brainrow

At the end of a PBS American Experience program about photographer Ansel Adams, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope summed up:

Well, Ansel’s life encompasses the long national debate — the debate that, I think, began ten years before he was born with the release of the Census of 1890, the declaration that the frontier had closed, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous challenge to the American people: who were we going to be now that we didn’t have a frontier anymore?

And Ansel’s life occupied almost exactly a century in which Americans debated that question, and at the end of the century came to Ansel’s answer, which was that while the frontier as a statistically measured artifact of the Census Bureau might have ended, wildness did not end with the frontier, and that what it was to be an American was to respect and cherish wildness.

…

I think Ansel captured in film that opportunity, that possibility which Americans spent all of his lifetime debating whether to value. And then, really almost at the end of his life, Americans decided that we wanted to be Americans. We did not want a second Europe. We wanted a place that was still wild.

The difficulty with protecting wild places is that you can’t win the victory once and for all. Every day, there is pressure to allow logging or drilling or other exploitation of wilderness lands. We can turn the developers away a hundred times, but they’ll be back, over and over, until there are no wild places anywhere.

Such things, once lost, can never be recovered. Never.

We’ve reached another milestone in Iraq:

The number of United States military personnel killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion five years ago has passed the 4,000 mark.

The latest to die were four soldiers whose patrol vehicle was blown up by a bomb in southern Baghdad on Sunday.

President George W Bush offered his “deepest sympathies” to the families of US military personnel killed in Iraq.

Separately, the bodies of two US security contractors kidnapped in Iraq more than a year ago have been found.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had recovered the remains of Ronald Withrow, who was seized in January 2007, and John Roy Young, abducted in November 2006.

On Sunday, insurgent attacks and military operations left at least 47 people dead across Iraq.

The bloodshed comes despite an overall reduction in violence since last June, following the US deployment of an extra 30,000 troops in violence-hit areas – the so-called “troop surge”.

Another hundred years of this war, as John McCain suggests, and this won’t seem so bad.

Update: The New York Times has a database of the lost lives. Each pixel represents one soldier. Click to see different faces.

James Carville on Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Barack Obama:

“An act of betrayal,” said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

Oooh! Classy!

Carville was one of the upstart political geniuses who ran Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. Two years after the Clinton political brain trust took over the national Democratic Party, the Republicans won substantial majorities in both houses of Congress. From then until 2006, the best Democratic showing in Congressional elections came in 2000, when they won a 50-50 tie with Republicans in the Senate — a tie that was immediately broken in favor of Republicans by Dick Cheney.

In 2006, Democratic strategists considered how best to fight their way back. Clinton-aligned strategists like Carville and Rahm Emanuel argued that Democrats had to concentrate their limited resources on a small handful of races where Democratic chances looked best. Howard Dean, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, had a different idea: give the Republicans a fight for every seat. It might produce some surprises, and even in districts and states where Democrats were defeated, the fact that the party was in there fighting might plant some seeds that would bear fruit in years to come.

Dean’s strategy helped Democrats regain control of both Houses of Congress in the 2006 elections. Immediately, Carville called for Dean’s resignation, saying “I would describe his leadership as Rumsfeldian in its incompetence.”

Really? Democrats win Congress for the first time in 12 years, and you say the guy responsible is incompetent?

You know, I don’t think Carville has any business calling anyone Judas.