internet Overwhelmed: Old Technology, YouTube and Other Stresses,” which might not surprise anyone who has stopped during their busy online day anywhere to read about the worldwide web, but the seminar series title might raise an eyebrow in wider circles – “The Aging Internet: Confusions, Problems and Fixes.”
Thinking of the Internet in terms of sprouting gray hair and seeing the doctor more frequently is hardly the material of daily public conversation.
For millions, the Internet is a take-it-for-granted everyday tool, only a concern when a technician has to be called in to kill a disruptive virus or fix an ailing server, but digital services are still something of a class-system matter for many more millions yet to get their first e-mail account and hesitating when considering the best and safest password.
London-based Opendemocracy.com contributor James Crabtree wrote about his vision of a public e-democracy in a June 12, 2007 story.
“It should be connecting ordinary people with other ordinary people. And there should be applications that help these people to help each other. A programme supporting civic hacking can do this,” he wrote. “This should become the ethic of e-democracy: mutual-aid and self-help among citizens, helping to overcome civic problems. It would encourage a market in application development. It would encourage self-reliance, or community-reliance, rather than reliance on the state.”
Crabtree also advocated the support of city governments in establishing such systems.
Internet cafes do not exist everywhere and that pound, dollar or rupee necessary for 30 minutes access can mean an entire meal in some cases.
“Such a system would be about helping people to help themselves. It would create electronic spaces in which the communicative power of the internet can be used to help citizens help each other overcome life’s challenges. Most importantly, by making useful applications, it would help make participatory democracy seem useful too,” Crabtree said in summary. “Bottom line: it is a political project. It needs backers. Any champion of e-democracy should take up the fight.”
Crabtree’s Opendemocracy.com colleague Becky Hogge credits the UK’s MySociety.org for being the closest to meeting a public’s political communication needs.
She said she doubts that she will ever tire of promoting their efforts in a April 23, 2007 entry.
“Their projects include WriteToThem.com, which puts people in touch with their elected representatives in two clicks of a mouse, and TheyWorkForYou.com, an accessible version of the parliamentary record which (among other things) emails subscribers each time their parliamentary representative speaks in the House of Commons,” Hogge wrote.
Hogge adds that what makes the MySociety sites successful is that it “positively exploits the best features of the new communications environment.”
Hogge also believes that MySociety’s simple design is public-friendly, and that it does not seek to deliver any particular message.
“Information that sheds light on the political process is a good thing,” her story said.
Digital pleasures and discomforts are still limited to the wealthier people of the world who have the money, or work for those who do, however. The digital world has advanced considerably since much more simple systems and initial office instruction touched many some 25 years ago, but it remains aloft from the masses.
It does not require much imagination to figure that office-hungry politicians would jump at the chance to have their speechwriters’ words manipulate those less educated into voting for them, too.
Warfare has often been a key instigator of invention and it is conceivable that political party warfare could enhance development into finding a way for people lacking computer access at home to go online at bus stops, street corners and shopping places for a synopsis on a political issue or short biography of a candidate.
Toronto Globe and Mail online journalist Mathew Ingram agrees that politicians would and have started to pander to digital media, much as they started to for television when that became a popular media, but he sees plenty of good and bad in this matter and possible growth area.
“I think the potential benefit for the political sphere is that the Web in all of its many forms -- blogs, wikis, discussion forums and so on -- allows many more people to express themselves and their opinions, and theoretically allows groups to form around an issue and make themselves heard where they might not have before” he said in an e-mail. “Of course, not everyone has the ability to take part in those forums -- but the number that do is growing all the time, and the attention that is being paid to those who are online seems to be increasing as well.
“I think on balance that is a positive thing for the political arena as a whole, even if there are downsides -- such as the tendency for politicians to pander.”
Veteran London journalist George Jones noticed much the same in a Dec. 3, 2007 online article on The Independent website.
“They recognize that there is an audience out there. I think online is bringing in a new audience,” Jones was quoted as saying. “People of my generation are visitors to the digital age. Anybody who has got children under 20 knows they are citizens of the digital age. There is a generation coming that expects to get their information digitally”.
Unfortunately, on the political screen, many candidates have continued to simply transfer the same old family and university days photos and stories to their websites, much as they ran in print flyers and on television in previous decades, leaving the public little reason to raise an eyebrow in awareness.
Catchy originality is best in an audience-hungry media, but researchers’ uploaded findings of previously obscure creations could help others copy and refine noteworthy concepts, however.
New York Newsday.com reporter Melissa Mansfield wrote on Dec. 6, 2007 about a website which allows New York state residents to track its government with a fairly liberal dose of transparency. Website clickers can see a bill, who lobbied for it and who donated to its sponsors campaign.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said that the sunlightny.com site is an effort to alleviate the public’s cynicism about state government that he encountered while campaigning last year.
“Government by definition is only as good as the trust that citizens place in it,” Mansfield quotes Cuomo. “The more we can expose, the more we can restore trust, the better.”
Sunlightny.com visitors get some inside information, previously reserved for investigative, or enterprise, reporters. Users can browse through information by elected official, legislation and lobbyist.
“Visitors also can search through campaign finance disclosures, lobbying lists, corporations, charities and state contracts, at the same time,” the story said.
While there might be a few bright signs for politics and the Internet in some places it is not a pretty picture in some international matters.
Yahoo has come under recent fire in the West for cooperating with the Chinese government in cases that resulted in the jailing of some of its users. A June 12, 2007 BBC online story said, “Human Rights Watch, a New York based campaign group, accused Yahoo, Google and Microsoft for ‘carrying out censorship for the Chinese government.’”
The same story said Yahoo says it must comply with local laws, and that whole websites - including media sources - are eliminated from Yahoo and Google in China.
Yahoo shareholders in June of this year rejected proposals overwhelmingly to stop censoring its Chinese customers and support human rights.
Amnesty International said in an Iain Thomson, vnunet.com, story on 14 June that it was bitterly disappointed and intends to monitor the situation and keep the pressure on Yahoo.
YouTube has reaped plenty of attention through its hand in US presidential debates, but appears to be in the middle of some serious international politics, too.
Internet news gatherer Politicsonline.com carries a Dec. 3, 2007 story by Esra’a, of Bahrain, writing for website Menassat about injustices in and around the Middle East involving YouTube.
Esra’a says is a vital source for videos that reveal human rights abuses and police brutality in restricted countries like Egypt, and many activists were comforted in the knowledge that new technology is helping them increase awareness about injustices.
Esra’a wrote of anti-torture activist and Egyptian blogger, Wael Abbas, whose YouTube account was disabled after revealing some previously unknown acts of brutality.
“Last week, its staff suspended Abbas’ YouTube account for several days, causing the deletion of dozens of videos that reveal torture taking place in Egyptian prisons. To YouTube’s credit, Abbas’ account was restored only days after its suspension, likely due to public concerns and pressure, but with all of the videos removed”, Esra’a wrote.
Esra’a noted that YouTube is owned by Google Inc.
“It’s therefore safe to assume that both sites maintain a similar philosophy,” Esra’a said.
The faces of the Internet are many and vary considerably, making the job of its researchers a challenge, an education, and a sheer satisfying delight.

Keeping the river grand

2007-07-26T19:11:00.001-07:00

If we don't watch out, there might not be a Rio Grande to be so concerned about. It could dry up, or be stolen? There is such a crazy idea out there -- bouncing off the wall -- pardon the pun.

Bouncing off the future water shortage wall

2007-07-26T19:00:00.000-07:00

Note: I hope anyone reading this would only take it as a tongue-in-cheek-style look at a growing problem. Don't try this at home!

By MIKE McILVAIN

We would have to make it look good.
Lip-sealed, very quiet, well-coordinated, neatly planned engineering would wash away Laredo’s second water source issue.
More water in the Rio Grande, the city’s first – and still only – source would make the issue mute in an overnight commando-type raid on the Colorado and Nueces rivers at their southernmost bends to link them as one into essentially a new river, flowing into the Rio Grande somewhere north of Del Rio. Sending the water in that least populated way looks like it would skirt much of the attention that a direct flow to Laredo would cause and avoid angry pointing fingers and screams from Corpus Christi and cities along the former course of the Colorado and Nueces between the San Antonio-area and coastal plains.
Egypt’s great Nile River used to flow through what is now North Africa’s famous, storied, very hot Sahara Desert, but – according to scientists on the National Geographic Channel and all over the Web – it changed its course because of natural and atmospheric reasons. That overnight rivers-changing raid, quietly rechanneling them short of any big cities over ranches and farms would have to be coordinated within 24 hours of some great earthquake, tsunami, or other natural disaster that could serve as the blame, but it can be done.
Those sweeping Nile changes have been linked to natural events as far away as Iceland – well up in the North Atlantic – so having some convincing meteorologists, scientists and other media-quoted experts on our side and ready is essential, too.
“It was just a natural event,” they could collectively say, smiling and shrugging their shoulders. “It is an act of nature.”
And naturally, local elected officials would have to be brought into the inner-circle of those saying, “Wow. We got lucky didn’t we? Perhaps we should share some of our water with those who lost theirs?”
Some water would be lost to aquifers and local water companies between those two suddenly engineered turns south with the Colorado entering the Nueces shortly before it turns abruptly south eventually joining the Rio Grande – so very innocently north of Laredo – and some livestock would be endangered and a handful of homes would be effected. Another crew of specially prepared engineers and strong-armed manual laborers would have to be ready to escort that first rush of water south to avoid any dangerous flash floods, but that would figure into the costs – well worth it to have a viable, long-term water source.
Before you call here to find out where to sign up as a river reroute volunteer, please keep in mind that this all written in fun – as of June 2007 – but, if water source planning doesn’t find vastly visible results by June 2017 there might not be any fun to it.
Much like the current problems caused by shortages and weakened access to oil sources, people seem geared toward intense, possibly bloody short-term solutions, and too many learned voices have repeated said our most important coming battles would be over water.
Details and politics around whether oil is replaced by synthetics, or water shortages are relieved through oceanic desalination, or discoveries finding water from grass and shrub cuttings isn’t near as important as answering these needs. It’s time for effective long-term thinking and resolution – as soon as possible.
Or do we need to have that first clandestine river-rerouting meeting? That project reads like fiction, or a bad TV movie now, but it won’t in a few years.

Border fence battle knows many faces

2007-07-26T18:56:00.000-07:00

Note: You can also read a story very similar to this in the July 2007 edition of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas and more online at www.laredosnews.com.

By MIKE McILVAIN

Border fence concerns to spark political blasts from pro- and anti-barrier factions, walling out attention on the immediately affected Rio Grande ecology.
Disagreement over the fence’s need and implementation has many eyes and ears with fewer and fewer voices remaining silent.
Washington, D.C.-based ecological organizations Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biodiversity both fear the government project will visibly upset the Texas-Mexico border’s fragile ecosystems.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters, including CNN -- which carried his comments live, that South Texas ranchers and mayors don’t want the fence, but they’re going to get it anyway. Congressman Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, doubts that Chertoff meant anything bad by his remarks, but the June 28 defeat of the immigration bill in the Senate cut off any immediate chance to halt, or alter construction of the Secure Border Initiative, which is scheduled to include walling intended to stop and slow vehicles and people where sensor towers are not seen as sufficient.
Silver City, N.M.-based Michael Robinson – a spokesman and field representative for Biodiversity – believes there are better ways to protect the border and that a 10 foot fence would only serve to stop wildlife – not humans.
Robinson said his organization hasn’t hired legal help to stop the government, but is monitoring the situation. Robinson added that taking legal action is tougher in this case because of strong powers handed Chertoff by the White House, which allow him to proceed with very little, if any, interference from environmental concerns, or laws.
“We are very specifically concerned about the ocelot,” Robinson said by telephone, describing the area around the Rio Grande as a biodiversity wonderland. “To separate the ocelot population would be catastrophic.
“The ocelot in the north will be marooned in its breeding and that doesn’t help any animals. There are a lot of birds, but we see so much and think that animals are plentiful and that they will have no trouble getting through, but we will see.”
Robinson said Biodiversity is also monitoring the rare Mexican long-tailed bat, which is more common to the Rio Grande Valley. Robinson said a lot of animals use the stars to navigate, so there remains a great deal of the unknown because details about the border fence are unknown. Robinson said Biodiversity doesn’t know if Boeing’s government Secure Border Initiative Network (SBINet) will use large bright lights, what effects the various radio and electronic signals and waves will have on borderland wildlife.
Noah Kahn, speaking for the Defenders of Wildlife from Washington, D.C., hopes all concerned will see the need for common sense.
Kahn believes local DHS and Border Patrol people should have the authority to decide whether they need any physical barriers, designed to stop vehicles and slow down pedestrians, but Washington, D.C. has ordered 700 miles of the solid two-layered fence be constructed, denying local foresight and knowledge.
Cuellar credits the language of that law to the previous Republican majority in Congress, which also specified where along the Texas border the physical barriers would be placed. Cuellar recently battled for and gained government assurance that local input must be received, despite efforts in the capital to kick it aside.
Cuellar also believes more flexibility will work into the project.
Kahn is also concerned about the ocelot, but believes more emotion might still explode from the Rio Grande Valley where cities have profited from their river land-based environments through eco-tourism.
Kahn said ocelots and jaguarundi both swim the river to mate and his organization believes a fence would ruin the environment.
Kahn noted that many come to see the river’s unique bird species, but South Texas eco-tourism is growing.
“There’s an increasing array of people coming from all over the world,” Kahn said. “They eat at the local restaurants, buy souvenirs, stay in motels.
“Texas Parks and Wildlife spent a lot of money on Bentsen State Park. The cities of McAllen, Mission and Brownsville have all spent money on their environments -- Weslaco, too. It has become an international destination and the wall is a direct threat to those communities.”
DHS spokesman Brad Benson, in the Border Protection division said, generally, physical barriers designed to stop vehicle traffic and slow down pedestrians will be in urban areas while the electronic-based virtual fence will cover the rural Rio Grande.
A tentative map, made in March, from Benson’s Washington, D.C. office shows concentrations of physical barriers around Laredo, San Ygnacio, El Paso, Presidio in the Big Bend National Park-area, and southward in the Rio Grande Valley from Roma to Brownsville.
DHS is aiming its SBINet plans on Project 28, which is 28 miles of virtual fence in the Arizona desert where nine sensor towers are spread out to assist a command center and mobile Border Patrol agents.
Project 28 experienced some delays, postponing an expected June 13 start, but Cuellar says he has been told it should be up and running soon and he and the media should get a look sometime in the near future.
Benson said BP hopes to use the new system to intercept them before they can cut out illegal aliens’ abilities to blend into populated environments. The government also knows that pedestrian barriers don’t stop people, but they can slow them down long enough to allow BP vehicles to catch them. Benson noted that vehicular barriers would likely be found where smugglers could simply drive across the river – much as they might near Presidio.
Benson believes the urban use of physical barriers will take quite a bit away from the fear of it destroying Rio Grande wildlife.
Frequent Rio Grande traveler, author and journalist Nat Stone believes anyone concerned about the river’s ecology and how barriers can affect a city should look to El Paso.
“You can walk across it,” El Paso native and Laredo attorney Forrest Cooke said. “Through most of town it’s a concrete channel.”
Stone noted numerous walls and fences down through history that didn’t work to completely keep people in, or out, but the numerous obstructions already in El Paso intended to stop, or reroute dashing illegal aliens don’t do much for the quality of life.
Stone and Cooke both noted the effect fences and treaties with Mexico have had on El Paso’s appearances and water flow, which helped lead to severe flooding problems in recent months.
“It’s its own case study of what building a fence looks like. It looks like a police state,” Stone said from his home in New Mexico. “There’s no such thing as fishing at the river. It looks like an apartheid state.”
Stone sees little convincing reason for the fence. He believes that the U.S. could be dodging a case of national bigotry by not addressing plans to fence the Canadian border, too. He noted the military industrial complex’s appearance in the project – Boeing has been a major military contractor for decades.
“The stock market seems to be doing well, so it smacks of race,” Stone said of the overall fence project.
Stone traveled the river in phases from its headwaters in the Rockies to its frequently lifeless mouth at the Gulf of Mexico. He said he plans to write a book about the river and is putting together a documentary. Stone is author of “On The Water: A circumnavigation of the eastern United States.”
Stone had to load his kayak on a truck in several parts of the river because it isn’t flowing much south of El Paso – most notably as far as 80 miles south at the site of the Ft. Quitman ghost town.
Stone sees a shallow current of conviction on the part of several pro-barrier voices and believes more people in Washington would understand the border better if they spoke Spanish.
“The political situation makes it hard for some to believe that it’s a beautiful river,” Stone said.
Stone said the Rio Grande, or Rio Bravo as it’s called on the south bank, is a working river for many Mexicans and saw much more life on that side in his journey.
“With a few exceptions, in some 1,200 miles I saw less than 20 people on the Texas side. There used to be a much better Texan presence,” he said. “As long as drug laws are in place, we’ll have this need to control the border.”
Stone believes more information should be available and forthcoming on any ulterior motives for the fence. Someone might be getting rich off this project.
“There is a huge amount of money involved. We should follow the money trail,” Stone said.
Laredo-area rancher Joe Hein agrees with Stone, whom he’s never met, that more information would be seriously helpful.
“I think they are trying to take into account what local people want and maybe that’s why they are dragging their heels,” Hein, who does not favor the fence, said. “There are a lot of people like myself with questions, or they not telling us, and maybe we’d agree and go along with them, but they’re not telling.”
Hein believes whatever detailed information might be lacking public scrutiny could serve to empower citizens to make good, solid decisions.
Hein compares his concerns over the fence situation to a personal observation that the Bush administration made a serious mistake by rushing into the Iraq War – not stopping to properly analyze the situation.
Hein sees the fence as something that could lead to some of the very same dangers it is intended to stop, too.
“It could be a false sense of security and that could be very bad,” he said. “I think we really need to be informed, but if it’s just politics and whoever’s getting it gets a lot of money, and that would be wrong and be making the same mistake again.”
Foreign Policy In Focus online columnist Frida Berrigan is one of those who will be watching.
“In Iraq, military contractors wasted billions of dollars of reconstruction aid. Boeing, meanwhile, is no stranger to corruption scandals: its chief financial officer went to jail in 2005 for wrongdoing in securing Pentagon contracts. To put military contractors, particularly Boeing, in charge of building SBI is a recipe for disaster,” she wrote in an April 12 story. “The issue of militarizing the border goes beyond questions of accountability. In order to craft truly effective, humane and ‘comprehensive’ immigration reform, the president is going to have to do a lot more than show up in his shirtsleeves once in a while. He has to learn that the border is not a war zone, Mexicans are not combatants, and military contractors are not the solution.”
Further research doesn’t paint a better picture, either for South Texas.
Dallas-Fort Worth CBS affiliate KTVT reported on its Web site in an Associated Press story headlined “Border Fence To Be Built On Wildlife Refuges” that “The U.S. Border Patrol informed officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that refuges in Starr, Hidalgo, and Cameron counties are on the fast track for the fence because they are on federally-owned lands.”
Valley conservationist and Rio Grande Delta Audubon Society officer Lee Zieger believes that big government doesn’t always learn from the past, either.
“Back in the 40s here we kept a gun for fear of banditos, but that didn’t happen, and now, too,” Zieger said by phone. “Drugs go through here and without the drug war we wouldn’t have no problem. We just not have won it. “
Local bank president Dennis Nixon said in a recent position paper that, generally, all law enforcement-anchored border sealings fail, but someone, or some thing, needs to wake up the government to the lingering inequality, which threatens more than the Rio Grande ecology.
Nixon noted that the need for labor – addressed, but lost for now through the guest worker program in the failed immigration bill in the Senate -- is a key economic factor in all of the U.S., and the situation shows signs of crisis, but the government is showing a very bad side by its attention on the southern border.
“Congress is so focused on the immigration problem on the southern border they are ignoring the gaping holes on the northern border that pose the largest security threat to this country since 9/11. The fact is Mexicans and Canadians are not treated equally and neither are their borders. Not from an immigration standpoint, nor a security standpoint,” Nixon wrote. “To give you more perspective on the disparity of border enforcement, there are 1,000 border patrol agents that guard the 4,000 mile Canadian border. Compare that to the 10,000 agents that guard the 2,000 mile Mexican border. If this truly is about terrorism and security, then why aren’t we treating both borders equally?”
Both of Texas’ Republican senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn voted against the immigration bill, which failed, with 46 for and 53 against.
Hutchison, a former television reporter, responded to LareDOS’ question, noting the environment while squeezing in other concerns, too.
“I believe our natural heritage is irreplaceable and should be preserved for the enjoyment and education of future generations. However, we must seek a balance between maintaining the integrity of our natural resources and encouraging economic growth, which will shape America's future,” Hutchinson said by e-mail. “I am convinced of the need for closer scrutiny of environmental regulations and of the imperative for legislation, which will allow businesses across this country to flourish. These are mutually achievable goals, and they are the principles with which I will judge any legislation concerning the environment.”
There are many minds to please in the fence issue, but one environment.

Flowers for your border woes

2007-07-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

Note: You can read almost an exact copy of this story in July's LareDOS in Laredo, Texas, USA, or catch it, and a lot more, online at www.laredosnews.com.

By MIKE McILVAIN

If your border fence misery needs company there’s now a place to look and something to look for – flower pots.
Flower pots could be used in the tight knit community formed by Derby Line, Vermont and Stansted, Quebec, Canada. Sure, fences are being discussed, too, but they’re already old as far as talk down here goes.
Those starch-shirt and always-in-a-suit guys from Washington, D.C. and Ottawa, Canada are conspiring through their surrogates to split the intertwined, intermarried, and interesting conjoined towns of Derby Line and Stansted, Quebec.
There is no river there to offer any kind of natural separation and some people are not sure exactly which country they technically live in. They even have an international boundary line running through their shared library and opera house.
This situation could be more emotional than the separations along the U.S.-Mexican border, but we won’t know if we don’t keep an eye on them, too.
“This border has a long history of neighborliness, peace, and calm. The community is an example of the way that international relations should be,” writes Rosemarie Jackowski in an online editorial in the MWC news. “It is also an example of the way family relations should be. No one cared that Aunt Jenny’s is across an international border, which up until now has been just an invisible line in the snow.”
Scenesofvermont.com said the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee considered a 3,000-mile long wall for the Canadian border, but that idea was dropped.
“It’s clear to me that those who want to build an enormously costly barrier across it haven’t a clue about the character, the history and the day-to-day commercial importance of the northern border,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, said. “It’s best to stop this foolish idea before the government starts shoveling taxpayers’ dollars at it.”
Sound familiar?
CTV.ca said local officials have narrowed their problem down to three side streets used as shortcuts by the locals. Law officers from both countries met with about 100 from both sides in the shared library and opera hall in late June, noting a heavy increase in illegal crossings through the little joined community.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Gregory Bishop said police made eight interceptions in 2005 involving 27 people, jumping to 15 interceptions with 44 people last year. So far this year, 10 interceptions with 32 people have been documented.
It was also Bishop who suggested placing large planters with flowers on the road to block vehicular access on those three streets used by smugglers.
Jackowski says the flower pot plan sounds too much like the duct tape plan of a few years ago when it was suggested that the tape and plastic could seal windows in case of attack.
“To old timers this makes about as much sense as the ‘duck and cover’ days when hiding under a desk was supposed to prevent injuries from an atomic bomb attack,” she wrote.
Maybe we could answer the northern border’s flower pot idea by simply gluing together that riverside carrizo the Border Patrol likes to cut down and moving it to low places where they might actually want a barrier – after painting flowers and happy faces on it?

But pesos would be worse

2007-07-13T16:05:00.000-07:00

It looks so much like an old Mexican village, but this one is on the grounds of Tabernas, Spain’s Fort Bravo, Texas Hollywood Western movies set and you will need Euros to see it. A fistful of dollars won’t do you any good. I know. I tried.

A Fistful of Dollars won't go very far anymore

2007-07-13T16:00:00.000-07:00

Note: Almost this same story appears in the July 2007 edition of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas. Read more online at www.laredosnews.com.

BY MIKE McILVAIN

ALMERIA, Spain – A fistful of dollars used to be a beautiful sight, but that big load of cash won’t make anyone smile in some places.
A trip to Spain after an absence of five years taught me my money isn’t good enough, anymore.
I got bushwhacked, pistol-whipped by the Euro and could have been hung, learning the stark reality and depth of today’s weaker American dollar, traveling to the movie sites which gave us Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More.
Any idea of taking a fistful of dollars or spending a few more there needs serious rethinking these days. Things have changed dramatically since some 35 and 40 years ago when those movies were made.
Get dollars out of your mind and don’t bother putting much in your pocket if going to Europe.
The old reliable, once strong, and mighty dollar has become an almost useless wimp in exchange and acceptance here where the Euro replaced the peseta five years ago and dwarfed the dollar ever since. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that the newfound situation puts travelers here on the American Plan, which is great for losing weight and we have all heard and read how this fat country needs to slim down for health’s sake. Spain, with its old tapas tradition has bar, or bar/restaurant customers eating usually main course and side items in a dish-for-dish fashion, taking the eater right up to feeling filled.
No more food is usually needed, or desired when you have to watch every Euro, too. No one wants to look at dollars in Spain, anyway.
I didn’t want to look at dollars, either, after coming to realize that I was carrying around a large amount of unwanted, seemingly useless money, losing an entire day and part of the next one in the discovery process between tiny Tabernas where only three banks can be found and numerous outlets some 20 miles away in the provincial capital of Almeria, down south on the Costa del Sol.
I had avoided Costa del Sol in all 11 previous trips to Spain, fearing it would be too expensive. It wasn’t – at worst, comparing slightly to Seattle-type prices for some items, but it was very educational.
It’s a good thing I exchanged for several hundred Euros at the bank in Laredo – now owned by Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria – before flying out. Staying in some nice hotels in Mojacar Playa gave me beautiful sunrises, new faces, and familiarization with the area’s motorcycle racetrack, but served to shield me from the horror of trying to exchange the U.S. dollar. Tabernas, separated by a little bit of highway and dusty roads from the western sets of Mini-Hollywood, Western Leone and Fort Bravo, Texas Hollywood, was waiting for me.
Without trying to slip into a western frame of mind, I discovered a bit before high noon on a Thursday that I was down to some 17 Euros and knew that wouldn’t take me through the weekend and the banks close at 2 p.m.
Unicaja seemed to want to exchange money, but showed me that their computer wasn’t accessing their company’s exchange page. The very busy two-person crew at Banco de Valencia started to process my request, but the cashier suddenly – on orders from the officer – tore up a machine copy of my passport inside page, telling me no American dollars are accepted. The nervous young man cashier at Cajamar told me they couldn’t exchange money because I didn’t have an account there.
Hey, I wasn’t unshaven, wearing a serape, straight-brimmed hat or smoking a short cigar like Clint might have just down the road several years ago, but I was beginning to look at banks with a different face.
Seriously alarmed after hearing three different stories, denying me a usually easy process in past years in smaller towns in Spain’s northern provinces, it was time to take given advice and grab a cab for Almeria.
No one at the airport there was exchanging money, but there was a cash machine – a sign of things to come – as half of the Jimenez taxi company with her husband, Sra. Jimenez, suggested trying various banks in Almeria, and plenty could be found close together.
Banco de Andalucia at the bus station told me they would exchange U.S. dollars, but not 100s. Unfortunately, what I had of some smaller bills was back in my room in Tabernas, so we zipped from bank to bank -- skipping the three Almeria affiliates of those already tried in Tabernas -- and hopes were high entering the BBVA office, but telling the apologetic cashier that I was with BBVA in the U.S. only prompted more shoulder shrugging and a suggestion that I try a travel agency near the port where the ferry boats disembark.
A couple of port offices and a policeman -- with Sra. Jimenez stepping in to ask more questions, led us to that sought after travel agency office near the port main gate – at the instant they closed their door for siesta.
Exhausted, quiet and in disbelief as we headed back toward Tabernas, a moment of mental clarity pushed past my elevated blood pressure, telling me to catch the next day’s 9 a.m. bus to Almeria, grab a cab for that same travel agency, exchange $200 and return on the 11 a.m. bus back to Tabernas. On that same Thursday evening I took a chance on my VISA debit card in the Unicaja cash machine in Tabernas and it worked for 30 euros. The debit card continued to be the main lifeline throughout the rest of the trip, yanking out bigger amounts as the need for cash grew.
The owner and his wife at the hotel I stayed in a few days later in Mojacar Pueblo didn’t like looking at either of my credit cards, frowning before politely asking if I had cash for a lamb supper, or cordero, and eventually for the room.
Personal vacation preferences often have me taking to the back roads, small towns and off the beaten trail for more quiet and more rest than the big cities offer. A helpful regional bank officer for Banco de Valencia, sitting next to me and our mutual acquaintance Tony in Tabernas’ Gran Café, explained that it is a loss nowadays for banks to exchange U.S. dollars unless there are many others there exchanging the same currency and this is not the case in much of Spain with American tourists usually sticking to the big cities. The banker told me that if I want to travel nowadays that I have to go with plastic – as he showed me four credit cards of his own.
That Friday’s quick trip to Almeria got me cash for the $200 before visiting Western movie sites around Tabernas and ruins of the town’s old Arab Castle, which millions have seen but few recognize. Tabernas’ Castillo Arabe had a modern moment in the sun when acting as a backdrop for Patton near Kasserine Pass in North Africa during that movie’s opening credits seen directly after actor George C. Scott’s famous speech in front of the giant U.S. flag.
Almeria is a relatively large city of about 170,000, but British tourists are usually the first to speak English here. Many movies about the American West were made around Almeria, but Americans have yet to discover the area in any recognizable numbers.
Lawrence of Arabia and Conan the Barbarian were among the numerous other movies also filmed partly in the area when an earlier Spanish economy meant plenty of budget-friendly cheap labor and supplies.
Some Americans in uniform visited the area in 1964 when the U.S. Air Force temporarily lost some nuclear bombs just off nearby Palomares. The British are buying up land and condos on those beaches there where Peter O’Toole, as Lawrence, dealt with his Arab Revolt’s victory at Aqqaba and where U.S. military personnel looked for the bombs. At least they had nice scenery surrounding their search with sea, mountains, sun and clouds casting eye-holding vistas all around Almeria province.
Exchange shock proved to be the only downside of two good weeks in this attractive area, but there was still shock in change.
It used to be so easy and often affordable to take commuter flights out of Madrid to regional capitals, or to fly on them before the flight home. I was too late on the way in, missing the flight to Almeria, forcing me to take a seven-hour bus ride south shortly after arrival.
On the way home, hoping for a night in Madrid, I wanted to take a flight there from Almeria, which I thought should have been easy, too, but I still had more to learn.
Changing the $34 U.S. currency I had at Banco de Andalucia at Almeria’s bus station for cab money to the airport gave me 21 Euros cash after the 3-Euro fee. Ironically, I spent 23 Euros in round trip cab fair after learning that it now cost some 280 Euros, almost $400, for a same day flight to, or from Madrid.
Back at the bus station I bought my 23.16-Euro bus ticket for that seven-hour ride back to Madrid. At least I was correct in seeking a cheaper a room in Barajas near the airport, saving money over earlier ideas of going downtown to Puerto del Sol and nice restaurants near Plaza Mayor. I was still on the American Plan.
Laredo-based BBVA officer Miguel de la Hoz deals with the dollar-to-Euro problem on a personal level, being paid in dollars but trips home to the Basque provinces require Euros. De la Hoz advises taking plenty of Euro cash if heading into rural Spain these days, and he echoes the Banco de Valencia officer’s advice to have plastic available.
“For one to two weeks, 1,500 or 2,000 Euros should be enough, but for restaurants and shops I recommend a card,” De la Hoz said. “In the small towns and cities you need cash, but in Madrid it is no problem.
“There is a problem with the conversion rate for the U.S. dollar.”
De la Hoz also believes the Euro is likely to rise in value against the dollar before it goes down.
At least, now, you have been warned, and is anyone out there still placing the dollar above all else in their life?

