This secret letter from a Marine in Iraq, now doing the rounds, is interesting and at times even amusing, but mostly it’s just depressing. The author is a talented and somewhat snarky writer, and it’s well worth a read. This bit, though, just boggles the mind:

Most Surreal Moment — Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. We had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.

This is how we win hearts and minds? By rounding up everyone who even looks like a bad guy? My great fear is that similar things will start happening here, soon. And with the dumping of habeus corpus, this is something we all have to fear for, now. You could be the next midget with plastic handcuffs and no recourse to call a lawyer.

An aside on that note, something that really pissed me off this weekend. On Meet the Press, the Missouri senate candidates, Talent (R) and McCaskill (D) were debating, and Talent was snidely accusing McCaskill of “supporting habeus corpus rights for terrorists, so they can sue us”. Astoundingly, this put McCaskill on the defensive. Why oh why didn’t she come back with: “I support habeus corpus rights for innocent people”?! That’s why we’ve had habeus corpus in civilized society for nearly a millenium!

End of aside, back to that letter. This bit was also very revealing:

Biggest Hassle — High-ranking visitors. More disruptive to work than a rocket attack. VIPs demand briefs and “battlefield” tours (we take them to quiet sections of Fallujah, which is plenty scary for them). Our briefs and commentary seem to have no effect on their preconceived notions of what’s going on in Iraq. Their trips allow them to say that they’ve been to Fallujah, which gives them an unfortunate degree of credibility in perpetuating their fantasies about the insurgency here.

So I guess George Bush was right — the media is getting it wrong about Iraq. Unfortunately, it’s getting it wrong in a different direction than he thinks.

With a hat tip to the Slog, enjoy a Friday afternoon song from the Asylum Street Spankers. Inspired by Bill Maher?

Hey Jay, they’re playing at VZD’s when we’re in OKC next Friday — let’s check them out!

Yesterday we had an election here in Austria. I was surprised to learn this morning that the Social Party took the lead – shocking, given their involvement in a massive banking scandal last spring. The far right Freedom Party took just over 11 percent of the vote. They ran an ugly, openly racist campaign that infuriated me whenever I saw the posters. The other right wing party was just as offensive, calling for a deportation of 30% of Austria’s immigrants as part of their platform – I loudly offered to be the first deportee in line whenever I heard the party leader on the news.

In my head it went something like this:

“Oh, we didn’t mean YOU,” they’d say at the BZOe HQ when I went down to volunteer to be deported.

“Then who, pray tell, DID you mean?” I would ask, pointedly, while the camera crew zoomed in on the hapless party employee’s face.

Given that the Social Party and the People’s Party took the lion’s share of the vote and that talk is of a grand coalition between those two, I hold hope that the new government will crush the far right’s participation in Austrian politics once and for all. But I also hope that the reason the Greens did so poorly is because green policy has become mainstream here in Austria. Hope springs eternal, and hey, yesterday at the harvest festival in Schladming, I watched little Indian girls dance to tuba music and hitch rides on hay covered floats, their brown hands stained with juice from wild blueberries. Austria has a chance, still.

If nothing else, now that the election is over, those awful posters will come down. I had to physically restrain myself from going on a propaganda remix campaign. They were bad, I’m telling you, saying things like “Homeland instead of Islam” and “Vienna Should Not Be Istanbul.” A newspaper checklist that listed things the FPOe was against included “The construction of new mosques.”

I’m on the hunt for photos of the Freedom Party’s campaign, remixed, but haven’t found anything better than the one we saw in town that gave Strache the trademark hairdo and mustache of Austria’s most famous facist – and renamed the FPOe (Freedom Party Austria) as the Fascist Party Austria. I salute you, my remixing neighbor! May you dance with the Indian girls at next year’s harvest festival!

Since several people have asked for them, here are photos of what I guess we have to call Garden Nonfamous. With the expert help of Michael Muro Garden Design, we ripped out the strange remnants of the previous owners’ landscaping and replaced it with a low-maintenance, drought-tolerant design. There were a number of things, like the sloping bed in front of the fence, that just never worked at all. We’re really pleased with the results and as everything fills in we expect to be even more so.

I’m most excited about the amount of early-blooming plants we included. I love things that bloom in late winter when I’m always so ready for spring, and with lenten rose, witch hazel and some crocuses, we have something to look forward to through the cold months. This is one of those things that I just don’t think we could have done ourselves… to do 10% as good a job would have taken every weekend for months, not including all the time it would have taken to learn about landscaping and pick our own plants. It was a pleasure to work with Michael, and if you’re interested in the details you can geek out with the design and the plant legend. We made a few changes in the plants but for the most part this is an accurate map of what we had done. I’m still working on being able to tell people what everything is… I’ve always admired Mamaw’s encyclopedic knowledge of plants so this feels like a good start.

Oh, and if you’re wondering how we’re going to keep Max and Easy from destroying everything, we fenced off the back yard for them. Their need to bark at every passing dog has now been replaced by an obsession with keeping the hated crows out of their new territory.