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Catching up on the news

Don't know if you guys have been following the Judith Miller case, but it's getting a lot more interesting. It turns out that Karl Rove may have been either the original leak or one of the original leaks of Ms. Plame's CIA identity. That on its own is a federal crime, but we have to ask if Rove was acting on his own or whether the smear campaign against Plame and her husband were orchestrated by Rove's boss, our old friend Bushie. Is it time to start asking "what did the president know and when did he know it" yet?

Interestingly, Bush originally said that anyone in his administration who was found to have leaked information about Plame would be fired. Now that it looks like Karl Rove did it (Bush's chief political fixer), Bush has modified that policy to say that anyone who "broke the law" would be fired.

I just heard about a poll that put Bush's popularity at 42 percent, and the popularity of Congress at 33 percent. Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, also just jumped ship and said he was going to oppose Bush on the stem cell bill. When your friends start putting political distance between you in order to save their own asses, you know you're in deep trouble. Bush is starting to look more and more like he's struggling every day.

I also heard that Roberts, his pick for the Supreme Court, may have been chosen not because of conservative ideology but because of a career of demonstrated support for the executive branch in American constitutional law. The theory being here, that Bush knows his lawyers are likely to end up in front of the Supreme Court at some point in the next three years (when his allies finally turn on him), and he's putting a friend on the court so he'll have all the help he can get. He may need it.

A year till the midterm elections... I'm beginning to really look forward to this.

More background on the Plame Affair (Ooh, I like the sound of that..."The Plame Affair") on Wikipedia.

Thanks for the perspective, Marton, and good luck in Iran!

Heads Down

I'm back, but buried. Catching up on work after vacation (my boss was just in a bad car accident too, she was in the back seat of a taxi during a conference and was broadsided by another car--she's okay but will be out of action for another couple of weeks).

Mainly though, I really want to spend some more time with the story I'm writing. I made some good progress during the last few weeks of traveling and want to keep the momentum going while I have the energy. So my posting here may be a little slim for a while.

Croatia was awesome, pics to come. Kisses to everyone who sent me all the nice mails the past couple of weeks.

Reverse Jetlag

Can't sleep. I have bad reverse-jetlag and startled wide awake an hour ago halfway through an intensely audio dream that involved The Beatles, The Stones and John F. Kennedy. I'm sure that for a few moments I was wide awake but could still hear the music from the dream, a kind of mod-rock dirge for dead heroes.

Arrived yesterday from the States and am off again to Croatia tomorrow. I'm going to need this sleep bad--flight to Venice, then a train to Trieste the next morning, bus to Rijeka and catamaran to Unije. I'll be able to sleep on legs of the trip, but still.

The States were great. I had the most awesome weekend with Hannah and her friends. I'd forgotten about the Fourth of July and so just stumbled into one of the best parties I've had in years. I'm really lucky that Hannah's in Chicago, and I'm lucky that I fly through there a lot and can stay over when I do. And I'm lucky that her friends and new boyfriend are so awesome, and that I can piggy-back on her social scene for a few days at a time.

I got to write a lot too... on the planes and in Hannah's place when everyone was out working. Broke the fifty page mark of pretty solidly complete text, another thirty five pages of notes. I guess I'm about a quarter of the way through this thing. It feels like it's starting to happen. Reading Gravity's Rainbow again for inspiration though, and while the psychological mood that book puts me in is really good for writing in the style I'm working with (there's at least one scene in my book that is heavily affected by one scene in Pynchon's), the sheer staggering brilliance of some of his passages just bring tears to my eyes. Tchitcherine searching for the Kirghiz Light...

"Got it, sez Tchitcherine. "Let's ride, comrade." Off again, the fires dying at their backs, the sound of string music, of village carousing, presently swallowed behind the wind.

And so on into the canyons. Far away to the north, a white mountaintop winks in the last sunlight. Down here, it is already shadowed evening.

Tchitcherine will reach the Kirghiz Light, but not his birth. He is no aqyn, and his heart was never ready. He will see it just before Dawn. He will spend 12 hours then, face-up on the desert, a prehistoric city greater than Babylon lying in stifled mineral sleep a kilometer below his back, as the shadow of the tall rock, rising to a point, dances west to east and Dzhaqyp Qulan tends him, anxious as child and doll, and drying foam laces the necks of the two horses. But someday, like the mountains, like the young exiled women in their certain love, in their innocence of him, like the morning earthquakes and cloud-driving wind, a purge, a war, and millions after millions of souls gone behind him, he will hardly be able to remember it.

But in the Zone, hidden inside the summer Zone... he will be drawn the same way again.

I got a new iPod in Chicago, gave my old one to Cecilie (she seemed to be very--and demonstrably--happy). I named the new one "Tchitcherine."

So in other news, I interviewed a guy over the phone for the Comms Specialist slot in my team. British guy, former journalist, stuck in Denmark for the same reason as me (married to a blindingly fabulous girl who makes it all worthwhile). He runs a magazine in his spare time that tracks Danish politics from an international perspective. It's his passion the way the book I'm writing is mine, and it looks like he's done a pretty good job of it. I hope we can get him on board, because I think I need to work with a journalist on this job. I can understand the mindset better than someone who's spent all their energy getting themselves into the marketing biz.