El Circuito de Almeria

2007-07-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

Engines roar and gasoline runs quickly not far from where many movies were made in the desert of Almeria province in Spain's Costa del Sol. But whatever you call it, motorcycling on the fast track races the heart.

Life rejuvinated by chance

2007-07-13T15:53:00.000-07:00

Note: A very similar version of this story can also be found in the July 2007 edition of LareDOS, in Laredo, Texas, and online at www.laredosnews.com.

By MIKE McILVAIN

TABERNAS, Spain – Chance meetings still lead to beautiful moments.
Two missed rides led to a much wilder and more engaging series of rides when this first venture into El Costa del Sol – a part of Spain carefully avoided for years because of its more-bark-than-bite expensive reputation. Missing a plane from the U.S. and then a bus from the provincial capital of Almeria brought a group of British motorcycle racer riders and myself together.
Blame that April 25 killer storm for the missed flight and my own jet-lagging foggy-headed determination to write down all my fresh notes from a resulting unplanned side trip to New York City, which included some testy moments at Newark’s Liberty International Airport.
Ten died on the border in and near Eagle Pass in that storm, but the storm moved east, foiling many flights and plans as it went. The storm made miss my plane by several hours, but my note writing had me miss my intended first bus out of Almeria to the small town of Tabernas by nine minutes, so I opted for Mojacar.
This occasion it was the storm before a short-lived calm preceding the roar of big, racing motorcycles against the backdrop of Europe’s only desert, breaking the normal mountain-surrounded daytime quiet encircled by the ever-changing nature-created paintings of brown, green, white, blue and tan as clouds moved slowly across mountain faces.
That sight, or the deep, intriguing pursuit by which amateur motorcycle racers engage in their hobby would have escaped me had I not missed those two rides and later decided that I was hungry, despite the pleasing and relaxing vistas of my beachfront hotel room.
Photographing wind skiers on the Mojacar beach gave me a sunburn and forced me to eat late – walking toward the only nearby open restaurant when these motorcycle racers from south and middle England happened along at the same time, going the same direction.
Lads Together was the closest group co-leader Greg Cox, from the little English town of Tring, could come up with for a name. The 12 that I found myself with needed a photographer and I was traveling with three cameras, including a brand new digital eager to prove to me its superiority to the two older film users. I had traveled on my own enough to know that’s not always the most exciting way to go, too, so having lived in England a few years ago we had plenty to talk about.
After supper with some wine and some good lagers we had more to talk about, too – what men always discuss – women, and all being far from home we didn’t have to worry about someone looking over our shoulders, or exercising any political correctness. All good vacations should carry such freedom.
Stuffing yourself into a small rented van with a dozen others is not traveling in any sort of free manner, but it was worth it going to El Circuito de Almeria, the go cart track, club entrances where door guards wore leather jackets and spoke in Russian accents, and some pretty good beachside restaurants. I would certainly missed some, or much, of that if not for Lads Together needing a photographer.
We only cruised past the hanging, cliffside houses of the little town of Sorbas between Mojacar beach and the track, which might have been the only main sight in the area that we didn’t thoroughly investigate when not speeding around El Circuito.
El Circuito de Almeria is one of Spain’s major motorcycle tracks. Jerez’s track gets considerably more attention with its frequent, highly competitive, sometimes televised races, but this facility some 12 kilometers east of the town of Tabernas and its trio of western movie set villages, is on many the map of many European racers. Riders on 1,000cc and 750cc bikes hit speeds close to 160 miles per hour on this track.
An occasional small motorcycle of 150cc might be tested on the Almeria track, but this space is generally reserved for serious riders, whether they are professionals, or simply serious in this expensive hobby.
Riders frequently use electric warmers for their tires when not out on the track. J.J. explained that the warmers help the often bald tires gain traction they have lost. Tires for these high-standard racers, in England, cost a few hundred pounds – equaling some $400, or $500 in U.S. currency.
Pooling dining and going out money with the biker dozen helped save some of my spending Euros, which also staved off the inevitable lesson I was to learn soon about how weak the U.S. dollar has become. One hundred dollars only gets you 68 Euros and banks, generally, don’t want to exchange dollars, too. That debit card, with VISA or Master Card logo, will save you as Euro after Euro is yanked from cash machines, however.
Money was not a serious concern in the safety of the group, as was good eating in the often democratic restaurant selection process. There was some good fish found and a friendly western American barbecue-styled restaurant was among those picked out by the hungry, rambling biker’s dozen one night back from the track along the string of restaurants and beachside establishments at Mojacar.
These guys could afford to ship their motorcycles down from England, but know how to spend wisely, saving a little here or there for that motorized love of their life. Some have more than one, too.
Keith Hawtree, the other co-leader with Cox, asked me something about paying for the photos, but simply riding with the Lads Together was pay enough. I never got everyone’s names, but it didn’t seem to matter – all minds seemed to be concentrating on the relaxing, non-work endeavor of racing big motorcycles around this Santa’s elf shoe-shaped track.
“We’re just out here for fun. No serious stuff at all,” Cox said once.
Many years ago I was privileged to frequent the pit during many motorcycle races in a small town in another part of the country and came to feel that I knew the motorcycle world quite well. At least, as well as a pre-teen boy could.
Not long ago someone told me that I should give motorcycles more attention because they are considered cool now.
I wanted to say that motorcycles have always been cool, but it goes much deeper than that. Motorcycles and their owners can be almost as close as any two family members might be. Motorcycles take their owners to places non-riders can’t see too easily – out of the house and office to freer places on the road. To places of a clearer mind and engaging mechanical thinking that sparks smiles and lifts spirits.
Motorcycles mean freedom, despite their noisy engines, and it was nice to be a party to that world again.

Freedom of Speech is life and death

2007-07-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

Note: Something very near verbatim of the following two articles appeared in a special summer '07 edition of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas after some copies of the publication were temporarily removed from public buildings. Read more online at www.laredosnews.com.

By MIKE McILVAIN

Freedom of speech, or freedom of the press, to journalists in many parts of the world is a matter of life and death.
A journalist well inside America’s interior might be able to take that freedom for granted, but not those working along the border with Mexico and familiar with that government’s system of controlling the amount of printing paper a newspaper might receive. The Mexican dilemma is mild compared to some other parts of the world where journalists are targeted for death because they dare to print, or broadcast, the truth, or something someone in some sort of power might disagree with or dislike.
Some journalists have been killed in Mexico with the drug situation heightening danger and violence across the border, but others are more frequently dying elsewhere simply because they want to tell the truth.
Hotspots like the Middle East and Africa are and continue to be a danger zone for journalists.
Beirut, Lebanon-based CNN journalist Anthony Mills said that country appears to be the freest in the Middle East, but it’s a deceiving appearance.
Mills has lived in Lebanon for some six years and is seen occasionally on televised reports from Beirut. He said it’s what you don’t see in the fight for freedom to express thoughts or to run a story that the public should know more about.
“Over the last two years or so two journalists have been killed here, and one had part of her arm and part of her leg blown off,” Mills said by e-mail. “Why? Because they refused to bow to threats of violence and intimidation.
“The Middle East as a whole has a pretty poor record of press freedom.”
Mills said journalists exhibiting any courage in Lebanon are in grave danger. Mills, a native of Luxembourg, knew one of the two murdered journalists, Gebran Tueni, personally.
“I’d interviewed him a couple of times in the last five months before he was blown up,” Mills said. “He knew he was on an assassination list. I asked him if he was afraid of dying and his response was defiance in the face of threat.
“That’s courage and it underscores the importance these guys attached to press freedom.”
Mills also noted May Chidiac who lived, despite a car bomb blast. Chidiac spent a year in a Paris hospital, but she returned to Beirut to continue broadcasting.
“That, too, is courage, but the other two voices have been silenced forever, and debate in Lebanon is the poorer for their departure,” Mills said.
Washington, D.C.-based Arabic news analyst Natasha Tynes, originally from Jordan, worked for a paper and Web site in Amman before meeting future husband Jeff and moving to the U.S., but still carries part of the Middle East with her.
Including the fear.
“Due to the lack of freedom of speech in the Middle East, journalists also face self censorship. Their coverage lacks any edge because they are always worried about crossing the red lines and challenging taboos,” she said by e-mail. “As a journalist from the Middle East, I find myself censoring my work on a daily basis. Fear is my worst enemy.”
Yemen television journalist Akram Al Hindi gives the right to free speech a 10 on a scale of one to 10.
“Freedom of speech in today's world is one of the basic human rights,” Al Hindi said by e-mail. “No one in this accelerating world can ignore this fact. The principle of freedom of speech is one of the most important rights any person, not just journalists, should fight for. This right to speak and express your ideas and thoughts had helped a lot of nations to achieve a lot and to change a number of negative things whether in society, government, or even in countries.”
Al Hindi pointed to the example of Martin Luther King who accomplished much in the Civil Rights Movement through his “I Have a Dream” speech.
“This dream today is a reality and this shows how well educated people, who are equipped with the right to speak, have achieved their dreams,” he said.
French La Montagne reporter Bertrand Yvernault, based in Clermont-Ferrand, said the relationship between reporters and politicians there is too close, which serves to block some information – in some cases.
“We journalists are very close with representatives, mayors and all kinds of elected people,” Yvernault said by e-mail. “They provide us with us with some very interesting information and hide others. It’s not really censorship -- more of the wrong side of being too friendly with politicians.”
Yvernault noted that this relationship cuts two ways. Quarreling with one office holder might be a mistake, but it might be worth the fight with another.
“Some nasty ones go straight to the newspaper’s owner or director to complain that they have been ‘ill-treated’ by a journalist,” he said. “It could lead to self-censorship.”
Yvernault believes self-censorship could be worse than that imposed by a government.
Jack Zeller, New York-based president of Kulanu, a global Jewish organization, sees the press, basic rights, and governments from a unique – almost hidden - perspective.
Many things we see, Zeller is able to see in other ways through reports to the organization Web site and his personal observations around the world.
“Many African countries that have democratically elected governments do not have freedom of press or speech,” he said by e-mail. “Historically there has been a dissociation. Americans assume that democracy brings human rights, minority rights, freedom of expression, property rights and so on. It is not true.”
Zeller noted that Hitler won a fair election in Germany in 1932 and put together a coalition government, which included critical support from the Catholic Church. He also said nowadays the U.S. press rarely covers human rights violations in Russia because it is lazy and pre-occupied with entertainment news.
“My own immediate experience is with African countries. Self censorship is the rule if you want to stay alive,” Zeller said. “It is also a good rule if you want to stay in business and not annoy the florid corruption of the non-government organization that operates there. There is a wide spectrum of censorship short of killing journalists.”
Solana Larsen, a New York-based editor for London-headquartered Opendemocracy.com, said numerous intimidators and authorities that would act against free speech could be found closer than we would like, too.
“Even people who profess to be for freedom of speech will quickly
forget it when it isn't convenient for them,” Larsen said in an e-mail. “In America we come down hard on foreign governments who limit freedom of speech, but sometimes fail to respond to it when it happens right in front of our noses. You don't have to put someone in jail to stop them from communicating.”
London-based journalist and New York native Norm Guthartz wasn’t too happy to learn of recent actions here in which copies of LareDOS were yanked from the airport and other public buildings. Papers being pulled is the sort of incident that frequently precedes other harsher censorship and violent actions in much less freer countries.
Guthartz has worked in the U.S., Israel, and Europe and places the highest priority on the freedoms of speech and of the press.
“It is the one freedom which Americans are supposed to be absolutely sure of. It’s the one that U.S. governments keep pushing as the prime benefit of having democracy foisted on them,” Guthartz said by e-mail on June 13. “Sure, there’s the old saw, ‘Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one,’ But here is a case of government blocking what people can read, trying to control their access to information, telling them how to think, requiring that they abrogate their responsibility as citizens to be willfully unaware of the functioning of their government.”
Guthartz advised making sure that would-be readers at the airport get their next copy of LareDOS.
“Send out staffers and volunteers to stand at the entrance to the airport and hand out free copies of the magazine to every carload of people entering (or leaving, for that matter),” he said. “Promote the free flow of ideas.”

Additional comments too late for initial publication –

Haaruun Hasssan, a native of Somalia, and London resident –
In Mogadishu where I have been, the Somali government has been conducting harassment and detention of journalists and closing down media organisations. These are journalists who have really strife for freedom of speech in a country where there is no law and order.
In March, a journalist was detained by the spokesman of the President [himself a former journalist]. Reason: He was asked questions he did not like. The journalist was released after 46 days in detention without charge.
I must tell say to you, this journalist was very lucky. He could have been killed – as Somalia is a lawless country.
Many journalists dare ask tough questions these days – Somali journalists are working in fear. They value freedom of speech very much.
It is very important for every society to get independent thought and analysis. Especially at this age when info is key to life.
On a scale of 1 – 10, I would rate freedom of speech on 9!

And Jonathan Blundell, a former journalist living in Waxahachie, Texas -- I really think the power of the press comes from freedom of speech and the first amendment and the press could not function without it. But on the other side of the coin, there are times that I think First Amendment rights should be limited as well. I don't have any answers as to how or where or when but when you hear stories about possible terrorist attacks and people using software like Google Earth to plan out their attacks, or newspapers printing information about certain political/war strategies, I have to wonder if that's really in the best interest of the general public.
I feel the best societies are open societies were information is exchanged freely but in this new society that also means that information is just as readily available to those we wish to keep it from the most.

Communication is common sense

2007-07-13T15:27:00.000-07:00

The following story is very similar to one that appeared in a special summer 2007 First Amendment edition of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas. More can be read online at www.laredosnews.com

By MIKE McILVAIN

It might have bloodied your nose on the playground, and it could have gotten you into a fight with a sibling that led to dire consequences when dad got home.
Communication.
If someone has a problem, or a question they need to open their mouth, put pen to paper, jump on a word processor, send off a carrier pigeon, or whatever it takes to get answers. One of the first hard lessons learned by many, many, and many was how bad things could get when problems are left unsolved and questions left unanswered.
But someone gets away with a lie – probably as a shortcut around explaining, or asking to solve or learn something -- somewhere along life’s highways and they seem to think they can unlearn what was learned in blood and pain as a child in those formative lessons. Many people experience how bad it can get when working with someone who leaves problems unsolved, or allow themselves to believe that those problems will just simply go away.
That non-communication leads to nothing but problems, job loss, arguments, fights, physical illness, and a variety of other woes, so why do governments and some top office holders think that suppressing the truth is the right course of action?
Chances are they knew better as a child, but they maintain, or learn a desire to lie, cover up and block the public from the truth if that truth might be temporarily, or permanently disappointing, or disadvantageous to them.
But do the math. The public, and those usually affected by decisions of the rich and powerful, always outnumber the decision makers, but the public too often allows itself to be wrapped up so much in average, daily life that it fails to keep a needed eye on the decision makers.
It doesn’t help matters, too, when the very few that consistently watch the bosses and politicians are too often the same people attending meetings for the same school boards, city councils, county commissions, and planning and zoning committees. Some of those overly consistent politician-watchers are sometimes left to look a bit foolish, standing there by themselves, when your curious question -- that you only once, and very shyly, mumbled to a spouse at home – could have been a very constructive item if the board, or council, had had to consider it.
Apathy rates as low on the human civilization scale as not asking that necessary question, or approaching that nagging personal problem that leads to problems for others around you, too.
Personal experience extends to those playground and backyard lessons learned long ago, but journalism experience continues to point to citywide, statewide, nationwide, and global problems left unsolved due to a lack of input.
There are millions of people in the world and eventually some one person might have to make a decision and the narrower the scope of input that decision maker has, that much narrower are chances for success. Not every single time, but don’t take my word for it. Research it.
Do political hardliners have a reputation for listening to the public anywhere?
Are hardliners anywhere known for being good listeners? There are some exceptions, but most are good at making up their minds very quickly.
On those larger than everyday life scales, are situations where leaders suppress the press, hire minders to hound visiting foreign reporters, and outright shut down the media? Can non-communication get any worse or any larger when an entire nation’s media is shut down, or so closely watched and bullied that it can only say what it is told to say?
Those of us who still remember what we learned on the playground, the look on dad’s face when he took off his belt to teach a very strong lesson, combined with what we’ve learned as much bigger kids about freedom of speech, cringe when any episode of press suppression surfaces. This act of non-communication can’t bring on anything good. We’ve known that since we were kids.
That very insecure leader, or the upper echelon of the government that shut down the press, probably did, too, but forgot somewhere along the way.
Communicate. It has always made sense.

Moving on

2007-07-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

In the problem around copies of LareDOS, being pulled from the airport and other public buildings -- as noted below -- the mayor apologized and the paper was allowed back where it had been.

Eye on Laredo

2007-06-06T12:32:00.001-07:00

It's quite obvious that I usually use my blog as a personal writing clips file, but with a press issue event happening around my employer and the new mayor here in Laredo, Texas it looks like time to alter focus.

All information received so far says mayor, and former FBI agent, Raul Salinas has ordered copies of LareDOS removed from the airport, the Laredo Visitors and Convention Bureau and City Hall. He appears to be reacting to criticism of city government action around a shopping mall and another around another mall interlocked with a wetland -- which garnered some 10,000 petition signatures in defense of the wetland.

The most visible critiicism has been on the front cover of LareDOS -- seen online at www.laredosnews.com -- which has depicted the mayor, city council and the mayor's dog. The dog made no political decisions -- that anyone knows of -- but was brought in after it became a public figure, too, in an unrelated public action campaign.

The key issue here, as the way the laws present it, is that the mayor is a public figure and subject to such criticism and some riducule over issues important to this booming city of some 207,000. Also, of importance, are the limits a mayor in Texas has under the "weak mayior" system. To put it lightly, there is serious doubt about a mayor's ability to order the removal of any publication, which also enters into free speech issues.

I have known the mayor for some 23 years now, since my sports writing days in Alice when the FBI agent Salinas would frequently visit his hometown -- probably as part of his public relations responsibilities in South Texas. Of course, G-men are limited in what they can say, so one can usually just know a G-man on a limited basis, but I have known him. Because I have known him that long, I have to question whether or not he is acting on his own, or receiving poor advice in this matter. Either way, I hope both sides speak to each other while it can still be corrected.

Although, it certainly could be too late, already.

It's a surprise to think that he could have run for office here in the U.S. and not have, at least, known that such criticism is the norm. He is a rookie politician and my publisher, Meg Guerra, has had the paper for 13 years, so there's an imbalance there, but when holding public office in a city this size, ignorance is no excuse.

Keep an eye on Laredo. Let's see what happens.

Begin the adventure

2007-05-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

One of the most dangerous rides I ever took was on one of thoes buses between Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Puerto de La Cruz -- from north to west coast on Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

Learning from Canaries

2007-05-23T15:50:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Spain – No one anticipates the sudden wrath of
indignation possible here when unfamiliar with local Canary Islands
universities.
"?Como? ?No sabes de nuestro universidades aqui?" the lady said,
launching a million daggers my way.
Small talk in Spanish over a very good islands' version of Italian
risotto turned tasteless when the greeter-waitress's eyes flashed and
nostrils flared at the instant of my ignorance. I had never heard, by
name, of any of these islands' universities, geographically tucked
away from Europe's main line of sight off the coast of northwest
Africa – closer to Morocco than any other country. And I still don't
know why they should stand out in particular for any other reason than
her pride.
We might not take our remoteness so hard here in Laredo, but there is
at least that one lady on the island of Tenerife with visible related
emotions.
This wasn't Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, South Bend,
Indiana, Norman, Oklahoma, or Lincoln, Nebraska, but that blind spot
for Canary Islands universities could have been treated just as
horribly had I suddenly stepped into a restaurant in any U.S. college
football hotbed on a fall Saturday and sheepishly asked why were so
many people wearing the same colors and heading toward the stadium?
She wore a red dress, so I guess she might have been something like a
transplanted Sooner, but I have checked the OU Web site and saw
nothing about any big games between them and any universities in the
Canary Islands.
Exhibiting pride in the local university is there, too, but no other
connection was seen and nothing else mattered at the moment.
Trying politely to tell the truth that in the U.S. we hear very little
of the Canary Islands as it is, leaving the universities farther down
the list wasn't working. Her eyes still resembled something very angry
and vengeful, springing out of the nearby Atlantic like a sea monster,
but repeated compliments on the risotto seemed to help settle down the
inner fire I accidentally stoked when failing to acknowledge any
knowledge of local higher education, shortly after getting off the
plane from Barcelona.
I went to that restaurant one more time – when careful scrutiny from
the street didn't reveal her devilish eyes or coal black hair. Asking
about her turned out to be a bit of a blood pressure raiser with the
other greeter-waiter in attendance, so I ate a good, saucy fish meal,
got out of there and forgot the restaurant, settling for lesser eating
places in my stay of the better part of a week before flying back to
the mainland.
The trek to those other restaurants often took me past that same
emotion-charged establishment and sight of her made me turn sideways
and quickly down nearby streets. No sense taking chances.
Chances were taken the following day in a bus trip over Tenerife's
hilly midsection to Puerto de la Cruz on the island's western side.
The bus driver might have been in some sort of deal with the devilish
waitress – taking one quick look at me, he yanked the green bus into
service as I searched for a seat – making me suddenly glad for that
balance skateboarding taught me many years earlier.
The hour-long white knuckles trip over the often photogenic and
panoramic scenery was more thrill-bound with the driver's
determination to zip blindly through intersections before sudden stops
to take on, or let passengers off. I wasn't alone in my prayerful
mistrust of this young, wild-eyed driver – one older man, getting off
halfway through breathed a loud sigh of relief as he stepped off,
shaking his head briefly back toward the bus. The driver was the
subject of some chatter with other regular riders who live in the
small towns and villages between the Santa Cruz and Puerto de Santa
Cruz.
Spain's tallest mountain, Mt. Tiede, rests with its clouds and
sunshine mixture off of one's left shoulder in this ride with the sea,
pounding surf and tourist watching waiting in Puerto.
The Canary Islands are seriously touristy, but not so badly saturated
that one can't find quiet, relaxing moments by the sea, or in the
countryside on these seven spots of Atlantic-surrounded land, which
Spain has owned for some 600 years.
Many Canary visitors visit Tenerife, the biggest of the group, and
Lanzarote for its unusual volcanic-created landscape, which is the
course I followed, hoping to see other islands there some day later
whenever time and circumstance allow – assuming the waitress and bus
driver have gone onto better things in life.
Tenerife's diverse offerings range between simple, sparsely populated
country scenes and upscale, expensive wall-to-wall peopled seaside
condos and restaurants rivaling that of Hawaii or Mexico's Pacific
Coast. Travel brochures and Web sites don't properly prepare the
American for all the skin Europeans like to air by the beach or pool,
but once that little shock is dealt with you're ready for any sight.
Or so you thought.
Ferries run between the islands and Spanish mainland, but planes are
frequently the choice and the roundtrip between Tenerife and Lanzarote
isn't a cheapy, costing at least $150, but the sights of this volcanic
island prove worth it -- at least once in a lifetime.
Lanzarote's oil painting-looking barren landscape resembles the world
after a nuclear holocaust with its dashes of reds, browns, grays,
whites and blacks. Camel rides, strong wine grown in black sand pits,
white villages resembling their North African cousins' more than those
in Spain's Andalucia and a restaurant where the food is warmed from
the volcanic earth below make the traveler feel he, or she, is in a
very distinct place.
Life's pace in the Canaries moves on the slow side -- more like the
Caribbean than Europe and Thor Heyerdahl's influenced museum and
pyramids at Guimar on Tenerife lend more otherworld-type images and
thoughts.
Norwegian-born Heyerdahl is most famous for his 1947 Kon Tiki papyrus
boat trip from South American into the South Pacific, which sold many
books by the same title and earned an Oscar for top documentary.
Heyerdahl also sailed a papyrus boat to the Americas, which the BBC
made special note of in its 2002 obituary on the explorer:
"In 1970 he crossed the Atlantic in a papyrus craft, Ra II after the
original Ra had disintegrated shortly after it set out. The journey,
which ended in triumph in the West Indies turned the idea that
Columbus was the first transatlantic navigator on its head," it read.
Exhibits at the Casa de Chacona Museum at the Pyramids of Guimar Park
peak the interest of the curious, noting similarities and reason to
suspect obscure links between other continents and the Americas. The
museum, like so many historians, didn't forget that Americas-bound
sailors from Spain always stopped in the Canaries for provisions and
that last night on the town before braving the Atlantic in little
wooden sailing boats. This museum also makes you consider who else
left early, forgotten footprints on beaches in the Americas.
"Who were the white and bearded men worshipped yet also shown
sacrificed in ancient Mexican art, before Columbus came?" asks one of
the museum exhibits.
Equally thought provoking are the pyramids of Guimar, which look too
much like something near Mexico City with cactus growing through and
around them. Museum explanations note that pyramid building was not
restricted to Egypt and Mexico, but that it was largely a worldwide
phenomenon, seeming to be a shared idea across unattached cultures.
On the surface, on the surf and in the mind, the Canary Islands leave
many lingering questions and thoughts, despite any knowledge of its
universities.
But I am much more willing to learn about them then I was that night in that restaurant.

When the pen really is mightier

2007-03-29T17:40:00.000-07:00

Note: A print version of this story, or very near in content, can be seen in the March 2007 edition of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas and online, in pdf, at www.laredosnews.com.

By MIKE McILVAIN

That pen and computer a law officer writes an arrest report with can carry more punch than the gun.
Modern crime scene investigators are armed with pens and many with laptops, too. An officer can begin writing reports on the scene, or start with notes and edit them into soon thereafter into a comprehensive report fit for the district attorney’s office and potential scrutinizing juries.
A scene ending with a policeman shooting down a criminal might seem to end a case, but the law officer that effectively, and consistently, writes a report that all clearly understand has a better chance of nailing down that case and immediately related crimes for good. The clarity, careful explanation of details and effectiveness of the report cover plenty of ground, which law enforcement bosses put a high premium on nowadays.
In the western movies how fast a lawman could draw his gun was the difference between life and death. How well a lawman can write nowadays his report means the difference between a good cop and bad cop.
“To me, it’s way, way toward the top,” Sheriff’s Major Doyle Holdridge said, adding that all the effort thrown into a case mean nothing if no one understands the report. “If we’re not satisfied we’ll send them back up to do the report two or maybe three times. At some point the jury can review that document.”
Laredo Police Academy Director Larry Garner rates clear writing “around a six, maybe a seven.”
He isn’t satisfied with the four English courses required of those pursuing a bachelor’s in criminal justice.
“They need to write more,” he said. “Most cops would rather be out doing detective work, or practicing shooting or something, but they could be fixing to lose a dozen cases. It costs us when they write at a ninth grade level.”
Garner and his staff train officers to write in 32 and 24-hour courses for cadets and in-service work for those already in the field, but his experience says better writing makes for stronger police work.
Journalism and creative writing wouldn’t hurt.
“In law enforcement we are set in our ways,” he said. “We should suggest taking a creative writing course.”
Without clear writing, Garner says officers’ reports make them look like something other than a top professional and they lose cases, setting criminals free – sometimes to be arrested again later.
“They get off scott free, and it’s too late then,” Garner said.
Laredo Police Department spokesman Juan Rivera says LPD officers get more intense training once graduated from the 9-month academy with 6 weeks of in-service crime scene, driving and policy manual study, including additional report writing training with their field training officer.
Rivera notes that LPD officers use different forms for different crimes, accidents and cases.
“Almost every crime has a report and it’s a detailed report – unlike TV cops that just shoot everybody and have no paperwork,” Rivera said. “It’s done in an 8-hour shift, but sometimes they have to finish later.”
“It has to be step-by-step. In the details,” Webb County Sheriff’s Cpt. Benjamin Botello said. “Detail No. 25 could be the weapon, or other evidence. They have to be able to see everything for detail No. 26, or detail No. 27.”
“We have to show how everything how it went from point A to point B. It’s detailed and important that we make it like a book that you can follow completely and know what happened,” Holdridge said. “We want it so you can see that it is very self-explanatory.”
Holdridge said reports have several important purposes, starting with informing the district attorney about the case, but also the report serves as material for an arresting officer called to the witness stand and it is an instrument in potentially taking the suspect’s life away. The suspect could lose many years behind bars, or literally lose their life in a murder case in states like Texas, which uses capital punishment.
Sheriff Rick Flores notes that cases sometimes don’t go to court for several months, or at times even a year later, dulling the memory of the sharpest minds, so those details written the day of a crime are very important.
Flores credits Department of Public Safety veteran Holdridge for upgrading his department’s report writing, but Holdridge credits his experience with that state agency.
“It has to be user-friendly and easy to understand,” Holdridge said.
Flores notes that all his department’s offices are computerized and can go to specifics of a report with physical descriptions, civil rights readings, jail bond reports, and other matters indexed in a folder.
George Altgelt, an attorney and former prosecutor, said lawyers look for the mental processes arresting officers show when assessing whether, or not, there was sufficient probable cause to stop someone in the first place.
“He has to look at all the pieces of the puzzle as he can gather and once they are altogether can he answer the question if there was more probability than not if this crime occurred,” Altgelt said. “He has to paint a picture for the prosecutor and he decides if it has the strength to indict on the strength of the police report.”
Altgelt says police report strengths depend on the facts and officer’s ability to articulate those facts in writing. Altgelt said the reports have to be in chronological order.
“The conclusion should end in an arrest, and he can’t arrest without probable cause,” Altgelt said.
Altgelt points out to the tricky elements in some cases, which require thorough, detailed thinking and observation. Assume nothing.
For example security at a large store might have video taped a suspected DVD thief moving the items in his, or her, clothing to another department. The suspect is detained by the store and police are called.
Altgelt notes that an officer has to see the video first and see that steps match up to an arrest.
Simply moving the items might not be a crime, but it obviously might have been a step in an eventual theft. Officers have to operate within the legal framework.
Altgelt points another hypothetical case in which a beige suburban is seen speeding down Clark Blvd. and suspected in a vandalism case, or disturbance. An officer can “engage” the suburban and ask questions of the driver and riders, seeking inconsistencies and taking note of any items which could have been involved in the crime.
An empty case of eggs could be found in the car, but does it have any relation to the vandalism case, or disturbance?
Conflicting stories from the driver and riders could make them look suspicious, but officers have to be very specific when it’s decided to make an arrest.
“Show your work. There is no credit for just giving an answer,” Altgelt said. “The officer has to show his, or her, work. It’s more a professional thing than anything else.
“The right steps show professionalism in context. The police officer took an oath to uphold the constitution, and that includes any amendments.”
Altgelt notes that an officer has to listen carefully for the word lawyer because once one is requested it’s like a giant iron curtain dropping between he and the suspect. That has to be in the report, too.
“That can be more important than anything else,” Altgelt said.
Altgelt believes that buzzwords are important in a report and that professionalism and credibility usually equals conviction.
Altgelt says there no excuse for sloppy work in a report.
“If you don’t even bother to run a spell check, what does it say?” he asked. “Mostly everybody here in Laredo does it by the book. Everybody is under good watch under a lieutenant or watch commander and they help.
“There are one, or two that take shortcuts, and just assume that if they arrest someone then they are guilty. Some are more like the KGB or Gestapo and we know who they are by reading their arrest reports – and their cases don’t get prosecuted.”
Altgelt’s experience shows him that police reports have a tough battle for credibility because professionals, like him, judges and juries are always picking them apart.
“Some that come in are good, but they never get better,” he said.
Altgelt prosecuted drug and environmental cases for Webb County before opening his own office with partner Forrest Cook.
Flores says the state requires law officers to have at least 60 college hours, but his department would like it if they had more.
“An education, that’s your ammunition. Your pen – that’s the most important weapon,” Holdridge said.

Corporations -- an opinion

2007-03-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

Note: Following is very similar, but slightly different from an op/ed piece in the March edition of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas. That can be seen online, in pdf, at www.laredosnews.com and in print in Laredo.

By MIKE McILVAIN

A local corporate executive recently told me not all corporations are bad.
I won’t hold him to it, but surely, there must be one, or two out there who haven’t completely tossed out their soul and lost sight of their original purposes and drive to make money. There’s nothing wrong with making money. Nothing at all, but too many corporations – being the loose-fitting strings of structure, people, facilities and mission statements that they are – lose sight of what enabled them to get where they are today as growth, ambition and faraway leadership steer their course.
Case-by-case examples prove leadership can be faraway and still in the same building as they try to solve problems and direct the local operation as the bosses at corporate would do it.
Not many people, whether they work for a corporation, or not, really like them, but many people are trapped, having to work for one because they seem to have more money than the sometimes more realistic, practical, clear-minded local operation.
“I don’t like it. I wish I could go somewhere else, but what are you gonna do? I got to feed the kids,” said a corporate soldier to me not long ago.
Unfortunately, not all locally-owned places are run by level-headed bosses with competition and imagined competition twisting their vision. Sometimes, when on the dark side, local owners might see their holdings and personnel as toys to be hurled around the room when frustration sets in. Keeping those wages down at the local level and still getting good, competitive results isn’t easy, either.
But before anyone starts to read too much into, or between the lines here, I am combining information from some 38 years in the workforce when I first latched on with a corporate ice cream shop in Houston.
Since then, I’ve been paid – I want to say nickel and dimed, but that’s not fair to all – by various bosses in Brenham, La Grange, San Marcos, Austin, Belton, Temple, San Antonio, Alice, Corpus Christi, Waco, Hempstead, Bryan, Copperas Cove, Wharton, Lufkin, Edinburg, Laredo, Florence, S. Carolina and overseas in London. And I might have forgotten some of those former workplaces, too, so please don’t necessarily read yourself into this, but all of my experiences combine to say that we all lose when our corporations and businesses get off track and stay that way. Someone in the driver’s seat needs to keep an eye out for sleepy eyes at the controls.
When we hear, “I’m not going home until the other bosses leave” and “I’m afraid to take my vacation time because the bosses might fire me” – trouble and foggy-headed, fatigued thinking usually aren’t too far ahead. Don’t take my word for it – please research that one on your own.
When we have reached that point – and way too many corporations have here and elsewhere -– we are taking the human element out of the corporation’s local office and that isn’t healthy. Do you want examples of people feeling dwarfed and pushed to extremes and bad health by high stress, or would you rather do that on your own? Have you seen anyone take a job and noticed as their weight blasts through the ceiling, or his or her health leaps out the window?
If you work for a corporation, you might have a boss who’s trying to kill you without trying to kill you. They’re just following orders to heighten production – it doesn’t matter how, with whom or if anyone falls by the wayside.
Do your bosses care if anyone dies?
It struck me as entirely too sad a few years ago when a very dedicated editor at a big city newspaper died and his memorial service was held in his office. It read too much like an ironic and fitting note for someone who might have bit, bought and swallowed their corporate dedication a little too far.
When people tell friends to get a life they aren’t just talking to hear the sound of their own voice.
People have to work and sometimes very hard. It isn’t easy to find any job that doesn’t go through some tough periods now and then, but a telltale sign of what I would call corporatitis is when that tough boss, or the one driven nuts by other bosses already beaten to death by poorly-prioritized efforts, really doesn’t show any sincere regrets when one of their employees dies. Are we that disposable now?
I still don’t know how efficient a dead employee can be.
Probably the simplest and most profound lesson learned in my high school years in the Houston suburbs was that there’s a big difference between tough and stupid. Someone needs to – please – start telling some corporate supervisors to wake up. The life they save could be their own.
You can be entertained, and educated in some ways, by this corporate thing, too -- if not already.
One of the best corporate-based dramatic movies in recent years was 1999’s The Insider, starring Al Pacino, Russell Crowe and Christopher Plummer. The Insider cut two ways, peering into corporate woes in the tobacco industry and at CBS where 60 Minutes had corporate-induced problems in simply airing whistleblower Jeff Wigand’s interview.
Both the book and movie, The Corporation, drew strong reviews when released only a few years ago, but 1975’s Rollerball, starring James Caan, continues to be mentioned whenever corporate extremes are the topic.
Caan plays a futuristic gladiator, playing this deadly game in a corporate-controlled world.
Online, Antipreneur: The Mark That Changed Capitalism has emerged, adding another corporate-aware voice to the struggle for realistic thinking and controls in the corporate world.
“While giant corporations run roughshod over our lives, we whine and complain, protest and boycott,” the Web site forum said.
Well-written complaints, protests and boycotts are a place to start, but some of those targeted corporate executives would only thinking of the free advertising they’re getting and nothing about the protest aims.
Good, or bad, it looks like we will have to deal with corporations for some time to come, but they and us will all work and perform better once they make a sincere, profound effort to clearly see the people in front of and around them. All of the people – not just the presidents on those dollar bills and legal tender.

Grupo Fantasma Fantastic

2007-03-29T17:27:00.000-07:00

Note: The following is a near twin to a story that appeared in the February edition of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas. It can be seen online, too, at www.laredosnews.com.

By MIKE McILVAIN

Grupo Fantasma is very much alive and flying high with an effective manager in Mike Crowley and the attention of the Prince.
“Laredo,” A corrido they sing on occasions is printed in Hecho en Tejas – An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature -- alongside the works of other well-known Texas musicians Selena, Little Joe Hernandez, Freddy Fender, Sunny Ozuna, Roberto Pulido, Conjunto Atzlan, Laura Canales, Tish Hinojosa, Lydia Mendoza and Chingo Bling, but Fantasma’s current streak could propel them well past the rest in the book.
“They are a great band,” Crowley said by phone from his home in Austin. “Nobody ever accused the music business of being fair, but hopefully we will get these guys where they should be.”
Fantasma guitarist Adrian Quesada credits Crowley, a longtime veteran of the U.S. music scene, with taking the Laredo-influenced Latin funk, cumbia and Hip Hop mix band to new heights in recent months.
Fantasma played with Prince in Florida prior to the Super Bowl, played for CBS execs before the big game, picked up several gigs in Las Vegas at Prince’s 3121 Club and for a Golden Globes after party in Los Angeles.
Austin-based Fantasma is so busy it only plays about once a month in the capital city.
Fantasma’s visibility in Hecho is in a two-page spread with the corrido “Laredo,” which the 11-member group usually plays when it occasionally returns to Laredo.
Quesada, guitarist and cuatro player Beto Martinez, bass man Greg Gonzalez, drummer Johnny Lopez III are all from Laredo. The band’s traveling concessions salesman Gilbert Mendoza is also from Laredo.
Ironically, “Laredo” is one of their few numbers that they didn’t write. Quesada said it’s an old corrido and they were published in newly printed Hecho because the book’s editor, Dagoberto Gilb, knows them.
Gilb is the author of several books, teaches at Texas State in San Marcos and lives in Austin.
Quesada notes that Crowley helped author musical success for the Cars and Jimmie Dale Gilmore a number of years after working on some of Elvis Presley’s tours in the 1950s, which included several rural dance hall appearances.
Quesada also credits Crowley with connecting them to Prince and possibilities of recording with the well-known Rock star.
“We were playing in Las Vegas every Thursday night and backing up Prince,” Quesada said. “Thank God we flew to Vegas.
“We are still busy without him and we’ve been talking about working on an album with him.”
One of Fantasma’s rare recent Austin gigs was a charity event for Las Manitas restaurant, which is being moved out of its site in a property takeover.
Fantasma was interviewed on Austin’s ME Television on Feb. 9 and said they expect touring to return them to Canada, where they played last year, too. Fantasma’s other recent gigs have been in Georgia, Mississippi and New York, frequently leaving group members to drive either of their two 15-seat vans. And those who volunteer to drive generally decide what music plays on the radio, which can be as varied as the music Fantasma plays on stage.
Fantasma fans seldom ever hear them on radio because they don’t cater to that media.
“We don’t write to get on radio,” Quesada said. “We do what we do. We’re into the band being ourselves. If something gets picked up it’s OK, if not that’s OK, too.”
Crowley says getting a band’s music heard on radio is not nearly as important as it was with so many other ways for fans to download music now. Getting on radio is good, but not the key to success it once was and Crowley says Fantasma is already gaining the notoriety radio-successful bands have had in evidence through recent events.
Crowley would know. His resume includes work with famed musicians such as John Denver, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, the Pointer Sisters and Joe Ely. He also worked for Concerts West in Seattle, Wash. and in California until moving to Austin with his wife in the 1980s.
Crowley says Fantasma puts itself in position to be successful because the 11 parts all fit together so very well -- and practice, practice, practice.
“They are a great live band and they practice every Tuesday,” Crowley said. “It’s something like a very exceptional football team. They practice and practice. They practice every Tuesday night.
“You see it when they are playing. There are not any surprises. They all know what each other is doing.”
Crowley likes listening to Fantasma for that fine, natural, professional touch and its fusion of styles.
“It all comes together in their own way,” he said.
Crowley says Fantasma will be back in the recording studio soon and new songs like “Revoltar,” which was played for the 200 or so braving temperatures in the low 50s at the Jalapeno Festival is expected to be on the next CD. “Revoltar” carried a sound and time like one that could go to radio stations, but that media is only one consideration nowadays.
Crowley isn’t sure where all of the group’s successes could take them, but doesn’t see any barriers – other than the group’s size – getting in their way. Airfare for 11 is considerably more than it is for the typical band roughly half that size.
Crowley would like to take the band to the Montreux music festival held each year in July on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, but taking the 11 usually means 13 or 14 go and summer airfares and hotels are at their highest. Switzerland isn’t cheap, either.
Montreux was a milestone in Texas guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan’s career -- booed off the stage one year before returning to thunderous approval the next.
“I’d love to go to Montreux, but we need someone who’ll pay for it,” Crowley said, whose confidence in Fantasmas isn’t based on his own viewpoint.
Crowley recalls another musician at the Montreal festival in Canada saying “that band dominates”
And it’s true,” Crowley said. “It’s going to happen.”

Ivins' good examples

2007-02-26T16:13:00.000-08:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

Regardless of the political side of the table you might come from, late columnist and author Molly Ivins left some good examples for her profession and the sharp idea of enjoying one's work.
Ivins is gone, but only edging away slowly into what looks like a strong, lingering place in Texas college-level journalism.
Ivins, 62, died of breast cancer on Jan. 31 in Austin. A memorial gathering was held on Feb. 4 at Austin’s Scholz’s Garten – a longtime political gathering place.
“Molly will continue to be an inspiration and outstanding role model for all journalists, especially women,” wrote University of Texas journalism professor Wanda Garner Cash in an e-mail from Austin. “Molly's unique brand of journalism and her natural ability as a storyteller helped me find my own editorial voice. She was fearless about speaking the truth, regardless of the professional or personal consequences.”
Cash said Ivins was both on the page and in person a funny, funny woman and a deadly serious one.
Recently retired Texas Observer editor Barbara Belejack said Ivins also believed journalism should be fun. “It’s hard work, but it can be fun. I’m not sure a lot people get that these days. She truly believed that,” Belejack said by phone from Austin.
Belejack hopes Ivins’ “wonderful wit, sharpness, and larger than life essence” translates into staying power in Texas college and university journalism classes.
“I think it is really important that students take a look at the way she wrote,” Belejack said. “She could get right to it. I like the way everyone has compared her to Mark Twain. I think it’s very appropriate.”
Ivins wrote six books and her syndicated columns were read in some 350 newspapers. She was also known for her work with the Texas Observer, Houston Chronicle, Minneapolis Tribune, New York Times and numerous speaking engagements.
Belejack notes that Ivins reached many people in her career through many appearances where she also spoke directly to people – not at them. Belejack says she received an e-mail from a journalist in Senegal, forwarded through a friend in Mexico, from someone who lamented not having met Ivins.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman met Ivins out on the book promotion tour circuit and ended his Feb. 2 piece, pointing to another area in which she stands as a good example to young journalists.
“Now, more than ever, we need people who will stand up against the follies and lies of the powerful. And Molly Ivins, who devoted her life to questioning authority, will be sorely missed,” Krugman wrote.
LareDOS publisher Marie Eugenia Guerra never met Ivins, but was lucky enough to be in the right class at the right time to hear a lecture at the University of Texas in the early ‘70s. Guerra remembers it well with the campus pulsating with political dissent, student protests and anti-war sentiment.
“Ivins, well into her no holds barred trajectory across the lofty heights of truth-telling journalism, was far more than Prof. Norris G. Davis, media law instructor and dean of the School of Journalism, had likely bargained for,” Guerra said. “What she was to many of us in that classroom was fresh faced, brazen, and confident, a girl just a bit older than those to whom she presented her view on journalism ethics and the Vietnam conflict. The more she spoke, the more Dr. Davis leaned away from her and to the right.
“The value she said that day 35 years ago that she placed on truth and justice resonates in everything she wrote. Time will remember her as a champion of ideals, one who held government accountable to those who pay for it. Literature will remember how good she was at her craft and that her refined style and stinging sense of humor were a gift to us.”
Ivins is also noted for referring to the Texas legislature as the best free entertainment in Austin.
Ivins was single and never married. She was a Houstonian, growing up in the River Oaks-area, constantly arguing with her oil business father on political issues, which she attributed to much of her feistiness and ability to stand up against authority.
Her father was a right-wing Republican and her politics came from the left. He was president of Tenneco, but also a cancer victim and shot himself to death.
Ivins went to Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Ivins also studied at the Institute of Political Science in Paris and gained a master’s degree at Columbia University in New York City.
She was survived by a brother and sister.

Learn more -- get on the plane

2007-02-09T14:13:00.000-08:00

(Note: Read more about this, and other interesting stories online at www.laredosnews.com, or in print in Laredo, Texas in the January edition of LareDOS.)

By MIKE McILVAIN

Asked to write about going to school overseas sounded like a harder assignment than those faced in graduate school, which included several all-nighters in the computer lab.
Writing something on my world views on health care, war, travel or relationships would be easier. Those issues involve the entire world, but my education out in the world is much more personal.
And some of it isn’t personal at all, but keeps on teaching.
Getting my master’s in international journalism at London’s City University opened up untold footpaths, avenues, highways, boat routes and flight patterns to that real, broader world I should have been discovering decades ago. The sooner the better for all the benefits one gains from getting the airplane and seeing and learning what the world is really like. Many U.S. universities like Laredo’s Texas A&M International offer semesters overseas.
Academic lessons at City centered around writing, international relations, ethics, staying alive in dangerous situations, new media, reporting specialties and several other smaller things that don’t come to mind immediately. The people come to mind more than any assignment, paper, or research topic.
Many continue to learn from each other and consult on various issues through e-mail. Several of us have attended each other’s weddings. I made one in Minnesota and another in India – so far.
Graduate school in London actually took off a few days after arriving and settling into an on campus room, which really served to make the experience affordable. Central London, where City is located, isn’t cheap, but on campus housing goes a long way to bring the expenses down.
Total costs at about $40,000 were worth it and I would love an excuse to do it all again. Even in another subject. That $40,000 covered housing, food, university costs, pubs, movies, travel, social, sporting events and those walking tours. I went a little overboard and had to borrow $10,000 toward the end, but had plenty of that leftover for post-school expenses.
As far as the economics go, I am quite sure I saved overall by going overseas, but one has to consider those so many more intangibles associated with studying in a place like London. It takes two years to get a master’s, at best, in almost all U.S. universities.
My flight from the U.S. arrived on Sept. 5, 2001 and those flights from hell arrived in New York, Washington, D.C. and the Pennsylvania countryside not even a week later. Classes didn’t begin for a few weeks, but new coursemate Anthony Mills and myself met in the campus bookstore on the 10th and got our call to this new world situation the next day after sitting in the nearby Old Jerusalem Tavern for nearly three hours discussing journalism, politics and sports. Mills was from Luxembourg, but played tennis for Brown University in Providence, R.I. where he got his bachelor’s in international relations.
“Have you blokes heard what happened in New York?” asked the bartender, no doubt having heard the American accents in our conversation. “Some planes have hit some big buildings there and another went down in Washington.”
Mills, who many have now seen reporting from Beirut, Lebanon on CNN, and I were already on our way to bigger pubs with televisions on nearby Farringdon Road before I could ask which Washington he was talking about.
Eyes were as big as basketballs as Londoners watched the infamous 9/11 attacks on the BBC and ITV in the first two pubs we found down close to the Thames. A third chain pub proved to be a disappointment when the French barmaid-in-charge cutoff the news, saying her customers were bored with it and wanted to play video games. Mills and I left as our blood pressures rose, quickly tossing a few choice words on the way out. Mills could offer more, growing up with French, which his father used to teach, and from his own tough street lessons learned when teaching English in Lyon, France.
Hearing on a U.S. TV news report that Central London was being evacuated, and being in Central London and not being evacuated, we figured that it was time to call home and let them know that we were OK in London, despite whatever they might have heard.
“Is this worse than Pearl Harbor?” I asked my mother.
“It’s worse. We didn’t know for a while how bad that was,” she said.
“Maybe I’ll join the RAF,” I said in a fleeting thought, feeling oddly far away from home for an instant, which had never occurred to me.
Conflicts were in mind and it wasn’t lost on me that the Royal Air Force had outflown and outgunned Hitler’s Luftwaffe directly overhead 61 years earlier in the Battle of Britain.
I had already started taking a large number of walking tours around Central London – most seemed to cost around 10 pounds each – so my historical perspectives were leaping and bounding all over each other, knowing that this was one of those historical moments, which this old Roman-founded city had seen so much of.
Scottish warrior William Wallace was executed not quite a quarter of a mile from my dorm room; historic St. John’s Gate, where Shakespeare previewed numerous plays for public exhibit approval was a few steps out my front door; the city’s old Roman walls were very close and many of England’s firsts were all around in short walks from where I lived at Francis Rowley Court.
Farringdon Underground Station – one of the very first constructed in the world in 1863 – was my home station and most frequent door to all that beyond the immediate area. This part of Central London, Cityside, was also in the old Irish and more recently Italian neighborhoods. Fortunately, several mostly affordable Italian restaurants were still close by and old Attilio, who managed first one and then another of these little rustic, but charming holes in the wall was patient and tolerant of university students who had too much to talk about, sometimes with too much wine, occasionally knocking over glass flower vases with energetic hand gestures describing lessons assigned by old news dogs like Colin Bickler – a New Zealander by birth who covered plenty in his time on jobs in Malaysia, the Philippines, Israel and Washington, D.C. to name a few – or the latest trip out from London on its cheap fare airlines.
“The Bickler” had a way of keep in students on their toes and fear in their eyes, but commanded terrific respect for the experience he brought from the field into class, too.
London is the low airfare capital of the world, which its many thousands of students take advantage of, including additional travel in their personal learning plans. I was on the conservative side, taking trips to Ireland, Spain, Holland and Lebanon from London as well as a rail run north to Nottingham and Edinburgh, Scotland.
Ireland, Holland and Lebanon were pleasure trips, which always became learning trips, too.
Spain, my 11th and still most recent trip there was essentially for an interview connected to my thesis and dissertation as were the stops in Nottingham and Scotland, researching the obscure side of the big business of soccer where participation and winning sometimes overshadow serious intentions of getting an education.
I interviewed a coach with Deportivo La Coruna in La Coruna, Spain – and timed it with a cider-casting, medieval costumed festival, which was another story, too. Ex-athletes were interviewed in Nottingham and Edinburgh, but, of course, I had to see the Tales of Robin Hood permanent exhibit, Scottish Celtic fiddle music and castles, respectively, too.
Ireland, my third trip there, took me to the south coast at Cork and Kinsale for the most festive New Year’s I ever experienced, celebrating with Aussies, Canadians and locals, listening to the strongest string and vocals trio I ever heard anywhere. Holland, by winning a contest for free round trip boat transportation, led me to Rotterdam, Amsterdam and its nearby bright, colorful Floriade, the not so cheery Anne Frank House and to a personal view that lax sin laws there have allowed the Russian mob to get a firm foothold.
My only trip to the Middle East, so far, had tougher appearances, but the dangers stood there with guns and weren’t shooting anyone at the time.
Lebanon, Lebanon, Lebanon. How I pine for a free, peaceful Lebanon. I would really like to go back.
Finally making the trip, thanks to the doubtful dares of Mills and Beirut-native Rabih El Khoury, I punctuated the whole event with a trip down to the Middle East after turning in my thesis and dissertation. The food, scenery, hospitality was all fantastic as was the very ancient historical sense one can get at sites like Byblos where at least 17 civilizations have held ground on a tiny peninsula and the more photogenic Baalbek, complete with its Roman temples and structures in the Bekaa Valley, close to the Syrian border.
Beirut appeared headed back to headier times it enjoyed in previous decades when it was called the Paris of the Middle East – very entertaining, fun, racy, sexy and diverse. One can sometimes scuba dive in the morning and snow ski in the evening in Lebanon’s more peaceful times. Las Vegas odds are not high on current truces holding up forever there since last year’s summertime war between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, however.
Rabih was an impressive driver to Baalbek, dazzling the many militia and Syrian checkpoint guards with questions before they could have time to worry about a camera-wielding American in this pre-Iraq War spot where roadside Ayatollah Khomeini posters reminding you to mind your manners.
I am very glad those guys dared me to go.
My world is a million times larger and at the same time much smaller since that day in 2001 when I arrived at London’s Gatwick Airport, seeking to start that new education. I count among friends, aquaintenances and former coursemates people from a long list of countries around the world. Going in, the top benefit looked like it might be that your coursework is finished in one year, whereas it is usually two – at best – in most U.S. universities, but I got more than I expected.
I interned for several months at Associated Press under European Sports Editor Steve Wilson and served as part-time web content editor for Media Diversity Institute. MDI is a non-government organization dedicated to making the press in the frequent ethnically-troubled and occasionally war-torn Balkans and Eastern Europe think and write in neutral, fairer-minded terms. No way that experience was going to happen in Laredo, or most anywhere else in the U.S., either.
City University’s International Journalism coursework probably strengthened my writing more than anything else, going through a series of instructors, despite using a hybrid English style. The English one hears in a cosmopolitan London university is another education with unique variations all challenging whatever one might have grown up with.
England is a great place to get a bearing on English and its many visitors from afar, including the U.S., help an English-speaking person know and appreciate their mother tongue much better.
As a journalist, the first time I handled a story for a class there in London I realized that I – like everyone -- has a place on the world scale, that I am very much as good, bad, lazy, industrious or energetic as anyone anywhere else, and the only thing really stopping me was me. Seeing the world in different accents prompts that student to think outside their comfortable, but self-limiting little sandbox made up of know turf, familiar places and names.
The course also introduced me to formal international relations studies and I did come through like a rookie there, but I am still way ahead of where I was. And I live an international life every minute here in Laredo.
Any time I pick up the phone it could be from Mexico, Sweden, the Middle East, England, Spain, or somewhere off Mines Road. Anyone asking what I learned out of my graduate school experience might prefer it in writing because the explanation could very outlive any one student. It can’t all come to mind in any single instant, either.

Higher education means higher costs

2007-01-30T14:54:00.000-08:00

(Note: A printed version of this story is available in Laredo, Texas in the January 2007 edition of LareDOS. You can read more online at www.laredosnews.com in pdf, too.)

By MIKE McILVAIN

Tenacity and staring into computers for hours could be the most important factors in finding affordable universities.
If the kids aren’t going to stay home and attend local higher education to reduce costs budget-minded parents might hope they eye crossing the Red River into Oklahoma, the Sabine into Louisiana, or have a sudden impulse to go to New Hampshire. New Hampshire state universities lead the nation in affordability with Texas’ border states Oklahoma and Louisiana close behind. Arkansas is consistently ahead of Texas, too.
Texas universities, a good buy in previous decades and magnet for numerous out-of-state students, has slipped to No. 23 in overall affordability in its state schools, according to statistics compiled by the Educational Policy Institute of Washington, D.C. and Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
“The competition is out there and that is what it will come down to,” Adriana Marin, Laredo Community College’s interim student financial aid director, said. “Hopefully though, we will gain more money for our students.”
Research-minded students and parents can begin sizing up potential universities by visiting their Web sites. Many schools have started to include costs through links off the home page.
The difference between those happier more affordable days in Texas universities and today’s nerve-wracking, number crunching hunt for reasonable and acceptable tuition and fees stem from deregulation at the various state capitols. Some state schools are beginning to wonder if they should drop the word state from their names.
“Every year we get less and less from the state. We get less than 25 percent of our money from the state now,” Dorothy Evans, Texas State’s director of alumni relations said in a recent visit to Laredo. “We’re not alone.”
Evans noted that the situation puts increasing importance and stress on fund-raising positions at the university.
Texas State, which changed its name from Southwest Texas State University a few years ago, continues to grow and has seen its enrollment double to 27,500 from its more affordable days in the 1970s. Texas State includes a new Round Rock campus, but the San Marcos-based school had to issue bonds to build there.
Evans said her association wants to build a $15 million alumni center in San Marcos, but the university won’t give them any money for it.
She believes there is some lobbying for higher education in Austin, but not enough.
“John Connally was the last governor that cared about education,” Evans said. “There is lobbying every year, but there is lots of money for the prisons.”
Connally was first elected governor in 1962 and re-elected twice to two more 2-year terms.
“When the State legislature cuts appropriations to colleges and universities there are only a few other sources of revenue available to these institutions and tuition is one of these sources,” Martha Ellis, president of the Association of Texas Colleges and Universities, said in an e-mail from Baytown where she also serves as president of Lee College. “When choices are made to not use public money to support public higher education, the burden will fall on the shoulders of the student.”
Sandy Baum, senior policy analyst for the College Board and professor of economics at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., says affordability seekers need to eye and research their intended universities carefully, but apply as early as possible to avoid missing any benefits hiding in the background. Baum notes that numerous doors open once accepted.
“Do not just look at the published price,” she said by phone. “The figures might show a school to be a little more cheap, but they might not have more money to help you.
“In Texas, Rice, for example, might the most expensive, but they would have more money to help students.”
Baum re-affirms that community colleges are the bargain, where many students also qualify for financial aid, but being able to attend one depends largely on the region as some states have more 2-year colleges than others. Laredo has Laredo Community College where a 15-hour semester’s total in tuition and fees costs $858. The same number of hours at Laredo’s Texas A&M International University cost $2,339.
Marin understands the financial battle students and parents face both from professional and personal views. She has two college-age children.
“I think it’s gotten out of hand. The cost is going sky high,” Marin said.
Marin says her colleagues around the country are watching state capitols and the new U.S. Congress, hoping for some help.
The U.S. new 110th Congress’ new Democratic-led House of Representatives voted 356-71 on Jan. 17 to cut interest rates on student loans in half to 3.4, passing the bill onto the Senate.
The interest rate cut, if it passes the Senate, will help, but Marin echoes Baum’s call to register as soon as possible, too. There is no substitute for planning.
“If you plan carefully, I think you can succeed and get your 4-year education,” Marin said.
Marin adds that one has to watch out for the difference between desire and reality, pointing toward potential roadblocks like the high cost of a $4,000 semester at the University of Texas against a once a year $4,050 PELL grant.
U.S. Democratic Senators Kennedy and Obama have introduced legislation to raise the PELL grant maximum to $5,100. The $4,050 ceiling has remained the same for four years.
“It doesn’t matter where you go, the thing is to go,” Marin said. “Even if you’re not going to LCC, we help fill out forms for money for college.”
State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, has been initiating and pushing legislation to encourage students to finish in that desired 4-year time frame, which would save students and universities money.
Last year Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst named her to head Texas’ subcommittee on higher education. Zaffirini holds a doctoral degree and taught at Laredo Junior College before joining the legislature in 1987.
She knows she has some serious challenges to make Texas universities more affordable again.
“I have a passion for higher education,” she said. “In a visit to Texas A&M I discovered that very few were graduating in four years.”
Zaffirini knows there are many whose personal situations don’t allow for a straight 4-year run to finish their bachelor’s degrees, but believes that the majority of college-age students could enroll with a solid degree plan. There would be the inevitable changes to almost all plans, but she sees savings through the more organized pathway to a degree.
Zaffirini has found problems with some university advisors in Texas – sometimes costing students an additional year through poor planning and advice. Zaffirini notes that her son, Carlos Jr., was almost forced to spend an extra year at the University of Texas for one course, but went over an advisor’s head and gained admission to the class.
“She was technically correct and following the rules,” Zaffirini said.
Zaffirini doesn’t believe students should have to do that and wants to see advisors improved through staff development: hoping to head off those upper class dilemmas.
Zaffirini also favors capable high school students taking college courses and testing out of subjects they already know.
“Laredo students could get 16 hours in Spanish,” she said. “For all who grew up in Laredo it could be pretty easy.”
Zaffirini would like to see more incentives for college-bound students to prepare and says higher education would be free if she had absolute say-so, believing college is a right and not a privilege, but the state can’t afford that now, so money has to be used wisely.
Zaffirini is optimistic for affordability in Texas universities, basing part of it on Dewhurst’s interest in higher education.
Laredo’s U.S House Rep. Henry Cuellar carries a serious bent on education, too, as Congress’ most degreed member with five and doesn’t believe students and parents should worry too much if pursuit of an education leads out of town. Cuellar made the unusual transfer from Laredo Junior College to the Ivy League’s Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
Cuellar credits his time at Georgetown for some of his most important individual development, noting it as probably the best move he made in his academic days. It is uncommon for Ivy League schools to accept junior college transfers, but Cuellar made that transition despite growing up with the same strong family ties many of his constituents have.
Sometimes those ties are too strong to permit the out-of-town transfer as Cuellar witnessed in a recent case of a young girl that could have gone to Georgetown as he did.
“My parents were crying, but after a while they said go ahead,” he said. “Georgetown, to me, was a catalyst in seeking more education – the law degree and PhD.”
Cuellar liked studying with students from 26 other countries and found some of them similar to him in personality, but saw differences, too, as he planned to “work harder than the person next to me” with the goal of getting into law school.
Cuellar got through Georgetown, a catholic university, with two part-time jobs, work study and a small loan of $3,000 – small by most standards, but it was enough to teach him an understanding of what many students go through.
Cuellar notes that college costs have risen by some 41 percent since 2001 and Congress aims to cut student loan interest rates in half, from an average of 6.8 to 3.4, aiming largely toward low middle class income families. The Democratic-led aim is to help students hurdle more financial barriers, giving them a larger choice of schools.
Even if the Senate and President side with the House on lowering student loan interest rates, the overall costs remain high and look to continue rising without more support be it from state or federal sources. The battle rages.
“One thing I can assure you, all presidents are cognizant of the rising cost and are truly working to be efficient in our operations while assuring the quality of our mission--teaching, research, and service,” Ellis said. “We are committed to the importance of an educated workforce for the economic development of our state, be it the operator in the petrochemical industry or the surgeon in the hospital.
“We know that if Texas is to be competitive with other states we must have an educated workforce. Therefore we are attempting to do more with less so that we can continue to close the gaps and educate an additional 500,000 people in the next 10 years. The future of Texas is directly related to quality of our higher education institutions and to having students attend these institutions.”