I never really thought much about Chicago when I was living in New York or California, but I'm falling in love with the city. There is a lot to do there, a lot of diversity, a lot of good food and a thriving music scene, but people--at least the ones I've met--are really down to earth. It used to get on my nerves how many people in San Francisco and some in New York come off like they're too cool to talk to you, even though you live in the same city and are involved in the same scene.

I was talking Marissa about it--I called her from the conference--and she's feeling the same thing too (she lives in San Francisco but is from Chicago originally). Turns out she was in Chicago the week before I was, and loved it. It's funny, she just invited me to a 007 party in August, which was the theme of the company reception my team put together at the conference in Minneapolis--the gig that pulled me there in the first place. I've got the tux but unless I'm summoned to Seattle that week I don't think I'll be able to make it. I had great fun at Klaus and Zorana's 007 party a couple of months ago.

I remember walking off the A340 from Chicago and down the concourse, seeing the other gates, other jets, other cities. Tokyo/Narita, Helsinki, Moskva/Sheremetyevo. And usually, here, breaking through my bone-weary gratefulness to be home, I'd have the fantasy of just keeping going. Walking not back to taxi and home but to some new strange place. And I did want to keep going, of course I did, but this time it was Chicago I'd have rather gone back to, and a rooftop party with a skyline view, and friends, and a fading turquoise sky the color you only find in paperbacks and dreams.

So what to do, move to Chicago? Who knows. Cecilie still wants to live in New York, even more than I do, and I am totally happy with that if I can find something interesting to do there. Something in publishing or PR comms maybe. I'd happily move to Chicago, or DC so I can work myself to death for something that's at least socially relevant. And Cecilie is always keeping an eye on the foreign correspondent jobs in Brussels (I just love that girl!), at the same time I'm looking at headquarters jobs that keep opening with the Company in Paris. Fuck it, who knows.

There's always a strong chance I'll be sent to Seattle long-term at some point if I stay in the same career. The conference in Minneapolis was a big success, and brought back a lot of the motivation for this job that I had lost over the past year. If I can help build a team structure that leaves me a little more fulfilled, I'll stay where I am, take my assignments and vacations. Be mobile. See people when I can. It's just so heartbreaking to know so many awesome people in all these different cities, and know that I can't bring them all together, even though it would be the epic party of the century if I somehow could.

Half past five in the morning. Bright Scandinavian summer sun outside. Plane in a few hours, must sleep.

I don't joke when I sign these things off by saying "I love you all." If you are reading this, I almost certainly do.

P.S.
Pictures of Ukraine, Copenhagen, the Netherlands, Chicago and Minneapolis are all here. I've got a tux on in the Minneapolis section, if you want a laugh. That section is very small because the vast majority of photos taken that night turned out to be incriminating in one way or another, but the shots from other cities are more interesting.

Ukraine photos, and Chicago

I realized, horribly, that I'm not going to be able to get all my material from Ukraine and Utrecht up before I have to leave on another trip. I'm off to Chicago in the morning, where I'm really looking forward to another cool Chicago weekend, and then am off to Minneapolis for a 10-day conference.

After that, I get back to Copenhagen for a day and then am off with Cecilie to Venice and Unije, Croatia, for two weeks. So a lot of flying but not much weblogging.

I haven't been weblogging much lately anyway, because I've had this huge urge to write on this project I've been working on for the last few weeks. I apologize but I don't know how long this is going to last and I really want to take advantage of it while it's there. Looking forward to the 10-hour flight to Chicago tomorrow because I can zone into the project on the plane and be completely uninterrupted. Moments of peace are at a premium these days. Thank fuck for the plane. Really.

It'll probably be at least another year before I'm finished with that project, but for now I've put up some photos from Ukraine. They're the top two entries on the photo page, listed "Kiev" and "Crimea."

I haven't had time to write captions for these yet--I'll sort that out when I get back to Denmark. But the Kiev shots were taken at the beginning and end of the fact-finding trip I took to Ukraine a couple of weeks ago (there are a couple of photos from Riga, Latvia that got mixed in), and the Crimea shots were taken in Simferopol (the inland shots) and Sevastopol (the pictures that involve the sea).

More soon.

By the way, Vanja, if you're reading this, I just got a bounceback from your email--I tried to send you a link about a video letters project that is happening right now to try to reconnect old friends that lived in the former Yugoslavia. It looks cool- using old tech for good purposes. Take a look at http://www.videoletters.net, and send me your new email address!

Sometimes it's even worse than you think

Click here for the New York Times article

Oh shit. Sandra Day O'Connor just resigned from the Supreme Court. She was the first woman on the bench, and even though she was appointed by Reagan, she turned out to be one of the centrist swing votes and arguably the most important person on the court for the last 24 years.

Everyone expected Chief Justice Rehnquist to resign this year, because he has thyroid cancer. That would not have affected the political balance of the court because he's a Nixon-nominated extreme-right ideologue. Bush would nominate another extreme-right ideologue to replace him and we'd call it a wash.

But O'Connor dropping out will tear a great ragged hole in the center of the court, and if Bush fills that hole with another mindless zealot like Clarence Thomas, we'll be fucked for the next thirty years. Prepare to say goodbye to women's rights, the environment and any semblance of social justice.

This, even more than the continuation of the Iraq War, was the real screaming horror a lot of us dreaded when America chose Bush the second time. Now the country is going to get what it asked for--nice and hard.