Blood Diamond review

2007-01-22T14:58:00.000-08:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

A few years ago one could hardly find a good movie, but nowadays it is tough to find the time to see all the good ones.
Hollywood has advanced from the days when it seemed like Stephen Spielberg was the only one there who consistently knew how to make a good movie. Hollywood is making better movies and “Blood Diamond” is certainly one of them.
“Blood Diamond” might have rated 15 habaneros on a scale of 1 to 10 several years ago, but gets a good, fat, healthy 8 now, despite a few familiar movie ploys, which stem from the bad recent days of Hollywood when the makers couldn’t get the funding from the financiers without including several scenes that were clearly adapted from previous successful productions.
“Blood Diamond” will remind veteran moviegoers right away of 1983’s “Under Fire,” starring Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman and Joanna Cassidy. Both movies are set in real life civil wars in tropical settings, focusing on international journalists and, or action-type people.
Rapidly rising star Leonardo DiCaprio, doing well these days in intense, edgy roles, is the former mercenary, with a credible white Zimbabwe accent, who has gone into smuggling diamonds from war-torn Sierra Leone through neighboring Liberia in the late 1990s. Sweet-faced Jennifer Connelly is the still idealistic international journalist Maddy Bowen who DiCaprio’s Danny Archer meets in a Freetown beachside bar, sparking a budding romance that never has but a few brief moments of peace to feel like it has a chance of going anywhere.
There isn’t much peace in a civil war with people making millions off diamonds sold to finance guns and ammunition and “Blood Diamond” -- blending thrilling action in several battle scenes with artfully sprinkled philosophical and moral points – makes three hours zip by quicker than a round from an AK47.
The action picks up shortly after Djimon Hounsou starts the movie in a seaside fishing village as fisherman and net mender Solomon Vandy. “Gladiator” fans will remember him as Maximus’ friend Juba and the last one to leave the area after the final fight scene in the coliseum.
Vandy is captured by rebels invading his village and taken to work in a river, digging for diamonds. He comes up with a big one, and mindful of his son Dia who wants to grow up to be a doctor, doesn’t hesitate to find a way to keep it for himself. The rebels’ brutality doesn’t hurt his angst with them, either.
Dia is captured by the rebels and coerced into becoming a boy soldier, adding a sub-
story to the drama, leading to one of several endnotes as topical as tonight’s television newscast.
“Blood Diamond” is very entertaining, but it’s more than entertainment – blood diamonds exist and this movie carries a documentary tilt to it, reminding us that people die to have pretty brides wear pretty wedding rings.
Archer gets caught smuggling at the border and he and Vandy are pushed together after the rebel diamond digging camp is attacked by government forces just in the nick of time. Vandy is taken to a Freetown prison with everyone else where the wounded rebel camp commander fingers him for hiding the big “pink” diamond. Vandy and Archer are freed just in time to dodge bullets, rockets and grenades in one of several very well-shot battle scenes on a level with the best ever seen in a movie as rebels attack the capital city.
Cinematography in the rest of “Blood Diamond” is pretty good, too.
Cameras make the most of scenes filmed in South Africa and Mozambique, including enough wild life, cloud forests and mountains to entice almost any itchy-footed traveler. Properly photographed city slums, devoid of the usual in-your-face beggars found in much of the third world, have a deceiving comfortable look to them.
“This is Africa, or T-I-A,” is used carefully a few times by Archer and his former mercenary commander, Arnold Vosloo as Colonel Coetzee, when discussing the violence and Africa’s troubles. “This is Africa” might sound a lot like “It’s the Code of the West” heard frequently in James Coburn and Carroll O’Connor’s 1967 western comedy “Waterhole #3.” There is a certain smile, as with that same quote in “Waterhole,” that goes with “T-I-A” each time and punctuates the script when Archer and Coetzee use it in one of the final scenes as the colonel is gunned down.
Only a quick eye would catch the obvious minor error that IMDb.com notes online in the 1999 London street scene near the end when a 2005 Volkswagen slips past filmmakers.
“Blood Diamond” brings plenty of entertainment to the screen. Be prepared to be pinned down in your seat for one of the more engaging, quicker long rides eyes and mind can travel via the big screen.

Note: A printed version of this review is available in Laredo, Texas in the January 2007 edition of LareDOS. You can see in pdf at www.laredosnews.com.

That very impressive instant

2007-01-22T14:14:00.000-08:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

Words can’t always describe the sight that stops a traveler or meets the eye head on, halting all movement for an instant.
That instant is usually repeated several times and frequently lengthened with the traveler’s eyesight finding a vista, valley, gorge, mountain, meadow, friendly walking trail, sunset, sunrise, river, creek, woods, grassy riverbank or silhouetted skyline, which won’t let go. These enlightened moments of appreciation are normally near the end of a vacation, or sometimes a light business trip when realization sets in that this sight can’t be seen at home – and certainly not at work.
Frequently, the sight is a quick flash -- a silvery, glistening-in-the-sun fish popping up out of nowhere, leaping for a fly, despite being surrounded by hungry seagulls, or the sun’s select rays breaking through low clouds at dusk over a seaside rock formation you’ll probably never see again. Anyone’s eye and mind-catching instant could be in the mountains, by a river, in a forest, in a desert, or in the concrete canyons of an unfamiliar city. These individual instances vary between the viewer and the scenery with as many possibilities and philosophical interpretations as the mind allows.
Such sights can spark a slumbering inner optimism and keep it up – after all, that hungry fish had the guts to jump for a buzzing insect and survived, or maybe those sunrays did break through the clouds so nicely over that big rock just for me? After all, it was a busy, hard year, so it’s deserved.
These sights seem to help sustain through the work stress from one break to another, much like a series of contracts.
Take it in. That mind-friendly, relaxing views of rocks, sea, birds, sun, beach and otherwise near silent serenity isn’t anything like that hallway down to the boss’ office, or that fake wood paneling up over the computer that sees you at your most stressed moments.
Each following glance toward that friendly, but fleeting traveler’s sight is followed by a series of smiles until the thought that only a photograph might remain from that instant.
A few lucky people have a ranch, or possibly a friend’s or relative’s farm they can visit where friendly rock formations, river bends, woods or nearby chirping birds or the sight of other wildlife help relax. Several neighborhoods in South and Central Texas are home to deer herds. Some nicely kept and carefully gardened backyards offer some of those instances of visual-to-mental escape, too.
For those who don’t have those visual relaxation aides at home or nearby, it’s a good idea to seize the moment whenever and wherever it presents itself.
Some find a dash of that renewing visual-to-mental relief through other’s photos on the new photo-share Web sites. Others find a touch of it on their computer screen’s photos – taken by someone they don’t know and often of places they don’t know, but the effect is much the same, despite being on a lower and less personal scale.
Seeing and experiencing one’s own vistas and photographing it gets the recommendation, but as stress doesn’t do anyone any lasting good, any of the visual aides which axe the stress monster deserve good play.
Walk, look, enjoy the sights and sites, click the camera shutter and kill the old stress monster as many times as time allows. Longer life could be available through the eye and a wide-angle lens.
The Laredo-area offers some worthwhile sights along the river and some find comfort in the big sky, which is easily taken for granted until visiting other places where the sky is smaller as it’s blocked out or partially obscured. Some of the local big sky is more visible when traveling south toward Zapata, or in those ultra clear day southside vistas in which the Sierra Madre near Monterrey is just slightly visible.

Note: A printed version of this is available in the January issue of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas and it can be seen online in pdf at www.laredosnews.com.

Kids speak honestly and quickly

2007-01-16T13:44:00.000-08:00

Kids Really Think Quickly!!

TEACHER : Maria, go to the map and find North America.

MARIA : Here it is!

TEACHER : Correct. Now class, who discovered America?

CLASS : Maria!

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TEACHER : Why are you late, Frank?

FRANK : Because of the sign.

TEACHER : What sign?

FRANK : The one that says, "School Ahead, Go Slow."

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TEACHER: John, why are you doing your math multiplication on the floor?

JOHN : You told me to do it without using tables!

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TEACHER : Glenn, how do you spell "crocodile?"

GLENN : K-R-O-K-O-D-A-I-L"

TEACHER : No, that's wrong

GLENN : Maybe it s wrong, but you asked me how I spell it!

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TEACHER : Donald, what is the chemical formula for water?

DONALD : H I J K L M N O!!

TEACHER : What are you talking about?

DONALD : Yesterday you said it's H to O!

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TEACHER : Winnie, name one important thing we have today that we didn't
have ten years ago.

WINNIE : Me!

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TEACHER : Goss, why do you always get so dirty?

GOSS : Well, I'm a lot closer to the ground than you are.

___________________________________________________________

TEACHER : Millie, give me a sentence starting with "I."

MILLIE : I is...

TEACHER : No, Millie..... Always say, "I am."

MILLIE : All right... "I am the ninth letter of the alphabet."

___________________________________________________________

TEACHER : Can anybody give an example of COINCIDENCE?

TINO : Sir, my Mother and Father got married on the same day, same
time."

___________________________________________________________

TEACHER : George Washington not only chopped down his father's cherry
tree, but also admitted doing it. Now, Louie, do you know why his father
didn't punish him?"

LOUIS : Because George still had the axe in his hand.

___________________________________________________________

TEACHER : Now, Simon, tell me frankly, do you say prayers before eating?

SIMON : No sir, I don't have to, my Mom is a good cook.

___________________________________________________________

TEACHER : Clyde, your composition on "My Dog" is exactly the same as
your brother's. Did you copy his?

CLYDE : No, teacher, it's the same dog!!

__________________________________________________________

TEACHER : Harold, what do you call a person who keeps on talking when
people are no longer interested?

HAROLD : A teacher

Crytpo Judaism -- does any linger?

2007-01-03T15:44:00.000-08:00

Note: A print version of this story appeared in the December issue of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas, but more about LareDOS can be seen online, and in pdf form, at www.laredosnews.com.

By MIKE McILVAIN

Mysteries course through our blood like raindrops on a lake and Jewish Sephardic lines and stories of modern crypto Jews surface frequently in South Texas and Mexico.
Plenty of evidence points to a past, in which Spain’s infamous Inquisition burned many at the stake, fueled the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and forced many to go underground. Much of that evidence extends to modern family storytelling and historical research about many of the crypto Jews pioneering Spain’s colonization into what is now northern Mexico and Texas – out in the wilds and away from church or government officials who might prefer to burn them at the stake.
Experts say the crypto Jews of the American Southwest and northern Mexico probably gave up their hidden Judaism for the safer Catholicism two or three generations after landing in the Americas, but that’s only because none have stepped forward with any concrete proof.
And they possibly never will.
Probably.
Most likely.
Seth Ward at the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver writes that the term crypto Jew is always used with respect to Sephardic converts to Christianity, but it could be said to apply to the secret Judaism practiced under Islam when the Almohades invaded Spain in the 12th century; in Mashhad, Iran in the 19th and 20th centuries and possibly to the Turkish Donme.
“Due to its secretive nature, a sense of community was possible only in fairly remote areas; even so, there was a constant fear that a practice might give them away to the authorities, or even that a family member might turn them in,” Ward’s story adds. “Crypto-Judaism is used to refer to a wide range of phenomena. In some cases, families are reported to have transmitted explicit statements such as ‘We are Jews’ through the generations.”
Corpus Christi-based historian and retired ethnology professor Leonardo Carrillo says some families passed down house keys from homes in Spain. Hopes were that the Inquisition would one day fade away, allowing Sephardic Jews to return home.
Crytpo Jews occupy an obscure corner of North American and European history, but their descendents appear to be all around and among us in abundance – leaving any future crypto Judaism to most likely fall into urban legend, possibly rising in a fiction novel, or a movie.
“So are there any crypto Jews today? NO,” Historian, archivist and “Silent Heritage” author Richard G. Santos, of San Antonio, said by e-mail. “What you will find are their descendents whose religious beliefs and practices will vary according to their familial religiosity, upbringing, worldview and heritage awareness.”
Carlos M. Larralde writes online at www.cryptojews.com that Laredo founder Spanish army Cpt. Tomas Sanchez and most of this city’s original settlers came with Jewish bloodlines, too. Larralde lives in the San Diego, California-area, but like many Laredoans claims to be a Sanchez descendent.
Larralde noted Sanchez’s connections to Judaism in his story.
“During Colonial Mexico, the Sanchez family used different surnames, a practice common among Hispanic Jews. Like other Jews, Sanchez had confidence in himself,” his story said. “Sanchez’s family roots sprang from Nuevo Leon since the 1600s, as part of the community founded by New Christian Governor Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva. There were probably 100 or more families.”
Carvajal was later found to be Jewish and many of his family and associates were victims of the Inquisition.
Carvajal came to Mexico through Portugal and Carrillo says Carvajal’s followers were Jews expelled from Spain, staying in Portugal long enough to be called Portuguese, escaping Spanish decrees against traveling to the Americas.
None of this surprises Laredo archivist and businessman Armengol Guerra who points to the online names section of Sephardim.com.
“It looks like the Laredo phone book,” Guerra said. “Probably 60 percent of the names in Laredo are of Jewish descent.
“Why come here in the mid-1700s when there was nothing here?” Guerra asked. “I think they wanted to be free of the Inquisition. It is surprising to a lot that they are Sephardic and not just Spanish and Mexican.”
Sephardim.com says the word Sephardic came from Roman times when many Jews were exiled from the Holy Land to the Iberian Peninsula.
“The area became known by the Hebrew word Sephard meaning far away. The Jews in Spain and Portugal became known as Sephardim or Sephardi, and those things associated with the Sephardim including names, customs, genealogy and religious rites, became known as Sephardic,” the Web site says.
Here in South Texas, weekends would have been different in a Jewish home. Carrillo says the Saturday Sabbath really began at sundown on Friday when candles were lit.
“They were not supposed to work, sweep, bath or eat pork,” Carrillo said. “They were obliged to eat pork in the daytime, but not at home.”
Carrillo says weeks were counted in eight days, too.
Carrillo, Santos and others note the appearance of numerous Ladino words popping up in Spanish-language conversations. Ladino was the dialect of Sephardic Jews taken with them when fleeing Spain after Queen Isabela’s expulsion decree in 1492.
Variations like muncho instead of mucho and comite rather than comiste are only two Ladino examples, but many more are listed in the growing number of Web sites dedicated to crypto and Sephardic heritage.
More information is showing up in libraries and bookstores, too.
Santos has taken some criticism for his work as it tends to divulge the family secret, as he told Austin Chronicle reviewer David Garza in 2001 after his book “Silent Heritage” was published.
Carrillo and Santos both note that some family lineage secrets include the marriage of cousins. Carrillo says there were some cases of close cousins marrying, but Santos says the Catholic Church didn’t allow first cousins to marry and the term cousin has a different meaning in the extended families of Mexico and South Texas.
“The licencias matromoniales conducted before any marriage could be performed attest to the fact they did each parties' family tree to their great great grand parents. Uncles marrying nieces and aunts marrying nephews were not uncommon. Second, third and etc. cousins marrying were also not uncommon as they were not illegal or prohibited,” Santos said in e-mail. “Bear in mind that in the Hispanic and Mexican culture the extended family bridges generations. Therefore, distant relatives are frequently referred to as cousins, uncles, aunts etc. even though they could be four generations removed. “
Loose-lipped family could give a crypto away, but dangers existed in public habits, too.
Converted Jews, or conversos, and their family members weren’t free of discrimination and the Inquisition by simply converting to Catholicism, but they, and the cryptos, could hide their faith, or links to Judaism by publicly violating kosher dietary laws when they ate pork, or shellfish. Muslims, also eventually forced to convert or leave Spain, had a similar diet and the same security problem.
Some people of crypto descent have maintained old handed down habits and claim to be allergic to pork.
“I don’t think you would have to look too far for an illustrative crypto Jew. You might find one on your own newspaper,” Dr. Jack Zeller said. “Many people know that their family is a bit odd since they have family customs that are very important that are never discussed outside the family. Anyone on your staff that thinks their family has an allergy to pork are good candidates. There is no such medical entity.”
Zeller speaks with authority as both a physician and president of Zulanu, a worldwide Jewish social and educational organization.
Zeller and others in synagogues and Jewish organizations have increasingly met people who came to believe that they are Jewish in habit and ancestry. But Jewish leaders constantly remind Web site readers and researchers that Judaism is a religion and not a race, leaving traceable bloodlines to the Semitic peoples, which includes vast numbers in the Middle East and Asia Minor.
Leaders also note a membership surge, which appears to have emotional, if not direct blood ties to that crypto, or converso, past.
An Oct. 29, 2005 New York Times story notes the strong growth of Judaism in the American Southwest.
“It is difficult to know precisely how many Hispanics are converting or adopting Jewish religious practices, but accounts of such embraces of Judaism are growing more common in parts of the Southwest,” Simon Romero’s story said. “In Clear Lake, a suburb south of Houston, Rabbi Stuart Federow has overseen half a dozen conversions of Hispanics in recent years. In El Paso, Rabbi Steven Leon said he had converted almost 40 Hispanic families since moving from New Jersey to Texas 19 years ago.”
Much of the same is happening much farther south in Brazil where Kobi Ben Simhon wrote for Ha’aretz’ online version on March 24 last year that all signs indicate a crypto Jewish awakening in search of its roots.
Simhon quotes from Israeli professor Avi Gross, of Ben-Gurion University, an expert on Spanish and Portuguese Jewry, while using the word Marranos, a derogatory word meaning swine, which stems from terminology in the expulsion from Spain.
“He describes a conversation he had in Sao Paolo with prof. Anita Novinsky, a world expert on the Inquisition – ‘She denies persistence of Judaism among the Marranos, yet she admits, as she told me, that Brazil is seething with Judaism below the surface.’ I will not forget what she said about one of the descendents of the Marranos I met – that he carries history in his flesh and blood.
“From my point of view as a historian, that is a definitive statement. After all, she is highly critical of the way historical research has idealized the Marranos’ preservation of Judaism, and when she says something like that she apparently knows whereof she speaks.”
Houston’s Family Tree DNA is one of several companies that could help some decide if they are of Jewish ancestry, but this tester has a Jewish-specific test.
“We could tell you if those clues indicate a possible Jewish ancestry, or if you are related to someone that is in our database. Our Jewish specific comparative databases are the largest in the world containing records for Jews of Ashkenazi and Sephardic origins, as well as Levite and Cohanim,” Family Tree’s Web site says.
Owner Bennett Greenspan says he contracts with the University of Arizona for Family Tree testing.
Greenspan is an amateur genealogist and has read about human migrations since watching National Geographic television specials as a boy. Greenspan notes the reasoning and logic behind why great numbers of Jews would have come to the Americas. Anyone lacking an army to fight back with most likely would have fled to remote places, too, but the DNA he finds in those Jewish heritage tests net much the same findings he would get testing a Palestinian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Syrian, Saudi Arabian or someone else from that region.
“I think a lot of Palestinians are Muslims, but were Christians and Jews, but they were not deported by the Romans,” he said by phone from Houston. “I think many were fighting Rome some 2,000 years ago. The DNA between the Palestinians and Jews is closer.”
Greenspan has been in the DNA business since 1999 when he bought another company’s test for a friend from Argentina, but says there’s a lot of work to do, hoping to get more information about those Spanish exiles “and make it easier for people to look up.” He is also diving more into Mexico’s intriguing gene pools, which include earlier groups than the crypto Jews.
Experts might have the confidence to bet money that no more crypto Jews exist, but they might be conservative in their betting, too.
“For many decades it was assumed that no crypto Jews remained in Iberia, but in 1917 Samuel Schwarz, a Polish Jewish engineer, stumbled upon remnants of crypto Jews in the village of Belmonte, Portugal,” Ward writes. “Attempts to revive crypto-Judaism at this time were defeated by opponents, but in 1932 interest in the crypto Jews of Spain and Portugal, and their contemporary descendents, was first popularized by the famous Judaic scholar Cecil Roth with the publication of “A History of the Marranos.” Much has changed since then, including gradual replacement of the negative Spanish word Marrano with the positive terms crypto Jews or anuism (forced converts).”
Santos’ epilogue in “Silent Heritage” places Laredo in the New Kingdom of De Leon founded by Carvajal and his crypto followers, which evolved into South Texas and the Mexican states of Nuevo Leon, Coahuila and Tamaulipas. This territory became a patria chica, or little homeland, separate from the other patria chica around present day New Mexico and remote from Mexico City’s bureaucracy.
Santos writes that the founding families of both patrias chicas were mostly of Sephardic descent.
“It mattered not if they were crypto Jews or sincere converses; they were Sephardic by culture. They were the ruling class and landed aristocracy. As such, their culture, worldview, cuisine and lifestyle was imitated not only by their Christian counterparts, but by the converted and assimilated Native American Indian cultures,” Santos wrote.
Turkish-born Laredo businesswoman Matilde Frank, 84, has assimilated into Mexican and United States cultures from Sephardic roots established after the 1492 expulsion from Spain.
Her family was able to practice their faith openly in Turkey and could in Mexico, but some of that old Inquisition-based discrimination lingered when she was a little girl in her second of three countries.
“Little by little it got better,” she said in both English and Spanish. “Thanks to the foreigners, Mexico is getting growing up, and the U.S., too.”
Frank recalls a lifetime in sales in Mexico and the U.S., but sees love as the top product sought everywhere and that commonality serves to break down barriers between divided peoples.
“People want to be loved. Everybody, somewhere inside has a heart,” she said.
Frank also notes the world’s people taking more control of their lives and their country’s directions in recent decades much more so than in past centuries, denying chances for policies like the Inquisition to happen again.

Note: Some of the other Web sites related to crypto Judaism:
www.ezralanousim.org
www.saudades.org
www.anusim.org
www.kulanu.org
www.shavei.org
www.hadassah.com
www.familytreedna.com

Most of these sites also provide numerous links to others.

Robert F. Kennedy

2007-01-03T15:10:00.000-08:00

RFK was one of the casualties of social change, or seemed to be, when he was gunned down in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in the summer of 1968.

The movie "Bobby" was Emilio Estevez's first as writer and director, but it still honored Kennedy with some great performances and a well-done ending. Sharon Stone certainly proved she can act.

U.S. Senate photo

Bobby review

2007-01-03T14:42:00.000-08:00

Note: This is derived from a print version of this review in the December 2006 edition of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas. LareDOS can be seen online at www.laredosnews.com.

By MIKE McILVAIN

“Bobby” could have been called “Hotel” with the various subplots developing in and around Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel the night Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968.
Actor, screenwriter and director Emilio Estevez let his movie highlight the essence of the ‘60s – breaking racial barriers and working together as one nation – but, it started too slow in its little stories of people in the hotel in their stories to grab all the audience it could have.
This movie is semi-documentary, using RFK news clips and others from marches, riots and Vietnam, but it also has a generation gap. The meanings and nuances of the cinematography, dialogue and Kennedy’s hope-raising presidential campaign speeches bring back that era for those who lived in 1968, but it could come off like ancient history overkill for kids and young adults.
Personal buttons touched by the ideals and experiences of that time -- which the movie hits on more than misses – give “Bobby” the chance to sit much higher with some viewers than others.
Anyone who recalls watching television that night of June 5, 1968 might feel moved by the movie’s well-planned end. Viewers remembering that night and those surprising televised instances of the wounded and bleeding Kennedy lying on the kitchen floor hold their breath as he smiles and ends the ballroom appearance saying, “Now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there.”
Estevez’s “Bobby” goes right to the gut in the effective mix of RFK’s pointed speeches stoked with the ideals of that era over Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” as he and his entourage exit the ballroom after acknowledging the presidential primary victory. The pace through the kitchen is deliberately slow, allowing more emotional buildup as star-cast subplot characters assemble, finding their place at that instant when assassin Sirhan Sirhan shoots Kennedy and wounds several of the others whose lives took them within range of Sirhan’s pistol as shocked and angered RFK backers wrestled the shooter to the ground.
“Bobby” also comes off much like a 1970s disaster movie with its smattering of big stars in supporting roles, but moved from a seven habanero to nine habanero rating here in the end from this reviewer, who vividly recalls being up watching TV alone that night up the coast north of Los Angeles in California in 1968.
Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood, William H. Macy, Helen Hunt, Christian Slater, Laurence Fishburne, Martin Sheen, Heather Graham, Harry Belafonte and Ashton Kutcher are the more familiar faces doting the subplots and some carry major roles in the dramatic kitchen shooting scene. Wood, Hunt and Slater are wounded as are campaign volunteers played by Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty a few hours after recovering from an acid trip with Kutcher trying to play the pusher.
Kutcher didn’t bring much energy to this role, but his real-life wife Demi Moore did well as the boozy singer Virginia Fallon on the downside of her career. Fallon is married to Estevez, playing her edgy husband and frustrated manager Tim Fallon. He exits the movie, leaving her while coincidentally bumping into Sirhan at the front door.
Stone handled her role so well as the cuckolded beautician Miriam Ebbers married to hotel manager Paul Ebbers, played by Macy, that it was easy to forget that she is the former “Basic Instinct” star. Paul’s affair with switchboard operator Angela, played by Heather Graham, ends earlier on that fatal summer day, but Slater, playing fired kitchen manager Daryl complicates the matter by telling Miriam. Paul later slugs Daryl for doing that.
Hopkins, Hunt, Lohan, Sheen – Estevez’s father -- and Wood didn’t hurt themselves any in their supporting roles. Fishburne was effective as chef Edward Robinson, but his overly gracious acceptance of two free Dodger baseball game tickets from Jose Rojas, played very well by Freddy Rodriguez, might have been overbaked.
Jose, a low-paid kitchen helper, reluctantly, but of his own free will gave away his two tickets to the game in which Dodger pitching great Don Drysdale was to pitch a record sixth consecutive shutout that night. Kennedy acknowledged the feat in his final speech in the ballroom and it was Jose shaking RFK’s hand and looking at him with a visible heartfelt smile as the first bullets hit the senator. It was also Jose seen trying to keep Kennedy from bleeding to death in those chaotic flashes of TV footage from the kitchen floor.
Chef Edward had scribbled a note on the wall, tagging Jose as “The Once and Future King” after he was given the tickets. That graffiti was ironically splattered with blood in the assassination.
Estevez isn’t likely to win an Oscar for his first picture as writer and director, but he awarded the 1960s and its worthwhile ideals with a moment of deserved attention.

Nice example

2006-12-05T11:33:00.000-08:00

Note: A print version of this story can be seen in the November issue of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas, or online at www.laredosnews.com.

By MIKE McILVAIN

Common ground must taste pretty good, judging from approving nods at
10 East Del Mar Blvd. where Baptists and Catholics share facilities.
First Baptist Church is in the process of building its new facilities
not far away behind the Post Office on Del Mar and temporary site host
Mary Help of Christians School is also growing, eyeing a new place on
the Bob Bullock Loop, but seem glad for the temporary shared
experience.
"It really has been pleasant working with Sister Suzanne Miller and
the nuns and a pleasure, knowing we're all ministering for Jesus
Christ," FBC Pastor Ron Scott said, smiling. "Words can't express all
of it."
Scott smiled again, noting that FBC baptisms are held in the MHC swimming pool.
Sister Suzanne echoed Scott's sentiment and facial expression,
pointing to shared classrooms.
"It turned out to be great that they rented from us," Sister Suzanne
said. "They are kind and generous, great renters, and we've had a
wonderful example of Christian unity.
"I told them if they ever need space they should call us on the Loop.
We'll always remain friends."
FBC has been renting space at MHC for a year and hopes to be in its
new 8-acre site sometime next year. MHC hopes everything is in place
at their new location in time for the 2008-09 school year.
Salesian-run MHC has been on its Del Mar site for several years, but
concrete plans for their new facility are on hold until all the
paperwork is complete. FBC has some of its plans posted on its Web
site at www.fbclaredo.org.
FBC is currently headquartered in a MHC building, siding Candlewood
St., near the intersection with Del Mar.
Moving into its new facility should end FBC's nomadic period. FBC was
at 2919 Malinche for 40 years, but outgrew that building and moved to
the Nixon High School Annex for 9 months before renting from MHC. FBC
celebrated 125 years in Laredo in October with the land dedication for
the new church.
FBC has a 14-member building committee overseeing work on the
26,531-square foot facility.
"These are very exciting times," Scott said. "It's going to be a great
location. It's fronting Bartlett and you can hit Del Mar with a rock."
Scott counts some 200 in attendance each Sunday with members coming
from as far away as Mines Road and Rio Bravo. Scott feels the numbers
could double once in the new church.
Music and youth programs are included in the plans as is a playground
and continuation of a real-time Spanish-language service with
listeners wearing translating receivers.
Scott, an Alabama native, has been in Laredo for 10 years and served
FBC as pastor for 4. He was ordained in Alabama and here when the
previous pastor left, so he was asked to take the role.
"Here we are and plan on staying," Scott said. "I love the mix of cultures.
"My Spanish is bad, but I love trying. I have to excuse myself often,"
he added, smiling.

Two schools at once

2006-11-27T14:32:00.000-08:00

Note:

A print version of this story can be read online at www.laredosnews.com in the November issue of LareDOS, or be found around Laredo, Texas.

By MIKE McILVAIN

Tempting, beckoning, curiosity-sparking electives look like presents under the Christmas tree to young college students with a knack for learning.
College and university professors and administrators have seen those many course grabbing students become “professional students” – some never earning a degree after taking more than enough hours for a bachelor’s and master’s in some cases. Texas A&M-International and Laredo Community College have put together a joint, simultaneous enrollment program designed to get incoming freshmen to stay the course to their degrees in four years without straying into professional student status.
Students enrolled in the program have access to facilities at both schools, as well as the public library. The two schools also have access to the records of jointly enrolled students, allowing for a closer course taking scrutiny and more guidance.
“We never say OK, you’re done, see you later,” LCC counselor Lisa Gonzalez said.
This isn’t the occasional guidance contact and degree planning of decades past where word of mouth held a higher importance. Finishing on time is important in the case of many local students who depend on time-related grants, too.
Students in a joint enrollment program like the one LCC and TAMIU have will likely hear more from counselors and financial aid workers than their parents did 30 and 40 years ago. LCC has similar agreements with other universities, but the local program is in its first year.
Taking those extra eye-catching electives costs parents, or the student money and more is potentially lost in the case of the B on Time Loan. The student’s debt is forgiven if they finish within four years with no less than a 3.0 grade point average and don’t take more than six hours over their degree plan.
B on Time Loan students receives some $2,300 per semester. Tuition and fees for 15 hours at TAMIU costs $2,339, but only $858 at LCC.
Any student in any financial bracket can qualify for the B on time loan, but local administrators know they are dealing with many who the first in their family to attend college, so little, if anything, can be taken for granted.
“Some hours don’t transfer into degrees, but with this intervention a student can get in and get out in four years,” Minita Ramirez, TAMIU’s associate vice president for student success, said. “We have a large first generation student population.”
Ramirez says many first generation college students need a little more handholding, noting that many lack basic knowledge of higher education finance, academic confidence, and how to deal with the processes of enrollment and advancement.
“We work with the schools. We help with their requirements,” Ramirez said. “Some don’t understand how things are at the university and want to go to LCC.”
LCC Dean of Enrollment Management Rick Moreno says they try help fill out forms, find financial aid and payment options, which students and their parents can live with.
LCC and TAMIU each award hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in grants, loans and scholarships, but connecting the student to that money requires some professional help and this is where the joint enrollment program kicks in.
That connection will make, or break, college for many students.
“The key is more time earlier and that much more of a chance we can work with them,” Gonzalez said.
Many first-year college students find themselves with their first checking account and are learning the hard way how to use money.
“Finances are huge. We try to support them and we know life skills, reading are important, too,” Moreno said. “We sell education and that improves the quality of life.
“The state continues to raise budget problems and it’s hard dealing with budget problems, but we have to work with them.”

Too close to that old Army home?

2006-11-10T12:09:00.000-08:00

Note: Copperas Cove Leader-Press correspondent Paul Gately wrote the following story over the squabble around the Killeen-based PBS station's problem with running a story on the local Congressional race and its relation to the war in Iraq. It provides some insight into living and working around a huge U.S. military installation like Fort Hood.

Carter defeated challenger Harrell to retain his seat, his third 2-year term, on Tuesday.

More from the Copperas Cove Leader-Press can be seen online at www.coveleaderpress.com.

From the Nov. 7, 2006 edition

KNCT reverses blackout decision

By PAUL J. GATELY
Leader-Press correspondent
GATESVILLE – It took less than 48 hours for policy makers at KNCT-TV in Killeen to reverse a decision to eliminate a news program from Friday night’s line up and re-schedule the local broadcast of “Now” for Monday night.
The particular program was a look at the U.S. Congressional District that includes Fort Hood and Copperas Cove – the 31st Texas Congressional District, and the two candidates who are running for the seat.
Citing a fear of unfairness to one candidate or the other, KCNT Station Manager Max Rudolph and Central Texas College President James Anderson decided to pre-empt the scheduled airing and delete the program from the run list.
KNCT’s station manager and college officials decided not to air the program late Friday when they were unable to obtain a copy of the program for review prior to airtime. The purpose of the review was to ensure fair and balanced coverage for all candidates in this local race.
But a groundswell of opposition that came immediately from citizens in the area prompted Mary Beth Harrell, the Democratic candidate for the job, to seek an answer as to why the program was cancelled. The effort resulted in a Saturday news conference at CTC’s KNCT studio and coverage of the issue to the point that Rudolph reversed his original decision on Sunday and rescheduled the program for Monday night.
Station and college officials viewed the show online late Saturday and subsequently scheduled the show to air Monday evening.
“Max cancelled the program because we didn’t know if it was fair and balanced,” said Barbara Merlo, community affairs spokeswoman for KNCT.
“They (PBS) didn’t notify us it was going to run and they didn’t notify us when they came down here to shoot the program,” Merlo said. “We just didn’t want the program to influence the local congressional race.”
If that was the intent – it backfired.
“We didn’t intend to have any impact on the election, but unfortunately the Mary Beth Harrell campaign has used this to their advantage. We certainly didn’t anticipate this degree of response form the public and I don’t know if we would have made the same decision if we had,” Merlo said.
“I’ve never gotten a realistic answer about why they cancelled the show in the first place,” Harrell said on Monday. “It wasn’t a story about politics in the first place. It was a story about Central Texas, Fort Hood and the soldiers who live here who are fighting in Iraq. I just thought it was a real shame that the very people the show was about weren’t able to see it.”
To say they were not aware of the program and its content somewhat falls back on KNCT, others in the business say. The President and Chief Executive Officer for KWBU, the PBS station in Waco, said her programmers are notified of content on “Now” as much as 14 days before a particular show airs and then again one week out. As well, the entire program was available on the Internet. In fact, Merlo said Rudolph viewed the program on Saturday via the PBS website.
“If we did receive that, I’m not aware of it,” Merlo said.
The PBS-Now website (PBS.org) clearly states the show’s content and purpose: “With less than a week to go before the election, it’s clear no single issue will have more impact than the war in Iraq. This week NOW goes to one of the most pro-military districts in the country – the Texas 31st – to see how people deeply affected by our presence in Iraq might vote next Tuesday.
“This conservative district is home to Fort Hood, the largest active duty army base in America, and almost everyone living there has a personal connection to the war. Since the war began, Fort Hood has sent tens of thousands of young men and women to fight in Iraq.”
Despite the district’s support for the military, Democrat Mary Beth Harrell, is trying to win a seat in Congress with a campaign strongly critical of President Bush’s war policy.
“The civilian leadership, this administration, this rubber stamp Congress, has failed our troops, and failed our community, and failed our country,” Harrell told ‘Now’.
“She is challenging the pro-war Republican incumbent, Congressman John Carter, who argues that the war is vital to protecting America from terrorists. Matt McAdoo, a 26-year-old libertarian candidate, is also in the running. He believes U.S. troops in Iraq should ‘pack up and leave.’”
Merlo said after viewing the program, Rudolph decided it was fair and balanced and did need to air for the sake of the viewing public.
“There should never have been a question,” said Polly Anderson, of KWBU. “This is PBS. It is our job to serve the public and airing programs like “Now” is one way we do it.”
Cursory checks with PBS stations in Waco, Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Amarillo indicated the program aired in its original time slot last Friday.
“I found nothing offensive about it. That’s a personal opinion, of course,” Anderson said.
And in the long run, both the other Congressional candidates say they approved of the show’s content, as well.
“We’ve heard Congressman Carter and Mr. McAdoo both thought the program was good and had no problems with it,” Merlo said.

Dealing with the bad guys

2006-11-03T14:59:00.000-08:00

Texas House Rep. Richard Raymond, D-Laredo, of the 42nd District, has a good idea in dealing with bullies, which he hopes will go through Austin's lawmakers for a governor's signature and become law.

It used to be, we had to learn the hard way as kids to find the courage to stand up to bullies, organize coalitions to impress upon the bully that we've had enough and we're not going to take it any more, or just jump the idiot from all sides if all else fails. But lessons learned in school shootings across this country and a few others say not all children and teens can do what is necessary to halt the bullying. Some can't take it, something snaps and they bring a gun to school and people start getting killed.

Raymond's intended legislation seeks to give the schools the power to act in these situations and move the bully toward a safer disposition.

By MIKE McILVAIN

State Rep. Richard Raymond, D-Laredo, wants to see schools have the tools to push bullies off the property.
Raymond says he will introduce legislation in the coming session, which would hand decisions on consistently troublesome, problem bullies to justices of the peace. The JPs would then determine if the student in question should be sent to detention facilities.
Raymond doesn’t believe children victimized by bullies should have to form coalitions of friends to confront the bully, or test their fortitude by standing up to them eye-to-eye by themselves.
“Parents can move a child out if they are being harassed, but they should move out the bully,” he said.
Raymond noted the bullying element in numerous school violence cases across the country, which includes Columbine and other school shootings.
Raymond and JPs attending his news conference on the issue discussed statewide school rules, which punish both students in a fight. It takes one to start a fight, but two to have one. The proposed law seeks to separate the fight starter from the answerer.
“We have parents who say my child is afraid to go to school in the morning,” Raymond said. “We have a priority for safe schools.”
“If they break the law and are in court and charged accordingly, it will mean a lot,” parent Rene Cervantes said, attending the news conference.
Precinct 4 JP Oscar Martinez says are harassed to the point where anyone would be forced to fight, but bullies are sometimes gang members and need to be made to understand that there is help for them, too. Martinez sees this potential law putting the bully in conversation with JPs who could help steer the aggressive child, or teen, away from trouble.

Familiar ring to Trans-Texas Corridor stories

2006-10-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

This story from The Guardian, off Farringdon Road in London, reports of unhappiness with growth in southern Spain. This is only the first few graphs of the story.

Spanish town goes on strike over development

Dale Fuchs in Madrid
Friday October 27, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

An entire town on Spain’s cement-clogged Costa del Sol went on strike for a day to protest at the planned construction of two golf courses, 800 luxury homes and two hotels.

The 1,853 residents of Cuevas del Becerro, outside Malaga, closed shops, bars, the town’s only petrol station and even the elementary school this week, part of a mounting popular backlash against rampant building throughout the country.

Residents fear the development, by Promociones Club de Campo y Golf de Ronda, will usurp, and possibly taint, the town water supply. More than 600 parents and children marched with signs that read “Water is our best friend” and “Speculation threatens the aquifer”.

Yoakam finishes strong in Laredo show

2006-10-27T14:37:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

Some opening acts are quickly forgotten, some eventually become stars and some make a difference.
Austin's Keith Gattis added balance to the show and drew admiration for his largely one-man effort to please the restless crowd.
Gattis' opening for Dwight Yoakam in the Laredo Entertainment Center's first Country Music concert on Oct. 16 doubled the usual 30 minutes allowed most openers with the star's delay in transit from Houston.
Gattis filled in singing and playing by himself -- with the exception of one number with singer-songwriter Ashley Monroe – switching up and low tempo songs in a Country, Rock and Blues mix.
Gattis and Monroe sang a duet in one of his final songs, upping the performance level another notch, harmonizing and alternating at the mic with blonde Tennessee native Monroe whose voice sounds somewhat like Reba McEntire and the late Tammy Wynette.
Gattis wears long blond hair and brought his sense of humor, which he threw in pinches of between songs and enjoyed some cool ones, thanking one fan for donating a large one after foaming one onto the stage.
"I've done this before: waiting on Dwight," Gattis said, who noted that he played in Yoakam's band a few years ago, demonstrating some electric guitar lines from his songs. "I'm just winging it here. I don't know what I'm going to do.
"Normally, I got a band up here with me – but, I don't tonight."
Gattis added a Bob Dylan-style harmonica while assuring the audience that Yoakam was on his way.
"He's coming," Gattis said.
"I've got to get my son to school in the morning," groaned a woman in the front row.
KRRG Disc Jockey Gino stepped on stage an hour into Gattis' performance, saying that Yoakam was on his way in a bus. Gattis played a few more songs before Gino was back at 9:50 to quickly introduce Yoakam and the main event was on before some 3,200 in the seating arrangement set up for 4,500, apologizing for running late while kicking right into some up tempo numbers from his various albums and fans wasted no time getting into his music, too.
Yoakam and his four-piece band's highly electric sound proved worth the wait.
Some couples danced and many kept beat and rhythm standing at their seats, moving hips, feet, arms and necks to familiar songs like the late Buck Owens' "Act Naturally," "Crying Time," "Together Again" and the Tejano-sounding "The Streets of Bakersfield," which he and Owens recorded together.
Yoakam’s band kept the crowd looking and listening closely with a unique blend of instruments.
The four behind Yoakam strayed from standard guitar and drum music using an electric piccolo, “stand up” base – usually found in Jazz bands -- and the accordion. The Yoakam group’s diversity ranged in appearances from his Cowpunk outfit to tuxedo and silk Rock-style jackets to a casual men’s suit and extended to some 1950s doowah-style in “Pocket of a Clown.”
Yoakam threw in Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” but moved toward the end with his original works. The crowd also responded well to Yoakam’s “Honky Tonk Man,” “A Thousand Miles From Nowhere,” “She Wore Red Dresses,” “It Only Hurts When I Cry,” “Little Ways,” “Guitars, Cadillacs” and “Fast As You” to close out the regular session, but the crowd stood firm for two minutes, getting him to return with two encore numbers.
The show ended a few minutes before midnight with Yoakam and accompanists Eddie Perez, Kevin Smith, Josh Green and Nick Morin disappeared.
Tour Manager Tim Aller noticed that the LEC’s ice hockey floor arrangement was much what the “Watch Out” Tour saw in several Canadian cities, but said Yoakam thought he was entering a theater because of the configuration of the seats and stage. Aller noticed the crowd responding to Yoakam’s performance, too.
“The people seemed to really love it,” he said. “I don’t know if it was just Dwight, but they seemed to know the words to the songs.”

Note: A print version, similar to this story, is available wherever distributed in Laredo in the October 2006 edition of LareDOS. A pdf version can be found online at www.laredosnews.com.

What would this wall bring?

2006-10-27T13:50:00.000-07:00

President George W. Bush signed onto the law making a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border from coast-to-coast legal. Now it just faces funding obstacles.

What obstacles to the environment, good relations with Mexico and so on might this wall bring on?

It is an issue with many, many questions.

Walls don't seem to work totally, but maybe that's not what its builders would be concerned with, anyway. The Berlin Wall, pictured here from the Newseum in Washington, DC, the Maginot Line and Great Wall of China weren't complet deterents to invasion, or escape. The East Germans had snipers posted to cut down would be escapers into West Berlin. I hope this thing isn't carried that far.

It's OK to work to keep out terrorists and undesirable illegal aliens, but very expensive walls are far from the only, or probably main thing, that such duties will require. Virtual -- electronic -- walls are possible, as it is too.

We will keep an eye on this thing.

The flag raising that stays up

2006-10-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Marine Monument, also called the Iwo Jima Monument, is one of the most reproduced instances in history, and photographer Joe Rosenthal didn't even see it until sometime after it had been printed on almost every front page in the United States.

Rosenthal photographed the second flag raising on Iwo Jima on Feb. 23, 1945 -- the fifth day of fighting there, but there were 30 more days to go, which would claim three of the six in the picture, which became the monument seen here in Arlington, Va., adjacent to the national cemetery.

The survivors were last together here in 1954 when this monument was formally dedicated. Ira Hayes would be dead three months later.

'Flags' flies high with deep impressions

2006-10-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

It’s the sign of a very impressive movie when most of its viewers sit quietly afterward to see the still photos and read the end credits.
Most moviegoers seeing “Flags of Our Fathers” did that the night it opened, mesmerized by a combination of gutsy, eye-beckoning cinematography, powerful career-level acting from Adam Beach as the troubled Ira Hayes, and Clint Eastwood’s direction, which served to push plenty of buttons. The more personal links one has to World War II in the Pacific, that war, any war, combat, or just living with a combat veteran – the more buttons pushed inside by “Flags.”
“Flags” also serves as further proof that a photograph can hold strong powers, centered on the famous Joe Rosenthal Associated Press photo of the flag raising on Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi by six Marines on Feb. 23, 1945.
A lesser movie would have simply had tears rolling down cheeks, accompanied by some sniffles, but “Flags” stands a little higher with its pensive effect on the viewer. Although any tears or sniffles wouldn’t draw much of a glance from anyone else watching “Flags” for the first time, as this is probably one we’ll be watching from time-to-time for many years to come.
Ryan Phillippe, playing Navy combat medical corpsman John “Doc” Bradley, opens the movie in a surreal flashback quest for buddy Ralph “Iggy” Ignatowski on Iwo Jima’s black sands at nighttime – with Iceland serving as Iwo Jima because of its similar black sands and moon-like appearance. A much older Bradley, near the end of his life, awakens from the dream in a wide-eyed sweat.
Those close to combat vets might have seen such things before and the cinematography helps bring in those from veterans’ families through its unique ability to appear like moving black and white still photos, without the frames – much like those a WWII vet might have had around the house somewhere.
Constant flashbacks to Iwo Jima leap off and on the screen throughout – much as they do for combat vets throughout the remainder of their lives.
Hayes, Bradley and Rene Gagnon, played by Jesse Bradford, are the only three of the six flag raisers to survive the hellish 35-day battle on that 7 ½-square mile island. They are whisked back to the United States, narrowly escaping going ashore in the Marines’ next battle at Okinawa, to serve as war bond sellers in a crucial drive which netted billions for the effort.
Fresh off the battlefield, they could not forget fellow flag raisers Sgt. Mike Strank, Harlon Block and Franklin Sousley, despite little mention of them by civilians. Strank was played very ably by Barry Pepper, who played the sniper in “Saving Private Ryan,” which also had very realistic and sometimes horrifying battle scenes.
The tour experience is belittling and bitter for Hayes and Bradley, climaxing in the climb up a paper mache Mt. Suribachi before 100,000 at Chicago’s Soldier Field, which was emotionally a tougher climb than the real thing. An angry Hayes bolted from rehearsal to go drink, only to be found by Bradley – angered further by one bar’s refusal to serve liquor “to an Indian” -- just in time to make the show at Soldier Field. Bradley is hit with several flashbacks during the short climb up the paper mache Suribachi.
Gagnon and his girlfriend, soon to be wife, aren’t troubled by the attention and take to it, but he admits that he is no hero because the real heroes are back there on Iwo Jima. Dead. He tells the crowd he was only a runner and helped in the flag raising because the pole was so heavy.
The movie doesn’t skip the fact that the celebrated raising took place on the fifth day of the battle and that what Rosenthal photographed was from the second raising. A big shot wanted the first flag for his private collection and had it sent to him straight off the top, but a replacement was run up by Gagnon right away and photographed as it was raised – sticking in the American consciousness for decades and raising hopes to win the conflict when the country had grown war-weary.
Ironically, Rosenthal didn’t see the photo until sometime later. There was no digital photography in those days and it lacked any faces, which again surprised him. It was just one of several photos he snapped that day.
Hayes’ story of problems with alcohol and unable to deal with the deaths of his friends, weaves throughout the movie, adding an instant of focus on South Texas with his trip to Weslaco to speak to the father of Marine buddy Harlon Block, confirming that it was Block at the bottom of the photo. Hayes left that brief scene, walking north-bound on U.S. Highway 83. Block was initially mistaken for Sgt. Hank Hansen who was in the first group to raise a flag on Suribachi, but the war bond trio was told to say it was Hansen in the photo, which added to their anger. That lie didn’t help when the touring trio met the mothers of Strank, Sousley and Hansen.
Anyone who watches “Flags of Our Fathers” will probably find their own connections even if they didn’t have any direct links. Similarities to the public and its relations to other wars can be seen through various things and this need for heroes is noted at the end, which book co-author James Bradley, son of “Doc” Bradley, discusses in his narrative. We manufacture heroes because we need them, he says.
Flaws are more than exceedingly difficult to spot in this one. Possibly a few lines could have been better said, but in the genre of war movies, and probably beyond, it’s a good 10 of 10 habaneros.

Note: A print version of this review can also be found online at www.laredosnews.com, in pdf, and a print version in the October issue of LareDOS here in Laredo.

A Quiet Place on the Mall

2006-10-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

Clint Eastwood's new movie, "Flags of Our Fathers" runs deep with most who see it, prompting some last minute looks and credit readings before quietly leaving. Those that don't leave later with the rest, generally file out like they were leaving a very personal church service.

This one employs some of Eastwood's best cinematic work ever, which is saying a lot for the 76-year-old entertainer.

Eastwood said the movie is about those who made the sacrifices, but it shows much more with its very fine cinematography and screenplay. It is one we will probably be watching off and on for a very long time.

These images are from the World War II Monument in Washington D.C.

Selling the roadway to dissent

2006-10-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

Good highways are like computers – great when they work, but absolute horror and frustration when they don’t.
The proposed Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), part of the proposed North American Supercorridor, has raised red flags and battle flags up and down the length of the possible routes. This possible superhighway toll road works for some, but not for others.
The TTC could serve to widen or parallel Interstate Highway 35, and activists continue organizing against it while Gov. Rick Perry spearheads the drive to make it a reality.
State government’s connection to the Spanish-partnered Cintra Zachry consortium to construct the big wide road, which could cover 1,200 feet from side-to-side, are two key points of contention. The loss of private lands, property, businesses, and expected high costs also spark considerable comment and dissention.
Tentative TTC plans include a 600-mile freight-rail line from Dallas to the border. The Texas Department of Transportation says that could pull one million trucks per year off of Interstate Highway 35, and it would be the most extensive addition to Texas’ rail system since the early 1900s.
Some local governments, utilities, and school districts have taken formal stands against the road, but others are waiting to see if the road will ever be built. Several believe legal action to protect homes, businesses, farms, schools and cemeteries in the TTC path could put a permanent hold on the road’s construction.
“It’s controversial and not the solution to any problems we have, and it takes up a large amount of land,” Linda Stall, founder of Corridor Watch, said by phone from Austin.
Laredo activist Enrique de la Garza has heard that the TTC might never be built -- or at least not until some time after lawsuits cast the project up in the air “until the time mankind learns to levitate” -- but he notes that the state has already invested plenty of money in its relationship with Cintra Zachry.
“I don’t know if they’ll go for the whole enchilada,” he said. “It’s not right, and they may be messing up aquifers along the way.”
De la Garza believes the TTC will stop at Encinal is also concerned about water. He says three major and six minor aquifers could be affected.
“Laredo has voted Democrat since the party was invented. Only Webb County votes Democrat many times and who is in power?” de la Garza asks.
Del Rio activist Jay Johnson notes that House Bill 578, passed last year by Texas lawmakers, orders the Texas Water Development Board to design a pipeline system with reference to the TTC.
“On completion of the map and using existing water pipelines and other facilities, the board shall design a complete pipeline system that provides each region of the state access to an undepletable emergency source of water,” HB 578 reads. “The design may be coordinated with the design and implementation of the Trans-Texas Corridor.”
Texas Department of Transportation spokesperson Gaby Garcia argues from Austin that proposed TTC routes are only mapped out in study areas on TxDOT’s Web site at www.keeptexasmoving.org and any assumption that it would stop at Encinal is incorrect. Garcia and the site also say the TTC will only use water for regular roadside purposes.
The related Laredo-area map shows the local TTC extension passing Encinal to the Callaghan Ranch-area, some 25 miles north of Laredo.
“We don’t know where it will stop,” Garcia said.
“Laredo and TxDOT are in discussions. A map during the summer had Laredo in a big gray area,” city spokesperson Blasita Lopez said. “I don’t know.”
TxDOT attempts to answer many of the numerous questions about TTC online on that Web site, including those around increasingly important water issues, which could seem related to the project.
“TxDOT will pump groundwater located under the Trans-Texas Corridor and transport it to other parts of the state,” says a myth in the Web site’s Get The FAQs section, listing myths against reality. It answers: “TxDOT is not in the business of selling groundwater. Furthermore, it does not have the authority to transport water. The only reason that TxDOT may access groundwater beneath state property is if it is needed for the transportation facility, such as a restroom or customer service center.”
Stall says more legal action is more likely north of Laredo because it would be affected first and could involve more landscape change, including quality agricultural turf. The San Antonio to Laredo segment serves to widen Interstate Highway 35 and little more.
Stall says Cintra Zachry has already drawn some attention through work in building part of a loop around Austin – the State Highway 130 project – which is likely to be part of the eventual TTC.
The expected 1,200-foot width of the TTC has activists seeing properties and communities chopped up in a very different concrete and asphalt Texas – drastically different from the one they grew up in.
“It is a lot of land,” Stall said. “It looks like the state is in the land speculation business.”
Stall and de la Garza both note the concern over future eminent domain rulings after the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling for the city in Kelo v. New London, Conn.
LaSalle County Judge Joel Rodriguez says concern there eyes the loss of ranchland, but he is comfortable with the proposed widening of I-35. Rodriguez says LaSalle County became interested in the project two years ago when the matter was first visible.
“We resolved not to grant cutting anymore ranchland,” Rodriguez said by phone from Cotulla. “For a while they planned to go through eastern La Salle County, and we would have to support it, furnishing ambulance, fire (department), and water. Smaller counties can’t support it.”
Rodriguez says LaSalle County has also met with TxDOT.
“It is very hard to predict the future, but people do like to leave something for their kids,” he said.
LaSalle County is listed among 30 counties, which have resolutions against the Trans Texas Corridor on the Blackland Coalition Political Action Committee’s Web site. Those counties range from tiny Rains in the northeast to Brewster in the southwest around the Big Bend National Park.
Blackland’s Web site also lists 12 cities, eight utilities and four school districts – all in Central Texas -- also filing resolutions against the proposed superhighway.
The organization meets in rural Bell County, but played host to gubernatorial candidates Chris Bell, Kinky Friedman, and Carole Keeton Strayhorn in a political gathering on March 24. Blackland’s Web site says incumbent Rick Perry was invited, but declined to address the group based midway between Waco and Austin.
“Everybody wants traffic to go faster, but it’s extremely controversial,” U.S. House District 28 Representative Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, said. “There are some big property concerns.”
Cuellar also believes the TTC could take a long time to happen with legal action halting, or slowing construction. He noted serious opposition in his district in the Seguin-area.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in its Sept. 28 edition that parts of the toll road — 260 miles’ worth — would be under construction within five years and open by 2014. Tolls would be about 15 cents a mile for cars, 59 cents for trucks.
Star-Telegram figures have total cost of designing and building the corridor at $8.8 billion. Private companies would pay that cost, plus fees totaling $1.9 billion, for the right to collect tolls for 50 years. The state Transportation Department would use that money on other work.
Perry defends the project, despite serious opposition, through a page on his re-election-related Web site and devotes an entire page to the issue at www.rickperry.org/pages/ttc.
“The Trans Texas Corridor is a new way to move commuters and cargo, remove hazardous cargo from city centers, reduce air pollution, and expand economic opportunity,” Perry’s site says. “It is a major project that ensures needed infrastructure gets built sooner and at less expense to Texas taxpayers. Like any major infrastructure project, it generates a lot of questions, and even criticism, that warrant a response.”
Candidates Kinky Friedman, Chris Bell, Carole Keeton Strayhorn and James Werner all oppose the TTC and point to other factors around it.
“Kinky is opposed to the Trans-Texas Corridor since it relies on toll road construction. He feels that the TTC is a land grab of the ugliest kind, with land being taken from hard-working ranchers and farmers in little towns and villages all over Texas,” Friedman’s site says. “The people who will ultimately own that land are the same people who own the governor.”
Democratic nominee Chris Bell is less polite in his online posted stance.
“The Trans Texas Corridor is a case study in corruption and cronyism, and one of my first acts as governor would be slamming the brakes on the whole plan and dragging it back into the public light. This deal would never hold up in the light of day. This is corruption you could see from space. Rick Perry just can’t justify giving billion dollar sweetheart deals to his largest contributors,” Bell said.
Wes Benedict, Austin-based executive state director for Werner’s Libertarian Party says Cintra Zachry will get a monopoly because local governments will be prohibited from constructing competing toll roads.
Benedict says that will be a major problem for the capital city.
“The Austin-area is going to have more toll roads than anywhere in the state and toll roads cost more to put up, so they are not cost-effective – running them, constructing toll booths and all that,” Benedict said. “There are better ways to improve public transportation.”
Strayhorn favors using more existing structure to deal with the expected heavy growth Texas faces.
“Texas property belongs to Texans, not foreign companies,” Strayhorn says online. “To meet our transportation needs we need freeways not toll ways, and we must use existing rights of way and increase efficiency of existing roadways and ports. We must not destroy our precious farm and ranch land.”
Strayhorn's site says her plans would expand IH-35 using existing rights of way, implement the ports to plains initiative, increase efficiency and use of existing rail lines and appoint an inspector general to oversee the agency and a transportation ombudsman to talk to Texans.
Strayhorn calls it the Trans-Texas Catastrophe -- the largest land-grab in Texas history under a still secret agreement to let a foreign company control and “toll our roads for a profit for over fifty years.”
District 13 State Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, agrees with Strayhorn’s secrecy assessment and is concerned over rural lands, but believes Perry has heard the public’s concerns and hopes he would adjust if re-elected on Nov. 7.
“None of us have ever seen the contract. What have we agreed to?” asks Kolkhorst by phone, driving through rural Grimes County in the Houston-area. “I’m for Gov. Perry, but this issue, he and I don’t agree on. I have faith in this governor. I don’t think it’s my way or the highway, pardon the pun.”
Kolkhorst says she will be at the doorstep of whomever wins the election with her concerns. She says her four-county district counts 70 churches and cemeteries that would be affected by the width of the project.
Kolkhorst echoes Strayhorn’s desire to see more transportation work by Texans, but recently attended an anti-TTC rally in Walker County.
“They would just as soon not have it,” she said. “Texas is growing and we want a good highway system, but when you dice up old, developed farmland -- and we have some very historic sites here in Texas history -- people don’t give up easily.”
Kolkhorst knows that all of those factors generate the passion the TTC’s opponents exhibit. She says she has talked to several South Texas ranchers and knows their worries, too.
Kolkhorst believes there is more to the TTC than simply a big highway and rail line.
“I’m not convinced this is for us. I’m not sure that NAFTA and CAFTA are good,” she said, seeing where we might be stooping to benefit the economies of other countries through the TTC. “It could be about blurring borders and our national sovereignty. It’s bigger than Texas.
“Tell Texans the truth and they’ll make good sense of things. I think power should be from the ground up and not the other way.”
Texas A&M International social sciences professor Michael Yoder would agree with Kolkhorst and sees TTC connections to economies in Asia, Latin America, the container ship business, unions, the Panama Canal and he sides with Cuellar, believing it will never be built.
“It’s too big, too expensive, too many people fighting it, too many interests against it,” Yoder said. “The TTC seems to rely heavily on the Mexico connection.
“One plan that seems sleazy is to use Mexican truck drivers to kill the unions and it would hurt the independent truckers, so I think that part of it stinks. Meanwhile, they’ll charge exorbitant prices for people to use it.
He doubts that current hotbed economies like those in Asia will maintain their pace and doesn’t see Mexico’s toll road offerings strong enough to help support it.
“It could be too ambitious. If they have the idea that it will pay for itself I think they will find themselves disappointed,” Yoder said. “They are banking on trade with Mexico and stuff from China. It’s overkill.”
The TTC’s value would also weaken – and Mexico’s Lazaro Cardenas port -- through a wider Panama Canal for larger container ships. Serious discussions have also risen in Nicaragua and Honduras for proposed freight-oriented transportation plans for canals, bigger highways and increased rail service between the Pacific and Caribbean.
And Panamanian voters stumped some experts by voting on Oct. 21 to widen that canal, too.
The TTC and its connected 4,000 miles of North American supercorridors don’t look cost-effective in Yoder’s book. It does not work in his computer.
“There’s not enough to justify what they are talking about at $184 billion,” he said.
At least, if this particular roadway is to be built it could certainly use a stronger selling job.

Note: This is the blog version of a very similar story, which appears in the October 2006 issue of LareDOS, available at the paper's office at 1812 Houston, in Laredo, and other sites around Laredo. Also available online, in pdf, at www.laredosnews.com.

That festive time has arrived

2006-10-22T20:22:00.000-07:00

Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, has arrived for the better part of a week.

Ask.com says Diwali is the Hindu festival of lights celebrated by Hindus, Jains and Sikhs in India and all over the world. It is a five-day celebration occurring in October or November. Diwali was Saturday, Oct. 21 this year. It is on Friday, Nov. 9 next year.

I hope you are invited to a festival near you, or even very far away, sometime soon.

This image is the handiwork of skilled Mumbai photographer and media arts artist Amal Batra.

Thinking about that camino

2006-10-10T15:21:00.000-07:00

The fact that I wanted to crop out the bottom of this photo says there might be serious validity in considering ways to get the time to walk Spain's Camino de Santiago (Way of St. James), or trek England's walking trails, or those found anywhere else.

This Patty Kirby photo is proof that I really do work, seen here interviewing U.S. House Representative Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, at Texas A&M International University, and proof that -- like too many other in my line of work and in the U.S. -- I need to get serious and sweat it off. So, my mind keeps floating to northern Spain where I have walked off plenty of pounds in previous vacations while enjoying that fantastic, flavorful, healthy Basque cuisine, great wines, seafood, fresh vegetables and eye-dazzling scenery while improving my Spanish. Anyone wanna go with me?

I'll keep the photo around and might use an uncropped version for one of those before shots. After? Well it could be as fine as my finest in previous decades, or just a whole lot better than now. Either way, the mind is turning toward serious self-improvement and getting there could be a matter of good taste, too.

My feet were a problem for a while, but they're not now, so the only barrier is time. I walked a few miles of that Camino several years ago near Pamplona and have seen many others out on the trail, so my mind's already got a picture of the adventure. The bottled mineral water tastes very good along that ancient trek as well.

Austin's eagle eye for the story in transition

2006-10-10T15:06:00.000-07:00

Longtime television reporter Jim Swift plans to stay with KXAN in Austin, despite the major reshaping of his popular features on that station's news programs. They are moved to a Sunday night slot instead of each night.

It is a shame his creativity is not shared more throughout the state and beyond. We would all get more out of the news and the world around us we too often overlook.

Jim Swift is a serious pro, even if the bearded appearance might make you think otherwise for an instant.

They kept the right guy

2006-10-10T15:01:00.000-07:00

Austin television station KXAN and reporter Jim Swift are staying together, reports Diane Holloway of the Austin American-Statesman, and this blog is glad to hear it -- even if his reports are not seen regularly down here in Laredo.

Jim and I worked together back in the mid-1970s at Radio Central in Brenham, Texas when his appearance was much more conservative, but his keen eye for the story wherever and however it might be was a learning tool for me.

Most of Holloway's story follows --

By Diane Holloway
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Jim Swift is still here, but his trademark "On the Porch" features for KXAN's news are gone.
For nearly a quarter century, Swift has been spinning out yarns about offbeat, inspiring, tragic and just plain weird people and happenings in Central Texas. From attack squirrels to zombie musicals and disabled artists, Swift has capped off KXAN's 10 p.m. news several times a week with the two-minute features designed to smooth the rough edges of the day's news.
"On the Porch" departed without an official goodbye. After a four-week medical leave, Swift learned that his "Porch," which had been cut back to a Sunday-night-only schedule, was closed.
"It wasn't my idea, but I'm not broken up over it at all," said Swift, 58. "Life changes, and you can either fight it and get tired of swimming upstream, or you can relax and stay off the rocks."
Swift, who joined KXAN in 1977 as a news reporter, has chosen to go with the flow. He will redirect his energy toward general news, with a focus on South Austin. He also will continue to do "perspective pieces" about the broader issues surrounding daily stories.
"I'm totally OK with that," the laid-back reporter said. "They want to concentrate more on hard news and less on features."
Bill Seitzler, KXAN's news director, says the change should not be interpreted as a slap at Swift.
"We just don't want to use that 'On the Porch' title anymore," Seitzler said. "Jim's work is fabulous. He's got his own unique storytelling ways that we're not about to change. We just want to change the focus a bit."
Swift, who grew up in Dallas and has a degree in intellectual history from Southwestern University in Georgetown, said he has signed a new contract and received "nothing but positive comments" about his future at KXAN. In fact, he's hoping to retire from the station with a full pension at 65.
"That just doesn't happen any more, especially in TV, and I'd very much like to do it," he said.

Conduct makes a world of difference

2006-10-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

Bob Bavasi's JapanBall.com reports through a Japanese newspaper story how an announcer lost his job after too many drinks and the resulting loss in judgment. The story, most of which follows, speaks for itself.

Top baseball commentator latest fired in NTV's string of sex scandals

From the Daily Mainichi:

Just a couple of months after NTV announcer Sosuke Sumitani was fired for using a hidden camera to film up a woman's skirt, a baseball announcer is out.

Masashi Funakoshi covered the Yomiuri Giants for NTV, probably the most appealing job in Japanese sports broadcasting.

His downfall occurred when the Giants played one of their countryside games, with the regional affiliate throwing an after-game party for the NTV crew. At the party, Funakoshi, 44, sat next to a young woman working for the regional station.

"She's cute and looks pretty wholesome. Pretty enough to have been a beauty contest finalist during her college days," says an affiliate insider.

Funakoshi began drinking heavily, boasting about how he was destined to rise up through the network's ranks.

The party continued at a karaoke bar where Funakoshi grabbed the woman, hugged her, and wrapped his arm around her waist while he sang.

When the singing ended, Funakoshi asked the woman to accompany him to his hotel, told her he was friends with NTV executives and promised to find her a job at the network.

"The woman was forced to accompany Funakoshi on a cab ride back to his hotel. Once they were alone, he roughly squeezed...," the affiliate insider says.

She reported the incident to her bosses, who filed a protest with NTV.
Funakoshi initially denied the allegations, saying that he had been too drunk to remember anything. But then more stories of his actions began to surface prompting NTV to act.

"We are not talking about the details of the case," an NTV spokesman says. "However, one of our employees violated the employee code of conduct and has been punished accordingly."

Other professions have strong codes of conduct, too, with firing usually the result when that line is crossed by such a wide margin.

Trouble in the Rio Grande

2006-09-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

Disinfection processes at the water treatment plant are all that prevent Laredoans from drinking sewage each time they reach for a glass of water.
Gilbert Anaya, El Paso-based acting chief of the International Water and Boundary Commission environmental division, says his agency tests for any contaminants, but specifically for human fecal matter, looking closely for E. coli bacteria because those tests are more specific.
And certain places in the Rio Grande carry more of a health risk than others.
“If you were to swim in the river and ingest some water you could get some bacteria, depending on where you were swimming,” Anaya said by phone. “Overall the river is in good shape, but the bacteria is still at an elevated level.”
Anaya said the IWBC, cities of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo are trying to pinpoint those more dangerous parts of the river.
IWBC testers also look for heavy metal, various bacteria, organisms and examine fish tissue. Anaya says Laredo also runs its own tests, but City Hall declined to comment for this story.
Online, the Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic says municipal water systems can fail.
“Although public water systems use chlorine, ultraviolet light or ozone to kill E. coli, some outbreaks have been linked to contaminated municipal water supplies,” Mayo said. “Most E. coli infections aren’t life-threatening, but the bacteria can cause serious and even fatal illness in some people. When it comes to more severe infections such as 0157:H7, however, no current treatments can cure the infection, relieve symptoms or prevent complications.”
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality says the only local facility currently under agency enforcement is Laredo’s waste water treatment plant at Zacate Creek where 29 violations were reported between 2001 and this year.
“The violations, for the most part are minor and regional staff works with the plants, through monitoring strategies, to ensure compliance,” said Lorinda D. Gardner, Harlingen/Laredo TCEQ regional director.
TCEQ reports 20 violations in that period upriver from the Laughlin Air Force Base waste water treatment plant. Ten were reported for the United North Laredo waste water treatment plant and six were counted at Eagle Pass. Four each were noted at the Rio Brave water treatment plant and at the San Felipe Plant in Val Verde County.
Possible links between the aluminum salts used in water purification and Alzheimer’s disease remain unsettled, too.
The international water science Awwa Research Foundation, of Denver, has examined that issue several times.
“Aluminum (Al) is the third-most-common element in the earth's crust and is present in all natural waters. Moreover, Al salts are used extensively as coagulants in drinking water treatment. It is not surprising, then, that measurable Al is present in the distributed water of all drinking water utilities, irrespective of whether Al was used as a coagulant,” Awwa says online. “The possibility of an association between Al concentration in drinking water and the occurrence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has long been a topic of research, discussion, and considerable debate.”
TCEQ tests between March 1, 1998 and Feb. 28, 2003 point to a 7-mile stretch downstream of International Bridge 2 to a pipeline crossing as the top fecal coliform test offender with 27 standard exceedences in 55 samples.
Fecal coliform standards were exceeded 17 times in that time frame in the nine miles between El Cenizo and the San Isidro pump station in 20 samples. In 24 samples, It was 13 in the 13-mile route from that pump station to a segment boundary. Nine exceedences in 39 samples were noted in the 4.2 miles from the Laredo Water Treatment Plant, downstream to International Bridge 2. Four exceedences in 18 samples were recorded in the five miles between the pipeline crossing and El Cenizo.
Ammonia Nitrogen is listed as a concern through 30 samples for 12 exceedences in that 7 miles from Bridge 2 to a pipeline crossing.
Cleaning up the Rio Grande could require some Rice – Condolezza Rice, head of the State Department, overseer of the 1944 Water Treaty with Mexico – but IWBC spokesperson Sally Spener, in El Paso, says it isn’t as simple as calling her up.
“There’s not a simple answer. It would depend on what the matter is,” she said.
Spener notes that the Environmental Protection Agency and its Border 2012 Program, the Border Environmental Cooperative Commission, North American Development Bank and Committee for Environmental Cooperation all have roles and jurisdiction in Rio Grande matters. Spener also points to the numerous state-to-state efforts between governments at that level on both sides.
But if an act of Congress would help, the more politicized border security issue could be another aid.
Laredo’s U.S. Congressman Henry Cuellar has acted as host to other Capitol Hill colleagues, exhibiting border issues through field trips here.
Cuellar might have indirectly helped to stoke the fires of action in the House toward gaining the State Department’s attention through a borderlands security and awareness tour he held for a handful of colleagues last month. John Doolittle (R-California) was one of the guests and serves as chairman of the Subcommittee on Water and Development and also works on an environmental committee.
Some of Doolittle’s committee work involves overseeing the Environmental Protection Agency.
“I would say you have got to get that river cleaned up,” Doolittle said, learning to his surprise that the Rio Grande is Laredo’s only source of drinking water. “It looks nice from afar, but I wasn’t right up on it.”
But it was the border security issue that got him to consider the Rio Grande’s plight – not the cries of environmentalists.
Doolittle noted that California laws would probably require an environmental impact study each time the Border Patrol cuts away riverside cane and grasses, but he has no problem with that in the effort to secure our borders.
Doolittle says that the Rio Grande won’t get any special attention simply because he has visited the waterway, but if it does cross his desk he will have a feel for it.
“I come from a border state, but haven’t seen much of the border,” Doolittle, of the Sacramento suburb of Roseville, said. “I have a new understanding of the border and its problems and issues.”
Cuellar helped funnel a Nadbank loan of $44.4 million for a water treatment in Nuevo Laredo, which includes a storm sewage network and plenty of that water will into the Rio Grande, but there’s still plenty of water flowing from upriver.
Cuellar also knows supply is a growing issue and feels we need to be open to almost any idea, which could include making Lake Casa Blanca a secondary drinking water source, or finding ways to recycle water as some other cities in the American Southwest do.
“We’ll be open to discussion. We have to plan now,” Cuellar said.
Planning now could help avoid legal battles with other cities and governmental entities.
“Who’s planning?” asks Laredo gastroenterologist Dr. Reynaldo Godines. “The medical community started looking at the water supply and quality 25 years ago.
“I’m more concerned with less water, more stool, pesticides and chemicals in the river.”
Godines notes a recent article in a United Nations magazine in which two rivers in North America are expected to dry up – the Colorado and Rio Grande.
“So, long-term planning for this is certainly what it’s all about. People always wait for a crisis.”
Godines says distribution is the issue as the river gets older with a growing population’s increased demand with a related rise in pollutants adding to the water, too.
“Half of the world’s population doesn’t have access to clean water,” he said. “Especially as global warming worsens, fresh rain is going to create more managing importance on civilization as we know it.”
Godines says Laredo needs to imagine how the city would be if the river dried up.
“The land is drying up. The desert is becoming a major part of our nation,” Godines said.
Upriver in El Paso flashes of that dry future have shown themselves more than once.
“That’s our bread and butter,” Spener said of the Rio Grande. “We have significant reduced water allotments. I’ve seen the river dry here in El Paso. Everyone is taking a bigger look at investing in water projects.”
City Hall is backing a water park project, despite infrastructure woes blamed on considerable water volume losses.
Numerous breaks in aging iron pipes are said to cost Laredo many gallons and plenty of revenue. City Utilities Director Carl Schwing told city council in the Sept. 18 meeting of an average of five breaks per day.
Schwing also said the wastewater plan has not been updated in years and the water plan is equally as bad.
“We’re looking at consulting firms to identify areas of major loss,” he said.
City Manager Larry Dovalina said the old iron ground pipes are replaced with PVC pipe.
Council approved the 2007-2011 Capital Improvement Program in the Sept. 18 meeting, which OKs getting $8.4 million in funding for wastewater woes next year. The South Wastewater Treatment Plant is scheduled to expand with a $7.5 million injection and $1.6 million is aimed at water projects.

More related readings online at: http://www.waterconserve.info/articles/reader.asp?linkid=53729; http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2006-03/18/content_544076.htm; http://www.oaoa.com/specialsections/riogrande/riogrande.htm; http://www.unep.org; http://www.awitness.org/journal; http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/e-coli/DG00005; http://www.ibwc.state.gov/; http://www.ibwc.state.gov/; http://www.epa.gov/.

Note: The print version of this story can be found in Laredo, Texas at various locations and it will become visible online at www.laredosnews.com.

Foresight to offer

2006-09-27T15:33:00.000-07:00

"And people will then say, ah, If only we had had the foresight to do something."
-- Emilio Martinez

Emilio's comment is related to local water issues here in Laredo, but strongly reflects something I noticed when overseas about the U.S.

It seems too many here think that simply putting on a uniform and taking whatever orders they receive is all needed to preserve this country and its strengths in the world. No!!! Not even close. It requires some thinking, insight and foresight, but there are tons of seemingly little things that are needed that aren't given a high priority, or visibility in the media.

It goes down to that small town, or big city, lawyer, business person, educator, etc. that still hasn't gotten off his/her butt to run for office, help fight poverty, battle hunger, kick AIDS and other fatal diseases in the teeth, and so on and so on. Just wearing a uniform and carrying a gun falls way short of what the U.S. needs. I'll get back to that when I've got a clearer, longer list.

You can do your own, if you wish, or have some foresight to offer.

Calling about that double-dip

2006-09-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

Americans are called to pay a two-sided bill like it was a privilege, but it’s one that might have the less fortunate smashing their cell phones in disgust.
That angry phone smasher, hurling a cell into the hard pavement would enjoy an instant of the most control its owner had in a caller pays system: such as we have here. United States cell phone owners saving some time on their units for an important call, suddenly hit by meaningless calls from friends or family, wiping out that phone’s ability to call, know the frustration and understand that lack of control.
People in the U.S. are among what appears to be a global minority double-dipped in cell phone use – paying for both incoming and outgoing calls. Canadians and some Chinese appear to be the only members of this exclusive club.
“No, we don't pay to receive calls on our cell phones at St. Lucia in the Caribbean. You still do in the U.S., don't you? You poor, poor things,” says teacher Linda Ambrose by e-mail.
“In all of the Middle East, surely for Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, you do not pay for receiving phone calls on your cell except in one case: when you are roaming. That is, if you have a Lebanese number with roaming service, if you are in Jordan and you receive a phone call on your Lebanese number, you will pay for receiving that call,” writes Lebanese businessman Rabih El Khoury from the Middle East.
In China it depends on which company you do business with. Receiving calls is said to be free there on CNC, but the two other companies will charge you for receiving a call – just like you were in the U.S., says a source where anonymity is often a good idea. CNC is a local network and only available within a contracted area, however.
Closer to home, Mexico enjoys the spirit of the larger world and only pay for outgoing cell calls. But get close to the border and your charges can jump several times, making it a good idea to have a doctor ready when the bill arrives.
Border businessman Rebiere Rodriguez is one of thousands who have been stung with roaming charges for making calls from Mexico – without crossing into Mexico.
“On Cingular downtown, it’s impossible with the Mexican signals,” he said. “Once close to the border they hit you for roaming charges. At the border it starts to go crazy.”
Rodriguez says his bills have doubled and tripled thanks to roaming charges. Rodriguez says he used to have service with Nextel in Mexico and Telcel, but doesn’t anymore. He has switched to Cingular, but it’s not perfect there, either.
“I try not to get near the border and don’t answer near the border because I know it’ll be roaming,” he said.
Geraldo Lopez at Bound USA Custom Brokerage says he has gone the opposite direction and found relief from roaming charges.
“I used to have Cingular and had problems with that, but not now,” Lopez said. “Not with Sprint and Nextel. No problems.”
That cell phone problem on the border in California has been alleviated, but somebody had to hire some legal help to get it done.
“As to the border roaming calls -- yes, this is a problem largely attributable to antenna placement. We have successfully sued Cingular for this practice along the Mexico/San Diego border. They readjusted their antenna and fixed the problem,” said Michael Shames, executive director of the San Diego-based Utilities Consumer’s Action Network. “Caller pays versus callee pays is a long-standing issue that has been debated in Congress but has gotten nowhere. It is fairly complex.”
Dallas-based Cingular spokesman Frank Merriman says his company was already working on a billing solution for San Diego when the lawsuit was filed, but he acknowledged a South Texas similarity to that other border situation.
“We don’t want customers billed inaccurately,” he said.
Merriman noted that some of Cingular’s problems stem from consolidation with AT&T, taking in 15 additional cell sites, or towers. Merriman added that those antennae can be relocated almost anywhere onto buildings, roadside signs, schools, fire stations, but there is usually a fee associated with site locations.
A large telecommunications lobby in state capitols and in Washington, D.C. could be at the heart of the caller pay vs. receiver pay debate, outspending almost every other lobby. It proved its strength in California in recent years, gunning down a state law which would have made it illegal to talk on cells when driving.
Washington D.C.’s Center for Public Integrity says the amount of money used in federal telecommunications lobbying, alone, is staggering.
“The way we breakdown industries, telecom could really involve a few industries: telephone utilities, $367,407,583.00; TV, movies and music $278,684,955.00; telecom $176,701,962.00 and communications $47,407,156.00,” reports CPI interim press secretary Bradley Glanzrock. He added that all numbers are from the beginning of 1998 and the end of 2004.
Small parts of that type of money could easily control some foreign countries.
Laredo’s Congress Representative Henry Cuellar saw the Telecommunications lobby in action in previous work on the state level where it fought a tax. He did not see telecommunications lobby resistance take place on the national level when they were told they needed to contribute to the schools and might have helped in some small way with funds in the $5.9 million dollar telecommunications award given to the Laredo school district earlier this month.
Cuellar serves on agriculture and business committees, leaving him out of much direct contact with the telecommunications lobby, but feels he could deal with them, despite the trappings of the U.S. electoral system, which almost forces candidates to solicit corporate funds.
“I have received money from AT&T, Verizon and some PACs and we need money to run our campaigns, but we genuinely have to be with the voters. The voter gets you in,” Cuellar said.
Cuellar’s Congressional cell phone is from Cingular, but goes with Sprint for his personal cell, noting only a few occasional delays. He also has two blackberries.
While Americans, Canadians and several Chinese lack control in their cell phone billing, there is a bright side in generally paying less than callers in Europe. Experts credit better competition and intense use in the United States for that positive note.
“Some analysts have also explicitly compared the United States and Western Europe with regard to mobile competition. These analysts agree that the U.S. mobile market is more competitive than most mobile markets in Europe, and that this is one of the primary reasons for lower revenue per minute in the United States,” said the Federal Communications Commission in one it its recent annual studies of the wireless industry. “European mobile subscribers are more likely to opt for text messaging because it is cheaper than placing a call on their mobile phones. In contrast, most U.S. mobile subscribers are on calling plans that include large buckets of minutes and are more likely to make a phone call because the incremental cost of a call is close to zero.”
For convenience, many U.S. companies have added a pay-for-minutes by credit card option to their phones, and many have outlets in many, many small places, which should handle most situations.
Should.
Linda K. Moore, a telecommunications policy analyst for the Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service, says cell phone service in the U.S. and Europe evolved differently and Europe’s Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) was sold to many other countries, helping to spread the caller pays system around the world.
Moore noted that most phone companies in Europe were state-owned monopolies when GSM was introduced there and the U.S. had already experienced the AT&T breakup., leading to our more competitive cell phone market.
“To help cover the cost of placing a call to a wireless phone, the European companies added a surcharge paid by the caller; that is, the caller paid the regular cost of the call plus a surcharge when the call went to a cell phone,” said Moore. “In the United States – where many companies were competing both in wireless and the traditional wireline – the surcharge, so to speak, was charged to the cell phone owner. Thus, the caller paid the same amount to call a local number whether it went to a regular phone or a cell phone. The costs of building the wireless infrastructure were borne exclusively by wireless callers.
“Although the markets and technologies have evolved, these billing practices have remained generally in place.”

Note: The print version of this story can be seen in the Sept. 2006 issue of LareDOS, out in various sites now. It will also become available online at www.laredosnews.com.

Dwight Yoakam heads toward Laredo

2006-09-26T16:38:00.000-07:00

Dwight Yoakam brings his "Watch Out" Tour to the Laredo Entertainment Center on Monday, Oct. 16.

The LEC seats up to 10,000 people and whatever many thousands will see the very animated Yoakam perform. His face will probably be becoming more familiar as the date nears. Yoakam has appeared in several movies and late night talk shows. He could be the most movie-active Country music singer.

Yoakam first hit the big scene in 1984 and hasn't slowed down since, just shifting gears a little here and there. And he's had plenty of theres.

Dwight Yoakam is Laredo-bound

2006-09-26T16:18:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

Dwight Yoakam is a Country music star and his star rises high above any single genre.
The “Honky Tonk Man,” and singer of “A Thousand Miles From Nowhere,” “Gone” and a string of other hits brings his “Watch Out” Tour to the Laredo Entertainment Center on Oct. 16, a Monday night, and he could be the cornerstone for a new wave of entertainment here in Laredo.
“Support is important because he is the first of many to come,” Belinda Guerra, president of Guerra Communications, said.
LEC boss Jalinna Jones explains that the arena and Guerra bought the show from promoters as an investment, seeking to bring in other big Country stars. Jones added that Yoakam is represented by the William Morris Agency, which carries a long list of major stars. Guerra and the LEC see that a good showing in the 10,000-seat facility will bring many of those stars here.
“Brad Paisley, Toby Keith, Gretchen Wilson have called,” Guerra said. “So this market needs to prove its strength.”
“We’ve got to be there for the first one,” Jones added. “They know Laredo is here.”
Jones said that the LEC has also talked with George Strait representatives.
Local ownership of the show put guarantee money in Yoakam and William Morris’s hands. This is an investment.
“We’ve been working on this since June,” Jones said. “They get their money whether we sell one ticket or all of them, but they don’t want to go to a market that would fail them.
“This is probably the fifth date we worked on with him.”
Guerra Communications said in its February press conference at the LEC when KRRG, 98.1 FM, dropped its Hip Hop format for Country music, on the same location in the LEC main entrance, and a hope to bring in stars from that genre was expressed by both.
Yoakam has crossed a number of barriers in his diverse career. His music is described as a mix of traditional Country with 1950s Rock and Roll with pinches of punk and Los Angeles-based alternative.
“The cowpunks, as they were called, that attended Yoakam’s shows provided an invaluable support for his fledgling career,” says his online biography.
Yoakam has been visible on the nation music level since 1984 when his release “A Town South of Bakersfield.” His first full-length album two years later, “Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.” eventually went platinum. Yoakam’s “Streets of Bakersfield,” recorded with idol Buck Owens, was his first No. 1 hit in 1988. “Blame the Vain” and “Live From Austin, Tx” are his latest albums.
Songs, albums and honors piled up for Kentucky-born and Ohio-raised Yoakam whose voice carries tunes with a controlling resonance. Eventually he moved into acting and has numerous credits. His recent movies include “Wedding Crashers,” “The Three Burials of Melciades Estrada,” “Bandidas” and “Crank.” Yoakam is no stranger to the small screen, appearing on numerous talk shows, exhibiting a strong, animated ability to express himself.
Yoakam’s credits include writing, songwriting and movie producing work.
Yoakam’s performance here is a week before his 50th birthday.
More information available about Yoakam online at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0948267/; www.dwightyoakam.com and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_Yoakam.
Note: More stories on LareDOS can be read online at www.laredosnews.com in pdf. This is a similar version of the print story in the Sept. edition.

Juggler enjoys moment at home

2006-09-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

Juggler Kaj Fjelstad has seen much of the world since he decided to turn an "I can't" into an "I can."

The product of a family of educators, Kaj was born in Switzerland and traveled far and wide since. The hat he wears here is a souvenir from Africa when his father was teaching there for a year. Kaj's older brother Per taught speech at Laredo's Texas A&M International University before moving onto Rhode Island College in Providence.

Fjelstad, a school teacher and single dad to son Solyan, is interested in many cultures has a strong affection for Mexico, having lived there, too.

Juggler extends his positive thinking to others

2006-09-26T15:44:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

Because he couldn’t he can, and now he teaches others.
“At first, I thought I couldn’t learn it and after I learned it I knew that you can learn things even if you don’t think you can,” juggler Kaj Fjelstad said.
Fjelstad has entertained crowds in Laredo gatherings, the Kerrville Folk Festival and traveled in Europe and Latin America as a juggler, but couldn’t twirl a stick well enough to scare off a fly when he first took up the activity in Northfield, Minnesota 26 years ago. He and friend Jon Wee played all the various sports young boys typically do, but that tricky, difficult, eye-catching, flashy, athletic juggling captured his eye and competitive spirit, largely because all that was beyond his junior high-level abilities at the time.
Fjelstad likes to use the word empowerment when detailing the benefits of picking up juggling, which helped boost him through those awkward teenage years and beyond.
“It was a gift from a friend. It’s about learning by accepting mistakes, drops and working with others and laughing at yourself,” Fjelstad said. “It’s good to have a sense of humor, so you allow yourself to have a playful nature and see what you can do, not just what you want to do.”
Fjelstad’s fascination at first sight for juggling took him to church where he and a couple of friends practiced frequently after school.
“Juggling is like a universal language,” he said. “It’s like a smile or laugh. Juggling can evoke similar feelings with all people.”
Fjelstad hopes to hand his learned gift of self-empowerment over to a group of future jugglers in classes open to all comers near Texas A&M International’s Killam Library on the second and fourth Fridays of each month between 4:30 p.m. and 6 p.m.
Fjelstad knows the campus well, having received his master’s there this year in special education with an emphasis in reading. He juggled master’s classes, being a dad to an 8-year-old son, and handled classes of his own as a resource teacher in South Laredo where he is beginning a new school year.
The teacher probably wouldn’t be surprised if his new juggling students made friends among themselves as he and friends Wee and Joel Erickson practiced well enough to call themselves the Three of Clubs. Wee, Kaj’s first teacher, and Fjelstad began their juggling connection when Jon sent him a Christmas card promising to teach him how to juggle. They continued their juggling together when time permitted during their college years in the early 1980s before they went their separate ways.
Wee has had a largely visible juggling career as half of The Passing Zone, seen occasionally on television and in various live shows. Wee and The Passing Zone were in “The Addams Family” and “The Aristocrats” and seen more recently on NBC’s “America’s Got Talent.” They take up a large share of space on the Internet, too.
Wee and Fjelstad’s first major experience was at the 1982 Twin Cities Renaissance Fair.
“It was fun. We did a lot of stuff like the Colorado Renaissance Fair,” Fjelstad said, noting that Wee had been a friend since he was 2 years old as all of their parents were professors.
Fjelstad was born in Switzerland and traveled widely before juggling became his frequent copilot. Fjelstad’s father was a Fulbright Scholar and worked in Liberia for a year. Fjelstad still wears a souvenir Liberian hat when juggling and sometimes uses drums he picked up there, too. Fjelstad was already juggling when he and the family were in Liberia. He found himself fighting boredom at a Liberian political by juggling and stole part of the show, but gained the experience of performing before thousands of onlookers.
Back in the U.S., Wee and Fjelstad worked several conventions and traveled to Santa Barbara, California while finding inspiration from the juggling Carmota brothers.
“We got to know them and they told us where to get the equipment and there was just one place then,” Fjelstad said. “We spent several hundred dollars, and our parents wondered what we were doing, but then I made my own props, and we did fire juggling.”
Fjelstad and Wee stayed together for seven years, but Kaj went to college at Pacific Lutheran in Tacoma, Wash. and semesters abroad in the Far East and Mexico led him into other adventures.
Fjelstad took off for four months in Europe after graduating from Pacific Lutheran, but Mexico had left a deep impression from that first visit and he had to return to that end of the world, eventually entertaining in Jugglers for Peace, which took him to Cuba where the 12-member show performed in each province, allowing him to see “more of Cuba than most Cubans.”
That troupe was a mixture of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Russians, “probably Polish” and none of them knew each other prior to the tour. Brazilians have seen Fjelstad work his wonders and he toured Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Mexico in La Caravana Arcoiris por la Paz before eventually finding himself in Laredo and in the teaching field.
The Nicaragua tour was held to honor Benjamin Lender, a U.S. engineer killed by Contras there in the 1980s and there’s a circus named after him.
“We were there two nights and I did a short show on the second night. The circus was closing because Daniel Ortega lost the election, so I let them in for free and I put on a two hour show,” Fjelstad said. “I used the unicycle, stilts and rola bola. It was like a dream come true.
“It was to give solidarity with them and I hope to go back.”
Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos was in Fjelstad’s audience when touring southern Mexico at La Realidad, Chiapas and he performed at Northfield, Minnesota’s sister city of San Rafael de Heredia in Costa Rica. He enjoyed performing for indigenous crowds in Guatemala for “neat people.”
Fjelstad said the caravan is still on the road, farther along in South America, and has a Web site.
“For me, it was a growing experience,” Fjelstad said. “Juggling is a great way to travel and I put it all together into an ‘I can’ attitude.
“It’s hard when learning, but you can take that empowerment into any activity. Take reading – it’s similar. You have to break it down into steps.
“I like seeing students get empowered, especially when they didn’t think they could learn and they keep learning.”
Notes: Fjelstad can be contacted by e-mail at borderlinejugglers@simplistixs.com. He trains jugglers each Thursday evening between 5 and 7 on the TAMIU campus by the fountain between the CH and PH buildings.
A print version of this story, and others in many editions of LareDOS can be seen online at www.laredosnews.com.

Actress at the movies

2006-09-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

Julia Vera, originally from Laredo, poses next to a poster this summer at the Latino Film Festival in New York City where her movie "Virgin of Juarez" was shown.

Vera has been in many, many movies, television shows and commercials since beginning acting professionally at 46. She sees plenty of potential in the blooming independent film industry and would like to develop a Laredo-based movie.

She currently resides in Los Angeles -- when not back in Texas or at other film festivals. She has attended some overseas, too.

Vera sees very much in indie movies

2006-09-26T15:14:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

Julia Vera has achieved that enviable point of not being able to remember all of the movies, commercials and television shows she’s been in.
But she has been writing a possible series of stories set around a young girl growing up in a very different Laredo some 55 years ago when only some 35,000 lived in a much smaller, more innocent, dustier and much more personal borderland town.
“La Metiche” is only a creation traveling between Vera’s mind and typing fingers – when time allows and free time isn’t plentiful with a full schedule. In a few days she begins playing the adopting mother in the independent movie “Juan Franzic,” (pronounced like Juan Francis) adding another note to her busy filmography on IMDb – probably the best way to try and keep up with Vera’s growing cinematic career.
She has five credits this year, up one from last year and up three from two years ago.
Vera didn’t start acting until she was 46, but wanted to since childhood days back in that much smaller Laredo, and the thriving independent film industry could eventually bring that world to life.
Vera made a brief stop in Laredo after attending New York City’s Latino Film Festival where her “The Virgin of Juarez” was among those showing. That potential in independent movies might not let Vera rest long anywhere as she sees plenty of potential for captivating, sharp, attention-grabbing, streamlined scripts and finished products in indys that their much bulkier major studio counterparts might not deliver as readily.
Big studio films are expensive and weighed down in formula -- forced to follow too many already familiar plots, scenes and lines.
“Like with Mission Impossible III they had a lot of explosions because they think that’s what the public wants.
The much freer independent film can be put together for less than $100 and shot with a rented camera and someone willing to act. Sometimes, nothing more is necessary.
“They rent that equipment in Dallas, Houston and I’m pretty sure in Austin and San Antonio,” Vera said.
A minimal expense indy needs very little to qualify for screening consideration at any of the numerous film festivals around the world, but Vera believes in following the tried and true paper trail to produce something the public would want to see.
“If it’s not down on paper you can lose your way,” she said.
A movie made without its principals holding Screen Actors Guild cards can get lost, too, missing any chance for major recognition. In New York, Vera saw “Quinceañera,” which she liked very much and is gaining critical backing, but cannot be nominated for Academy Award consideration because it is a non-union production.
And that sad note doesn’t have to be repeated.
“The SAG has in place ways of using union actors to make ultra-low budget, paying them $100 a day,” she said. “Most love to act and a lot would do it for free. It’s an amazing experience to be part of a creative force.”
Vera notes the success of “Monster,” “TransAmerica” and “Frida,” which all operated under ultra-low budget financing and brought in big box office and rental returns.
”In ‘Frida,’ a lot worked for free just to help,” Vera said.
“Quinceañera” will probably make money, despite going non-union because it was picked up by Fox and could already be in rental stores.
Up front checks between $35,000 and $45,000 and a public that likes to rent stacks of movies ensure that moviemakers make money when their projects go video.
Awards won at those numerous film festivals like $5,000, a trophy and extra film help independent film making grow, but Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival held each January in Utah remains the leader. Vera says Sundance’s Spectrum 2000, in which the top new films are selected is helping speed recognition of the top indy filmmakers.
“When you’re picked, that’s a biggie,” Vera said.

Note: Online versions of many LareDOS editions can be seen at www.laredosnews.com. This story is very similar to one printed in the Sept. 2006 edition.

Good academic year start

2006-09-25T13:22:00.000-07:00

The new movie "Accepted," which seems destined to make something of lead Justin Long, as Bartleby Gaines, hit theaters right before the start of the 2006-2007 academic year and hit it well.

Long, who has appeared in "The Break Up," "Dodgeball" and a nationallly aired television commercial, is the catalyst in this misfits to geniuses movie, which puts the eye on traditional American-style higher education. There's no shame in self-examination, so this is one today's college and university administrators should catch if they haven't already.

It's a good one -- one with meaning beyond the current curriculums, lessons and assignments of this academic year.

Accepted certainly is

2006-09-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

“Accepted” leaves a ringing effect long after the last of many laughs and the unusual applause and cheers die from the last local theater showing.
Made with few familiar faces to moviegoers, “Accepted” doesn’t seem like an academic version to 1981’s “Stripes” with Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and John Candy until thinking is clearer after the stimulation from this one finally fades. Anthony Heald is the most familiar face and he’s no household name, either, but works well in the mix as the middle aged, stuffy, snidely and nasty Dean Van Horne at nearby Harmon College.
Heald is a good, but still somehow an almost loveable villain who could have fit in “Stripes” or “Animal House” roles, too.
“Rejection. That's what makes a college great. The exclusivity of any university is judged primarily by the amount of students it rejects,” Heald as Van Horne says, anchoring his character as the traditional, modernday college administrator.
Bartleby Gaines, played by Justin Long, is rejected by all previous colleges he applies to, so in desperation he augments smarter buddy Sherman Shrader’s letter of acceptance to have him accepted at the South Harmon Institute of Technology. South Harmon doesn’t really exist, however, so the school’s founding friends, mostly other rejects, spend the summer making an abandoned psychiatric hospital look like a college.
“Let's start this fake college. Then, we'll go start a meth lab somewhere. It's a gateway crime. That's how these things start,” Shrader says, mocking Bartleby’s request to make South Harmon somewhat of a reality.
Shrader, played by Jonah Hill -- helps bring in his Uncle Ben, played by Lewis Black, whose face is fairly familiar to moviegoers -- to front as a school official. Crusty old Uncle Ben proves to have the gift of gab and punch line strength to pull it off.
The lovely Blake Lively is Bartleby’s heart throb and eventual girlfriend, edging toward the relationship in a move away from Harmon College and her traditional, athletic-looking fraternity officer hunkish boyfriend. Shrader eventually leaves Harmon, too, once his involvement in South Harmon is too deep and his disdain for abusive fraternity hazing.
Harmon and South Harmon meet in an Ohio college board meeting after the evil Dean Van Horne has exposed the upstart institution, seeking its land for expansion and a grand entranceway. This is the battle of the old-style traditional institution against new innovative student-led and designed courses. Bartleby’s key defense speech questions the gray-headed board’s real intentions and desires back when they entered college.
The speech helps hand South Harmon a one-year accreditation, resulting in pandemonium and triumph for the new school over the old. Some scriptwriting sincerity and forethought raises above the laughs when the board president tells Bartleby not to judge too quickly as he had more artistic intentions when younger.
“It’s never too late,” Gaines says in brief heartfelt reply before joining the celebration.
Adam Cooper, Bill Collage and Mark Perez have worked together before on a few other lesser movies and wrote the screenplay. Perez wrote the initial story intended for movie adaptation.
“Accepted” rates a solid 9 ½ habaneros out of 10 and 10s just aren’t handed out. This one was too short. Too many other movies are too long.
Anyone who ever took a college course, or decided against it, should see this one. Anyone involved in higher education and concerned about that inner battle of the traditional college education against new ideas and formats could find themselves seeing it several times.

Governmental transparency is a very good idea

2006-09-21T12:40:00.000-07:00

Perhaps some of that transparency would actually serve to free up our state lawmakers who seem to have become much more reclusive recently? They should be able to feel free to speak from their educated minds.

Efforts by Texans for Public Justice to get more transparency could help.

The following TPJ press release tells more:

For Immediate Release
September 21, 2006

For More Information Contact
Common Cause, 512-474-2374
League of Women Voters, 512-231-8536
Texans for Public Justice, 512-472-9770
Citizen Groups Outline Five Political Reforms
To “Make Democracy Work” in Texas

Austin, TX - Texas citizen and government reform organizations today unveiled a five-point reform agenda designed to ‘Make Democracy Work’ in Texas. The citizen groups say the reforms are needed to strengthen Texas’ campaign finance laws and ensure open and independent government free from the influence and dominance of special interests.

“The integrity of Texas’ political institutions has taken a beating lately. Our leaders need to make political reform a priority. Reforming Democracy isn’t a Republican issue and it isn’t a Democratic issue; it is an issue that affects all Texans regardless of any political affiliations they might hold,” said Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice. “Democracy can’t work if citizens have no faith in the integrity of its political institutions.”

The list of non-partisan reforms presented by the groups included:

Place a $100,000 Aggregate Limit on Individual Contributions;
Close the Revolving Door between the Legislature and the Lobby;
Keep Judges Independent by Appointment and Retention Elections;
Record All Non-Ceremonial Legislative Votes; and,
Create an Independent Redistricting Commission.
"The people of Texas have a right to demand transparency and accountability in their government," said Mario X. Perez, State Chair of Common Cause Texas. "These proposals represent an important step forward to reform our institutions and maintain trust between the people and State government. Open, clean, government is not a partisan issue. It is a Texas issue."

“Political reform is not a partisan issue,” said Julia Marsden, President Pro Tem of the League of Women Voters of Texas, one of the organizations promoting the five-point reform package. “Our reforms don’t favor or penalize any political party. These reforms benefit all the citizens of Texas regardless of their political persuasion.”

“When there is no accountability, democracy fails. Democracy sometimes fails in Texas because legislators are unwilling to make themselves accountable for their votes on significant issues,” said Weston Ware, retired Public Policy Director of the Christian Life Commission and Volunteer Legislative Director of Texans Against Gambling. “Efforts to secure more straightforward reporting of votes made in the 79th session should now be further strengthened and brought to the people in the form of a constitutional resolution. Citizens have a right to know how their elected representatives voted on bills brought before the legislature.”

“There has been bi-partisan support in the legislature on nearly all of these reform issues. Regretfully, support for political reform has not been shared by our government’s leaders. We applaud those legislators working for reform and pledge to help them get their reform bills written into law,” said Alison Dieter, Legislative Coordinator of the Gray Panthers of Texas. “Reform needs to be a priority of our top political leaders.”

The organizations plan to promote the Making Democracy Work Reform platform among their members and urge officeholders and candidates to endorse the five reforms.

Organizations promoting the Making Democracy Work reform plan include Common Cause Texas, Gray Panthers of Texas, League of Women Voters of Texas, Public Citizen Texas, Texans for Public Justice and the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission.

His hair is blonder

2006-09-20T17:59:00.000-07:00

CNN Reporter Anthony (AKA Antony) Mills, a bud from grad school days in London is looking a bit like that network's fair haired boy with considerably more air time since the 34-day Israeli-Hezbollah War this summer.

He had been seen, but mostly heard, in various reports on bombings and other stories from Beirut where he lives with his Lebanese wife and sometimes NFL lineman-sized brother-in-law. Hopefully, Millsy will have more days in the sun, making his hair more blond than it's already gotten.

His on-air work is improving each time out and I assume it will continue to do so.

Mills played tennis at Brown University in Providence, R.I. before going to City U. in London and it looks like he might have gotten back out on the court, sliming down some for the camera. He's not a network anchor pretty boy, but probably a lot more interesting than most of those guys and he's proven he certainly knows his turf.

Hooligan story

2006-09-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

(Mostly for my own records and access. You'll notice that the English differs a bit from standard American English -- For June 2003 edition of Beirut-based UniverCity magazine: distributed to American universities in Beirut and on some Persian Gulf campuses)

By Mike McIlvain

Get there late.

If there is a chance hooligans, or yobs, might be
outside the gates of a football match you are going to
then dodge them by missing the kickoff.

That worked for me last season at London's infamous
Millwall where I voluntarily allowed myself to go late
to a match that I was covering, something I had not
tried to do in almost 30 years as a journalist. By the
time I found my seat in the press section, the
hooligans were either seated, or had left. Those in
their seats faced large guards watching each stadium
vertical aisle from a chair placed at each would-be
entrance to the pitch.

The guards never watched the game, their eyes stayed
on the more potentially violent situation among the
hooligans in the seats. On 2 May of last year,
however, the aisle guards were not enough, or in the
right place, and many police and their horses were
injured in a riot outside Millwall's stadium, The Den.
Some of those jailed from that riot are expected to be
released in time for the 2003-2004 season late this
summer, but several have been banned from The Den for
eight years or more.

Police are still investigating closed circuit video
tapes from the riot to identify more hooligans.
Studying in London, which included its nightlife, I
had learned that a small amount of liquor in some of
that island's inhabitants often sparks a
confrontational mood and people worth avoiding there,
too. When some people drink, they get nasty and
England appears to have more than its share there.

Alcohol serves as the fuel oil for the fights, riots,
clashes and incidents associated with hooligans, but
these ne'er do wells have been studied since they
surfaced in the mid 1960s. Their presence has caused
problems beyond for the United Kingdom, the
Netherlands, Germany and other countries who have the
problem, or disease as some observers call it.

Britain's federal government has noticed and discussed
the sometimes fatal problems linked to hooliganism and
clubs have joined in against the thugs. A 29 December
2000 story in by The Guardian's chief political
correspondent Patrick Wintour, noted the xenophobia,
sexism and threatening manner of the hooligans and the
government's call for joint effort with the clubs to
curb the situation.

"Unchallenged racist or sexist remarks and threatening
behaviour can transform the communal and passionate
experience of watching football into a wholly negative
and intimidating one for minority community and female
supporters," the Home Office report said. "Many seem
to believe seem to believe that racist or xenophobic
chanting is the appropriate way to demonstrate
national pride and support for the English team. They
appear oblivious to how that behaviour is perceived
and then bemused when the host police behave
accordingly."

The Guardian story notes that hooligan behaviour at
football matches equals that frequently seen on high
streets in the weekend, in continental resorts.

"It is hostile, anti-social an dismissive of all
things not stereotypically English," the report
concluded.

Hooliganism, a culture of rowdyism which clings most
noticeably to the European soccer world, sends shivers
down the spines of average sport fans whose usual
greatest complaints focus on officiating or coaching.
England, the reluctant homeland of hooliganism, has
seen the problem spread to other sport venues, mostly
cricket, but eyes on the Angle Isle are keen for the
sort.

Most hooligans are stereotypically white and between
20 and 35. They do not all, however, come entirely
from broken homes: studies link more to upper-middle
class two-parent homes. Not all hooligan trouble is
found at football matches. Hooligans are associated
with the sport, but anyone in their path far from a
pitch can have problems.

"Rowdy groups of young people spill out of a pub, and
then rampage through the streets, roughing up each
other and anyone else unfortunate enough to cross
their drunken path," says an online BBC report. "This
is what is often perceived as 'yob culture'. The words
have now become a rallying cry for politicians in the
law and order debate."

The BBC says restaurant owners note yob culture from
bankers and lawyers, too. Some are seen indulging in
drunken behaviour, making sexist and racist remarks.
It may once have been excused as high spirits, but
yobbish behaviour has become a symbol for a decline in
respect for law and order. Most of the newsworthy
hooliganism happens at a stadium, or nearby, and
non-hooligan English people are raising their voices.

"I feel disgusted and ashamed of my country when I
hear of incidents overseas, caused by England 'fans',"
says one a male fan on the dooyoo.co.uk website.
"Football hooligans are one of the many things wrong
with this country's people."

"I have had the unfortunate experience of being caught
up in a bunch of hooligans, when I was in my teens,"
says a female fan on the same site. "It was a
terrifying experience which stopped me attending
matches for many years."

Former Millwall star Eamon Dunphy laments the start of
hooliganism, recalling its start in a road game at
Oxford in the mid 1960s.

"This was Sixties England, the Permissive Age. A small
band of aggressive young men were not intercepted at
Oxford Station and sent back to where they'd come
from, but rather permitted to go about their business:
to seek gratification through the incitement of rage,
disgust and fear in others," Dunphy says on
www.millwallhistory.co.uk. "The Millwall boys found
that by banding together, being uncouth, 'taking over'
a town centre like Oxford, pulling a communications
cord or two on the way home from matches and chanting
a few slogans, they could make national headlines.

"Over the next few seasons, gangs of football
hooligans sprang up all over England. The Millwall
boys had invented a new sport."

Some of the best football in the world is played in
England, but choosing your seat, and path to and from
the stadium is another new sport.

Border control dilemma

2006-09-20T14:39:00.000-07:00

That proposed guest worker program Congress has discussed, off and on, probably for 30 years, or more, might be best seen in legislative action soon if word of a labor shortage is true.

Alan Tonelson wrote about the facts facing business and government for the San Diego Union and Tribune's online arm in May of this year. There could be a serious crisis looming ahead, which could make life very uncomfortable and raise prices on many objects. Online research says D.C. lawmakers need to get off the fence and do something.

The essence of what Tonelson wrote follows here.

"Take restaurants. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, illegal immigrants represent 17 percent of the nation's food preparation workers, 20 percent of its cooks and 23 percent of its dishwashers. National Restaurant Association spokesman John Gay recently stated that his industry will need about 1.9 million workers in the near future though he “doesn't know where they will come from.”

According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, though, inflation-adjusted wages for the broad Food Services and Drinking Establishments category fell 1.65 percent between 2000 and 2005.

Urging Congress to loosen immigration controls, Marriott International Chairman J.W. Marriott Jr. insists that the hospitality industry “needed a supply of immigrant workers to fill jobs” and condemned those “in Congress [who] want to criminalize the undocumented and their employers.” Ten percent of the nation's hotel workers are illegal immigrants, the Pew Center estimates. But the BLS data show that their inflation-adjusted wages fell nearly 1 percent from 2000-05.

In the booming construction industry, illegal immigrants make up about 12 percent of the work force. But from 1993 – when median home prices began surging at a record pace – through 2005, inflation-adjusted wages in the sector rose only 3.02 percent. And from 2000 to 2005 – the height of the boom – inflation-adjusted construction wages actually fell by 1.59 percent.

Illegal immigrants are even more prominent in food manufacturing, where they represent 14 percent of the work force. From 2000 to 2005, inflation-adjusted wages in this sector dropped by 2.24 percent. And in the “animal processing and slaughtering” sub-category, where Pew research contends illegal immigrants make up fully 27 percent of all workers, inflation-adjusted wages fell 1.41 percent between 2000 and 2005. Similar figures emerge for many other illegal immigrant-heavy sectors as well, ranging from dry cleaning and laundry services, to parking facilities, golf courses, and country clubs.

These wage trends in illegal immigrant-heavy industries make clear that these sectors are not facing shortages of native-born workers. They're facing shortages of native-born workers who can accept poverty-level pay."

It has been suggested that this guest worker program would also save the lives of many crossing through the U.S.-Mexico border's deserts, but that would allow the Border Patrol and Customs to concentrate more on drug smugglers, terrorists and such. Do we want that?

Ample reason to blog

2006-09-19T10:44:00.000-07:00

Selena Dehne, of JIST Publishing online for The Career News sums up some good reasons to blog. It's about you and getting it right.

Employers turn to blogs to screen job seekers

INDIANAPOLIS, IN -- "Digging up digital dirt is rapidly
becoming one of the most popular and effective ways
for employers to weed through handfuls of job
candidates. According to a survey by ExecuNet, an
executive job search and networking organization, 75%
of recruiters use search engines to uncover
information about job seekers. Additionally, 26% have
admitted to eliminating candidates due to information
they discovered online.

From Facebook profiles featuring racy photos of
candidates to public arrest records, the one thing
standing between a perfectly qualified candidate and
the job of their dreams could be their digital dirt
drifting through cyber space. Therefore, job search
experts are aggressively warning job seekers to be
wary of their online presence.

With corporate recruiters and executive search firms
now using blogs as a prescreening tool for candidates,
you should consider creating an online journal to
demonstrate your skills, share your expertise, and
lend potential employers insight into your
personality. You can write about projects you are
working on, industry events, ongoing research, current
trends, new products, and evaluations. You can also
include articles or papers you have written, a bio,
project histories, a downloadable resume, and even
audio or video presentations."

What do the search engines say about you?

Origin of certain words

2006-09-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

The Pope's recent comments, which infuriated many Muslims have a history. They have a lot of history, and a London educator explains them in an article in The Guardian.

Soumaya Ghannoushi is a researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, specialising in medieval Christian literature on Islam.

Part of that article follows below. The Guardian is consistent in finding content well worth the time to find and read.

"It is ironic that the Pope, who stresses the unity of reason and faith, which he uses as proof of Christianity's superiority over Islam, has inherited this formula from Ibn Rushd, or Averroes, the Andalusian Muslim philosopher. It was on the basis of this Rushdian equation that the medieval church could reconcile itself with Benedict's beloved logos.

The Pope speaks much of religious tolerance in his lecture. Unfortunately for him, the church's historical treatment of its religious others has been marked by violence and aggression, against pagans, Jews, heretics and infidels alike.

Not a day goes by without calls to reform Islam being raised-a mission which Pope Benedict XVI has declared impossible. Perhaps it is time to make the same demand of Catholicism and its infallible head. It certainly needs to introduce dramatic reforms to its terrifying conception of Islam, its prophet and followers. Rather than apologising for the church's bloody legacy against Muslims in the dark years of the Crusades and Reconquista, the Pope has chosen to twist the knife in the old wound. He has driven the gulf between the two faiths even wider. He has again pitted the cross against the crescent.

The Pope's statements have done much to convince Muslims from Tangier to Jakarta that an open war is being waged against them on three fronts: political, military and religious. The pontiff should not be surprised that his words generated such strong responses in a Muslim world seething with rage at being dragged back to the age of colonialism and civilising missions. Who is to convince Muslims now that the west is not waging a crusade against them, in an alliance between Bush and Benedict, between the powers of the temporal and the sacred?"

There are people out there who need to get off their butts and run for office, become journalists, or take on other professions and avocations which would lead to some sort of clearer understanding between peoples in these sticky areas.

Threatened historic site

2006-09-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

Byblos is still in a fight for its life, despite the ending of the 34-day conflict between Israel and Hezbollah there in Lebanon.

I have a fondness for this ancient site known to have been a fortress, or inhabited by at least 17 different civilizations on this little finger of land extending into the eastern Mediterranean. It's battle is with oil, which appears to be leaving heavy damage with the rocks that the Crusader fortress is built on.

I would gladly lend a helping hand there if in the area.

Whither Byblos?

2006-09-15T12:43:00.000-07:00

Byblos, an important military and trade post for 17 civilizations in Lebanon, came under attack during the 34-day conflict between Israel and Hezbollah from the sea -- by way of an oil slick.

Native Beirutian Rabih El Khoury says it's gotten better, but serious concerns remain there.

"Most of the oil has been extracted from Byblos port. Archeologists, however, are conserned that oil spots that stuck to the watchtower base may have affected the stone composition, which would lead to faster deterioration. Last i heard, a team of international--mostly Dutch--experts were taking all necessary measures to minimize any potiential further damage.

But this is not the shocking story. Prior to the oil spill, local officials from the tourist and archeological bureau of Jbeil, the city where the Byblos site is located, have been in a row with the Ministry of Tourism and the United Nations for more than a decade. The argument is over the Byblos Port quay which, according to Jbeil officials, needs to be reinforced and extended to protect the watchtower from the seas. About a year ago, I chatted with the Port's Chief Mariner who explained that the current quay design and structure, which dates as far back as the watchtower and the port it is made to protect, has become ineffective as climate change has altered the intensity of the waves and the tides. "I've been here [at the port] for more than 40 years. I've noticed the changes in the sea myself", the Chief Mariner said. Being a United Nation's Heritage Site, any major sickle, hammer, or shovel directed at Byblos, its port, and its quay is subject to UN approval. The process of getting approval is (suprisingly) neither tedious nor lengthy. So what's keeping the quay from getting the required fix-up? As it turns out, and in true Lebanese politics fashion, several key memebers of the unit at the Ministry of Tourism, in which Byblos is part of its jurisdiction, are at personal odds with Jbeil's chief archeologist and head of the new quay project propsal. Issues of insufficient funds and delays of approval (from the related UN bureau and the ministry's own Projects Unit) have been cited by the Ministry of Tourism. For some ten years. The real sad but true part: Jbeil's chief archeologist who proposed the new design is no longer in office. Still, the project bears his signature. So Byblos waits. In the meantime, according to the Port's Chief Mariner, the watchtower's base stones are slowly disintegrating. A catalyst in the form of an oil spill was really the last thing one could have wished for."

War damage

2006-09-14T21:53:00.000-07:00

One of the other things I hate about war -- what all it messes up besides lives, property...

This reached me late, which is just as well, but it's worth sharing as people need to consider that other things suffer when anger takes over. I really liked Byblos when I visited Lebanon in October 2002.

Reuters tells the rest --

Lebanese oil slick hits ancient Phoenician port
Tue 22 Aug 2006 9:04 PM ET
By Gideon Long

BYBLOS, Lebanon, Aug 23 (Reuters) - The Lebanese port of Byblos has survived the Romans, the Crusades and the armies of Alexander the Great but now it faces a 21st century menace, brought to its shores on a tide of war -- oil pollution.

A slick caused by Israel's bombardment of a power plant last month during its conflict with Hizbollah guerrillas has spewed a black tide along a 140-km (87-mile) stretch of the coastline.

Few places have been hit harder than Byblos, which dates back 7,000 years and lies 35 km (22 miles) north of Beirut.

Capturing the moment

2006-09-11T12:01:00.000-07:00

Note:

This came in an e-mail from good friend Rabih over in the Middle East. He is Lebanese and proud of it, but very aware of the world around him. He lived in the U.S. during his undergraduate years in New England.

My Dear Friends from America,

I'm writing to tell you that my thoughts and feelings are with you and the American people on this special day that marks five years since September 11. Today is day of remembrance, of meditation, of emotion. Though the whole world was affected by the events of 9/11, and in many ways a new world order came to be as a result, on this day my thoughts are with the three thousand and more families whose lives were changed. Everything can be rebuilt but the loss of a loved one is forever. On this day I also take a moment to stand up straight and give salute to the oh so brave men and women who against all odds rushed to the scenes that people were fleeing and risked their lives to give a helping hand. I recall the words of our Lord: "Greater love has no one that this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Theirs is story of courage, of bravery, of unquestionable love. They are real heroes.

Today is an important day for us, the alive and the capable. An important day for you, especially as Americans. It is a day of judgment and accountability. As we reflect on the memory of the lost ones, as we stand before their graves, we ask ourselves: What have we said and what have we done so that those who died did not do so in vain? Has it been right? Has it been enough? It is a great feeling of inner void to stand before those who have sacrificed their all, willingly or not, and to look into the eyes of the heroes who gave their all, realising that we could have contributed more. September 11 lies two weeks before memorial day of the fallen soldiers of the Lebanese Forces. Every year I stand somberly as I count my overdues. Those of you who have had the chance--or have made it point--to visit Normandy Memorial Site in Northern France, which lies only a few hundred feet from one of the D-Day beaches, would perhaps know what I'm talking about. For two hours, I did not utter a single word. At times I found it hard to stand up as the overwhelming sense of respect kept bringing me to my knees. There is no raised Lebanese flag and no Lebanese soldier in the earth of this site. They fell for a war not fought in my country or for the liberation of my country. They fell in a war that ended almost two generations before I was born. But they laid their lives for principles that define my being: freedom, sovereignty, dignity, justice, human rights, and peace. That is enough for me to hold myself and my conscious accountable before their deeds, as I believe any responsible and aware citizen of the free world should. Those who died in September 11 were not in a war. They were not in battle for a just cause. They did not volunteer to die. Death was wickedly brought upon them by those--independent of race and religion--who chose to revolt against the principles of the free world. They are the victims and the martyrs of those principles, and as such we owe them a lot. Today is a day when we question what have we done? What have our governments done? I am not the person to judge, right or wrong, the results of the American government, the Lebanese government, and the many other nation's governments "war on terror". Only time will tell. But as I reflect on this day, I ask whether we would have accomplished more and given back more, had our governments, motivated by our individual and collective intentions, instead fought for "a commitment for justice and peace". These are my thoughts at least, which I share with you.

The reality is that September 11 happens everyday in many countries of the world. We are all responsible for stopping September 11 and not letting it happen ever again, for the memory of the fallen, for ourselves, and for our children and their children.

My thoughts and prayers are with you, America.

Sincerely,

Rabih El-Khoury

Profound observation

2006-09-08T16:04:00.000-07:00

Note: This was written by City University coursemate Asad Khan, of Delhi, India, who works as an editor there. It is very topical and worth the time to read it.

Why blame Britain?

No provocation is big enough to justify killings and whoever supports the slaying of innocents is a coward. The theory of retribution is humbug, says Asad Amin

Minds are stamped with images of "atrocities against Muslims". Hizb-ul-Tehrir and al-Muhajiroun spend a great deal of their energy and resources denigrating Western culture and instilling hatred of the West; and thus are suicide bombers made.
There are around 1.8 million Muslims in Britain. A large number of them are from Sylhet in Bangladesh, Mirpur in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Punjab in Pakistan. Unlike Indians who migrated to Britain, most of them were uneducated and came to this country as labourers in the 1950s and 1960s to work night shifts in factories and mills.

My first reaction to British Muslims being arrested on August 10 after security forces unravelled their plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners was of disbelief. I prayed it would turn out to be another Forest Gate incident in which two British Muslim brothers of Bangladeshi origin, arrested on terrorism charges, had to be released because of wrong intelligence input. But three weeks later, with most of the arrested men charged, I am furious that the dastardly act of a bunch of people has put the Muslim community in the dock.

Why this urge among British-born Muslims to perpetuate violence against their own fellow citizens? What will they gain? Are they propelled merely by frustration over social and economic disadvantages? These and other questions are now being raised to find answers to the radicalisation of an increasing numbers of young Muslims in Britain. During my stay in the UK on a fellowship, I interacted widely with young British Muslims and often asked them these and related questions. Often this would result in unending arguments, with me insisting that violence, as a means of protest, is no solution. Some would agree, many others would not.

Those who advocate violence cite the suffering of Muslims "around the world". For them, the war on terror is a "global war on Islam". The US invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with democracy, but to "steal" Iraqi oil and draw a new map of West Asia. They describe Prime Minister Tony Blair as a "criminal" for supporting the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. The US and the UK are seen as mollycoddling Israel. So these countries are legitimate targets, they argue. No matter how hard you try, you cannot convince them that targeting innocent civilians in markets, the Underground, buses and aircraft is indefensible. But the fact remains that no provocation is big enough to justify senseless killings and whoever supports the slaying of innocents is a coward. The much-vaunted theory of retribution is humbug.

Who are these young British Muslims, mostly of Pakistani origin, that turn to violence? They are discernible by their presence everywhere. Hanging around on the streets in tracksuits with hood pulled on and Nike sneakers in groups of four or five, they indulge in pointless barbershop chatter and revel in conspiracy theories. These whinging Toms have nothing good to say about their Government. They are ungrateful children of the British welfare state. They live in the UK but their heart beats for their parents' birthplace. They decry everything Western, but make full use of freedom and democracy. They comprise the fringe group that has hijacked Muslim society. Some section of the media wants us to believe that they are the majority and represent Islam. Both the assumptions are wrong.

Among the potential terrorists some are school dropouts, born again Muslims and members of extremist Muslim organisations like Hizb-e-Tehrir and al-Muhajiroun. A large number of their members are drawn from families that survive on social security and are forced to live on paltry sums of money in a country of cutthroat competition and flourishing consumerism. With their eyes shut to the real world, they willingly believe propaganda about "atrocities being committed by Christian armies against helpless Muslims", made credible by visuals of "children being killed by the Israel Defence Force" screened regularly at centres of Hizb-ul-Tehrir and al-Muhajiroun

The Guardian recently quoted a disillusioned member of one such group as saying, "I think the answer lies in what I am calling the 'atmosphere' - the bedrock. I call it 'ummaism', corrupting the youth; making them disillusioned with their families; determined to show that the Western civilisation was a lie, that your parents are not living the Quran, that you are a Muslim first and supporting your brothers in arms is what it means to be a Muslim." This is how impressionable were provided with housing in Burnley, Bradford and other places in the north. Over the years, these housing estates became islands of British Muslims of South Asian origin, with the residents reluctant to interact with the Whites, transplanting the social and cultural mores of their country of origin.

When the factories and mills began to shut down, these immigrant, semi-skilled workers were left with no option but to either apply for welfare benefits or open small businesses in retailing, takeaway eateries and halal shops. Those who could not move on live in virtual poverty in dilapidated housing blocks.

The brighter side of the story is about how Bangladeshis have succeeded in private enterprise, opening restaurants. The Curry Club of Great Britain estimates that there are 8,500 Indian restaurants in the UK, of which Bangladeshis own 7,200. More Whites than Asians visit these restaurants in Brick Lane, Southall and Euston. The point that needs to be noted is that Britons helped them succeed by patronising their business ventures. Those who tried to succeed, have little to complain about; those who chose not to try, are today's whining lot who find fault with anything and everything British and, by extension, Western. These are the radicals, the die-hards, the potential bombers.

Where does Islam fit into all this?

Body of surprise

2006-08-31T13:39:00.001-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

How Webb County handles the dead has been a live issue for some time and remains one with related duties under scrutiny and discussion.
Raul Casso, chief of staff for county judge Louis Bruni, believes publicly aired disagreements with the Sheriff’s Office stem from a lack of the meeting of the minds, despite what might have previously appeared to be an understanding. Bruni and commissioners had been led to believe that the Sheriff’s Office would be picking up bodies left to them after two trucks were delivered to the county and later outfitted with refrigeration earlier this year.
“Picking up bodies has been a sore spot with the county at $50,000 a year,” Casso said.
Unidentified bodies and those requiring extensive forensic examination in criminal cases are frequently sent to the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s office in San Antonio.
Casso, and Texas A&M International criminal justice professor Clifford Black both say the sheriff’s office entered into talks about picking up bodies found around the county, or in the river, with intentions of saving money. Definitive, concrete action was lacking to make it all happen, however.
Casso says Webb County sought to have its own morgue unit a few years ago and floated bonds to try and bring it about, but nothing happened. The county also lacked control over which funeral homes showed up to pick up the dead.
Casso says Sheriff Rick Flores stepped into a verbal crossfire when county leaders discovered to their surprise that his deputies were not picking up bodies. Webb County wants to take care of transporting the dead themselves to combat inconsistent and high charges from funeral homes.
Casso lacked detailed funeral home transportation charges, but noted that costs ranged from $800 to $1,500 for indigenous burials and said transport charges were similar in their inconsistent costs.
“It’s about the same kind of spread to take them to San Antonio, or pick them up,” he said.
Casso said commissioners had set a limit on paying the funeral homes and bought the trucks to move duties into county hands, but notes that the trucks were never specifically assigned.
Casso doesn’t blame Flores for any misunderstandings and does not believe the sheriff had intentionally lied to him.
“He was never specifically given the job, but he never spoke up,” Casso said. “I don’t feel I was misled. They didn’t ask me for anything. I can’t take the position that I was purposely mislead.
“He was never told to go and do it. There was no mandate to go pick up bodies. It looks like maybe they are going to do it, but it remains to be seen.”
Black has worked with county sheriffs in Ohio, Denton and Laredo isn’t so sure that that will happen. He doesn’t see it as a normal duty for law officers.
“I think the sheriff’s departments across the United States do not transport bodies to the morgue if there are any undertakers or funeral parlors in the vicinity,” he said. “The morgue’s not our responsibility.”
Key words in related conversations between Casso and the Sheriff’s Office are blamed for leaving wrong impressions because law officers frequently see dead bodies in their investigations.
But that doesn’t mean they get used to it.
“Why don’t you come with us the next time?” Casso heard once, understanding how horrible those assignments can be. “It can be really terrible out there, finding bodies that have been in the river for a couple of weeks or out in the monte under the hot sun for some time.”
Casso will be glad to finally see Webb County get its own morgue unit underway, costs of dealing with the dead reduced and clear communication with the Sheriff’s Office.
“He the Sheriff, is not the problem. It is just a big gangly problem that’s got to be taken care of,” he said. “It’s just got to be worked out. That’s all there is to it. I thought they were picking them up, but they’re not.”
Black says Webb County usually has some seven or eight deputies on patrol in a day shift, covering some 3,400 square miles.
Webb also plans on hiring a two-person morgue staff starting with a medical examiner, but Casso notes that they are very hard to find.
“San Antonio is there, but nine times out of 10 the local guy (medical examiner) can tell you how they died,” he said.
Laredo is some six times smaller than San Antonio, where numerous Laredo-area dead are examined. The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office employs 42 people, with one doctor and three or four autopsy technicians working each shift. One or two clerks handle receiving paperwork duties.

Note: A more extensive version of this story is available in the August issue of LareDOS, here in Laredo, Texas.

Eye-catching graphic work

2006-08-11T16:06:00.000-07:00

Texans for Public Justice graphic artist James Stout obviuously knows what he's doing in his craft.

His handiwork here leads into a very interesting report filed by this Austin-based watchdog organization about Texas top-rated, or low-rated -- depending on point of view -- lobbyists and their many, many millions.

Many of these millions go toward sponsorship of many Texas politicians -- obviously with strings attached when they obtain, or reclaim, office. Unfortunately, that's the system we have here in the U.S.

Politicians should wear sponsor company logo clothing and signs like race car drivers and athletes do in various other parts of the world. That would be much more honest than the current system, which almost still asks them to lie (or dodge the topic), telling us that they have no one telling them what to do.

Hey, you want to hold office here in the U.S., well unless you can pay for it yourself, you'll need some help and here's how you get it. Through lobbyists and other kingmakers.

Read more from TPJ at www.tpj.org

About Mexican Americana

2006-08-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

For those without a connection to the Mexican-American way of life and its many wonders and cultural marks, this movie "Quinceañera" might help.

It's an independent film, winning two awards at the famous Sundance Film Festival, so it has to have several qualities worth seeing. I haven't seen it yet, so I can't say yeah, or nay, o si o no, but if standing there in front of a theater without a clue which movie to see -- this might be the one.

A quinceañera is generally held when a girl is 15, signifying her ascent into near adulthood in the Mexican-American community. This is based around that usually very colorful and festive event.

Words worth remembering

2006-08-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

Larry King, on his Tuesday night edition of "Larry King Live," on CNN, got some interesting, and potentially smart words from Jordan's Queen Noor and retired U.S. statesman George Mitchell on the ongoing mess in the Middle East.

That segment is worth having around to read again. And maybe again...

Thank you Larry --

Your Majesty, are you more confident today than yesterday?

QUEEN NOOR: Oh, I'm an optimist by nature, like my husband. It's been tested sorely over these last years. I do believe that all hope is never lost. And as I have emphasized before, I think that it's vital that we recommit to resolving a just and comprehensive peace that will resolve and end occupation, that will deal with the refugees, that will resolve and end occupation, that will deal with the refugees, that will bring the parties together to listen to one another, to engage in a mutually respectful dialogue no matter what the histories, because there is an ugly history on all sides in this conflict. And to remember that 50 percent of the population in our region is under the age of 18, 70 percent under the age of 30. We must look to these generations, these coming generations. Israelis and Arabs and Americans must consider what Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein did. What are they leaving to the next generation? Are they going to leave this bankrupted approach and vicious cycle of violence, or are they going to try something new? And that means working together.

KING: Thank you so much. Your Majesty, Queen Noor, the widow of King Hussein of Jordan.

And George Mitchell, I want to ask you one question about Castro. Can peace break out here, George?

MITCHELL: You mean in Castro or...

KING: No, no, no, I'll get to Castro in a second. The Middle East. Can peace break out?

MITCHELL: Yes, it can. Yes, it can, Larry. I was just thinking as I heard some of the other comments. This is an ancient conflict. It's gone on for a long time. The British domination of Ireland lasted 800 years. Today, there is a free and vibrant Republic of Ireland. It has excellent relations with the United Kingdom. There remains the problem of Northern Ireland, still a serious issue, but one that hopefully -- where the war is over and progress will continue to be made.

So no matter how ancient the conflict, no matter how much hurt has been done, it can be ended and peace can break out.

Of government and forms

2006-07-24T17:00:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

“We have been hearing from some angry lawmakers,” Texans for Public Justice Director Craig McDonald said after his organization’s report on campaign donor disclosure went public last month.
Laredo-based District 42 state representative Richard Raymond wasn’t one of them, receiving high praise for properly disclosing the names and amounts he received, but Laredo’s District 21 state Senator Judith Zaffirini and District 80 area state rep. Tracy King didn’t fare as well.
Zaffirini and King both argued that their poorer grading by the Austin-based watchdog organization was due to discrepancies in the paper forms used to comply with new regulations on campaign disclosure. Both also said they had no intention of hiding anything in the forms required by the Texas Ethics Commission. Raymond did not return phone and e-mail messages to his office about the report, however.
“Ain’t Nobody’s Business: Lawmakers Flunk Big-Donor Disclosure,” available on the TPJ Web site said, “Three senators and 28 representatives left the occupation and employer fields blank every time they reported a large donation. Sen. Judith Zaffirini, (D-Laredo) raised the largest amount of these all-blank contributions ($226,400),” the report said.
The report said three of Zaffirini’s mystery donors were Beaumont and Houston law firms each contributing $25,000.
“Zaffirini, a champion of tobacco-control legislation, failed to identify the employers or occupations of three trial lawyers who litigated Texas’ $15 billion lawsuit against the tobacco industry,” the report said.
The report added that King (D-Batesville), choked on the disclosure of a former Texas governor – a $15,000 donation from Dolph Briscoe of Uvalde.
McDonald noted that the report, handled largely by an intern from the University of Texas, Omair Khan, took all of its information from what the candidates had filed and that the Dallas Morning News, Associated Press and San Antonio Express-News have all written something about it.
“It’s gotten some attention,” McDonald said. “This the first time for this report.”
McDonald added that TPJ constantly analyzes campaign contributions and spending.
Zaffirini and King have put their responses to the report down in writing.
“Under no circumstances would we knowingly violate any reporting requirement,” Zaffirini said to the Texas Ethics Commission in a June 30 letter. “The forms they used and that were approved by the TEC all indicate that including occupational information is optional. Because we used these forms, we thought we were complying fully with reporting requirements.”
King said in an e-mail that he has no problem with the disclosure requirements, but notes three reports have been due since the new law requiring disclosure of the employer and profession of contributors of more than $500.
“The last two reports have that space filled in every time. The first report after the new requirements became law had a few blanks in that spot due to a software issue I had at that time. That was later corrected and that blank has been filled every time it was required since then,” King said. “Apparently, the TPJ did not think the descriptions were adequate in some cases. Obviously, I thought the descriptions were adequate and certainly represented my best efforts.”
Note: All state lawmakers, including Zaffirini, King and Raymond, have Web sites easily found through any good online search engine and there is much to read for those seriously interested in learning about political campaign money. Some of those sites are: www.tpj.org; www.ethics.state.org; www.followthemoney.org; www.corporations.org; www.publicintegrity.org; www.campaignsforpeople.org; www.commoncause.org; www.publicampaign.org; www.citizen.org; www.texpirg.org; www.vote-smart.org and www.campaigndisclosure.org.

Note: This is the blog version of a very similar story published in the July edition of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas.

Caught in the middle

2006-07-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

Lebanese Christians appear to be right in the middle of what's going on right now in the Middle East, more so than innocent Israelis under Hezbollah rockets, or Hezbollah fighters and sympathsizers under Israeli attack -- but so far, their losses have been fewer.

They sit in a bad spot, which could worsen if Israel does indeed launch a full-scale ground offensive in southern Lebanon. Following is a message from a Lebanese friend...

Lebanon is under siege: Regardless of what your political beliefs are, Lebanon is being destroyed at the time you read this. And there is one thing you can do to help cease the fire: you can make your voice heard against the disaster that's being forced upon the Lebanese people.

Scream your indignation and call for a cease-fire and for the support of the Lebanese government position.

At a horrible time like this, we ask the international community, our friends, you, to stand together with us and react. Only by showing how united you are, will we be able to achieve massive sensibilization and help Lebanese children have a future.

Take a minute to read the note below: it's a summary of the main points of the Lebanese government legitimate sensible call for a cease-fire. Print it out and send it by post, by fax, by email to your local government office, to international newspapers, to international TV stations, to the UN headquarters and missions around the world...anything will help. It only takes a minute.

Thank you.

Calling for a Cease-Fire
July 18th, 2006

Israel is destroying Lebanon. It has no right to do so.

Children, women, innocent civilians are being killed by the Israeli attacks. Entire families are being chased out of their home villages. Bridges, roads, airports, ports, highways, energy plants and communication networks are being pounded to the ground. The whole country has been cut off from the rest of the world.

We, Lebanese people, are sad, we are suffering, we are angry, we are determined and mobilized to work together towards saving our nation.

Israel's initiative is an unfair disproportionate collective punishment inflicted upon Lebanon for the wrong reasons: what is happening today goes beyond the issue of a prisoners exchange.

Neither the government nor the innocent people of Lebanon had been informed or agreed on the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers.

Lebanon is in despair: it's a humanitarian and economic disaster.

We call for an immediate cease-fire under the auspices of the UN,
We call for the establishment of the government's sovereignty on all Lebanese territory in cooperation with the UN,
We call for your help to pressure Israel to stop its attacks.
Help us achieve it as soon as possible.
So that Lebanon will survive. Lebanon will survive.

From Lebanon

2006-07-20T12:19:00.000-07:00

Word from the Middle East isn't very good right now.

From a Lebanese friend, I hear...

"It's ugly and it's disgusting. The bombings are focused on Hizbollah locations, so it's not like the entire country is being blasted. The problem is that the Israelis have bombed not only Hizbollah whereabouts, but also every major road and port infrastructure that Hizbollah can directly or indirectly use to get in weapons from Syria and Iran. Worst of all is, the number of innocent civilians that are falling is unbelievable. Israel has actually striked on several occassions on pure residential areas with direct hits on residential buildings...it's total carnage."

From a journalist stationed in Beirut, a warning...

"I just hope there isn't a civil war. I'm convinced that if they send in ANY Western troops as part of an 'international stabilisation force', they will be attacked, and this place will become another Iraq."

Remote assignment

2006-07-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

KRRG's Rob Roberts works a remote from a Laredo, Texas location, speaking to the station and its listeners through a telephone.

Big Buck Country, KRRG, 98.1 FM, became a Country radio station earlier this year after the local AM 1490 went the same, but in automation, last year.

Roberts, Starr Murphy and Gil Ray bring in many years between them of on-air experience.

That growing Laredo Country radio market

2006-07-19T11:23:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

“Nothing is ever certain in radio, there are always changes being made,” Big Buck Country Program Director Monica Salazar said.
Salazar, 22, has been in radio for almost six years, but knows to keep an eye on the radio, despite it being a sound medium. Salazar also advises to keep an eye on Guerra Communications as it prepares to move to new and larger facilities on Jacaman Road, within sight of the Laredo Entertainment Center. KRRG and sister Tejano station Z-93 move when the building is ready – probably sometime before the end of the year – and regular listeners could raise an eyebrow at the radio and sharpen their hearing for Guerra Communications’ new home.
Salazar says the stations might employ a scrolling marquee, visible to passersby – noting which recording artist and song are on the air and hopes are for more range, too. Big Buck Country’s signal at 98.1 FM is strong in Mexico, extending to the mountains slightly north of Monterrey, but the station would like to turn its antenna around and be heard beyond Pearsall and closer to San Antonio.
Salazar feels the change five months ago from the previous 98 Mix format of contemporary hit radio music is working as intended. She says the main idea from owner Belinda Guerra and previous General Manager Martha Kennedy in going to the country format was to give Laredo a change and is seems to be a positive move with country music veteran regular disc jockeys Gil Ray, Rob Roberts and Starr Murphy leading the charge.
Salazar admits to being primarily a Rock and Roll music fan, but finds country winning her over through the works of singers like Tim McGraw and wife Faith Hill as well as Dierks Bentley.
Salazar sees more appreciation for Country music through the success of television’s “American Idol,” in which several of its singers perform in that genre.
Carrie Underwood, a winner in one recent “Idol” season, is becoming a regular on the Country Top 40 charts. Salazar also believes that crossover stars like Hill, Shania Twain and The Wreckers’ Michelle Branch help introduce more to Country and she sees elements of other genres in some songs. Trace Adkins adds a trace of Hip Hop in his current chart song “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.”
Salazar noted a more emotional “rowdy” response to the switch to Country a few months ago with requests for T-shirts and bumper stickers, but sees the strongest element in local radio success through its personalities. Automation might be the chosen low overhead choice of some radio managers, but not Salazar, or people like new General Manager Jorge Arredondo.
Big Buck Country DJs are frequently out of the office in remote broadcasts from events and businesses, meeting people and turning heads from their portable red-dominated Boom Box and Big Red van. Big Buck Country DJs are not machines.
“People make it more personalized and that’s something we want to stick with,” she said. “Making shows interactive is one of the most important things radio can do. Real persons entertaining persons.”
DJs aren’t machines, but use much more now than did a few decades, or even a few years ago. A DJ can program an entire show in and spend more time preparing for each speaking opportunity.
DJ Gil Ray claims over 30 years in that role. He started in 1974 at the Bonnie and Clyde Club on Arkansas St. and started working in local Country radio in the 1980s at KLAR.
He’s seen those many changes Salazar notes, but knows that not all change is handled correctly, missing potential longtime, loyal listeners.
“When Y95 went Country it was No. 1 overnight, but then they started changing and switched, but I think it’s going to do pretty good. People seem to be listening everywhere,” he said.
Gil Ray believes Laredo is a better Country market now than in past decades because the city has grown rapidly.
“A lot of people have moved in and a lot of people like the Country format,” he said.
Rob Roberts, an Alice native who has worked out of state, sees Laredo as a good Country music market, but primarily for mainstream Country due to its consistent variety in the listener’s ear.
Radio is an uncertain world where many old veterans learn to keep an eye on people entering the building who might appear to be interviewing for their job, and make mental notes of where the haul-it-yourself moving companies are located, but it is beginning to look like Country music might be in Laredo to stay.
The next ratings book is expected by Aug. 3.

Note: A similar print version of this story is available in the July 2006 edition of LareDOS in Laredo, Texas.

Big Boom Box

2006-07-19T11:06:00.000-07:00

KRRG disc jockey Rob Roberts steps out from that Laredo radio station's mobile remote unit known as the Boom Box on assignment recently.

The Boom Box is in frequent use by the Guerra Communications stations, which include Tejano station, KJBZ, Z-93.

In Beirut, Lebanon

2006-07-18T19:32:00.000-07:00

In late 2002, a the invitation of good friend Rabih El Khoury, I visited Lebanon, despite all the jitters it might have given others.

Things weren't difficult at that time, but the Syrian occupation was a visible problem and there was turbulence on the horizon with the coming of the U.S.-Iraq war seen. Now, however, Lebanon is in the center of the storm, leaving too many dead and even more terrorized.

Many of these immediate Lebanese victims here in July 2006 have nothing to do with Hezbollah, but are where the bombs, missiles and bullets fall, nevertheless. I certainly hope peace prevails very soon. Most all of this never should have happened, anyway.

I still have very good memories of my trip to Lebanon. It's a beautiful country with many striking scenic sites, great food and really good people. I would like to see it all again, including the sites I missed in that first short trip. Even if I favor a war I dislike war, and this one -- for this American way over here -- seems very much a waste.

I'm sure I would have much stronger words if I was in that region.

Rabih's new blog has some very stunning photos from both peaceful and war moments in Lebanon. His blog is the first listed down on the right of mine.

Bobcat alums gathering in Laredo

2006-07-17T14:37:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

Laredo alumni of Texas State University, previously known as Southwest Texas State, are growing and seeking members and project support.
Banker colleagues Jim Moore and Robert Treviño are the current chief leaders, aiming toward high school students, hoping to aid those who need some help.
Treviño said the group wants to raise scholarship funds for local high school students; mentor students on Texas State’s pluses and on education in general as well as to mentor parents on the positives of having their children leave home and grow as individuals outside Laredo.
“We realized that Laredo had over 500 Alumni in the area and we decided to get these people together so we could give back to our University and our community,” Treviño said. “We are in no competition with any other organization. In fact we welcome any joint project we can work together on. We all have the same goals Give back to our community and university.”
The University of Texas, St. Mary’s University and Our Lady of The Lake also have active alumni in Laredo.
Treviño feels media attention is important to the Bobcat group, and probably for other alumni groups, to help draw graduates.
“We are in our infancy stage and need all the publicity we can get to grow this organization into a chapter all alumni can be proud,” Treviño said.
Moore frequently updates local alumni on the phenomenal growth at the San Marcos school, noting numerous building changes, land acquisitions and changes in the facilities’ physical appearance.
Moore attended in the 1960s when enrollment was some 2,500. Enrollment has climbed to 27,000 now and TSU has become considerably more selective in its admissions.

Note: A similar print version of this story appears in LareDOS, here in Laredo, Texas.

Election wins don't always follow the money

2006-07-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

By MIKE McILVAIN

Are enhanced television through cable and satellite, along with more entertainment offerings in a growing city, burying political commercials?
Results of recent local elections might say Laredo voters either miss those numerous, and sometimes expensive television commercials, newspaper ads and radio spots, or see beyond them.
Money and politics are in an older and more secure marriage than anyone who is, or ever was married or dreamed of being rich, but that relationship isn’t always good enough to assure office. The wealthier, or perceived better-monied candidates for Webb County Judge and Mayor, C.Y. Benavides and John Galo, respectively, came up short in their quests for office against Danny Valdez and Raul Salinas.
“It wasn’t about the money,” Salinas said of his volunteer help, a day after winning a runoff against Galo by 1,008 votes.
Texas A&M International political science professor Nasser Momayezi understands where Salinas is coming from.
“Money, they say, is the mother and milk of politics, but it really depends on how you raise the money and spend the money,” Momayezi said. “Mr. Galo spent a lot of money and look what happened.”
Records at City Hall indicate Galo spent $353,210.43 while Salinas’ campaign treasurer Rogelio Rodriguez says they spent $102,350.70.
Momayezi, author of “Texas Politics: Individuals Making a Difference” and numerous magazine articles, notes Laredoan Tony Sanchez’s unsuccessful run for governor in 2002, despite spending some $73 million.
Momayezi says plenty of special interest groups and people give to political campaigns and candidates have to spend money to gain voter attention, but saw Salinas’ edge through his footwork – trekking the grassroots.
“Out everywhere, he was there and Mr. Galo relied on the TV and turnout was very low,” Momayezi said.
Momayezi felt that local water problems and city government’s bickering with the county over bridges and other issues could have hurt Galo, attempting to move from his city council chair to the mayor’s post. Salinas had never held public office, running after a 35-year FBI career.
Momayezi expected a close race for mayor and saw the water issues as a possible deciding issue. Laredo has long sought a second tap water source, other than the Rio Grande, and shortly before the runoff election a city water failure on the northside couldn’t have pleased anyone.
Valdez moved over from a justice of the peace post to county judge. Benavides came from a business background.
The March 24 edition of the Austin-based Texas Observer, noted Valdez, originally from a city barrio, spending some $160,000 and “rich oilman and rancher” spending some $700,000.
That old money and political success relationship, or formula, isn’t seen as a dying marriage elsewhere. At least not yet.
Jason Stanford, campaign manager for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell, and a consultant and researcher occasionally quoted and interviewed by national news media, sees the strong relationship between money and obtaining a desired office.
“Money is time, and time is the most precious commodity in politics,” Stanford said from his Austin office. “Money allows you to do more work in a finite amount of time.
“The basic rule is that you have to have enough money, but you won’t win just because you have more money.”
Some 50 miles north of Austin, Republican Congressional hopeful Wes Riddle appreciates the differences in money and people between local and Washington DC-aimed races. He hopes to eventually replace John Carter, R-Round Rock, who holds the 31st District seat in the nation’s capital. Riddle left a two-decade Army career before running against Carter once, and writes a column for several newspapers.
“What’s great about a city-wide, is that the threshold for media saturation is also more easily reached,” Riddle said from Belton. “You might say the same thing about a U.S. Congressional race, too, except that a candidate can reach 5-20,000 voters directly through the course of a 6-9 month campaign for mayor.”
Salinas will receive $36,000 per year from Laredo in regular salary.

Note: A similar print version of this story is available in LareDOS, in Laredo, Texas.