Articles worth reading

Some things from the last few days, when I wasn't able to get online:

Bush's My Lai, on Haditha and other atrocities in Iraq, from Robert Parry in Consortium News.

the scenarios are eerily similar: U.S. troops – fighting a confusing conflict against a shadowy enemy – lash out at a civilian population, killing unarmed men, women and children.

The Four Fundamentalisms and the Threat to Sustainable Democracy, by Robert Jensen in OpedNews. It defines the things Americans want to believe: Economic, Technological, Religious and National, and considers alternatives, such as those thought essential for a good life, like air conditioning:

The “cracker house,” a term from Florida and Georgia to describe houses built before air-conditioning that utilize shade, cross-ventilation, and various building techniques to create a livable space even in the summer in the deep South. Of course, even with all that, there are times when it’s hot in a cracker house -- so hot that one doesn’t want to do much of anything but drink iced tea and sit on the porch. That raises a question: What’s so bad about sitting on the porch drinking iced tea instead of sitting inside in an air-conditioned house?

How New Orleans drowned, by Douglas Brinkley, article in latest Vanity Fair,a chronology of the disaster and the government's response, that concludes:

Blanco's was a struggle largely hidden from the public eye. But her effective, if clumsy, showdown with the president subtly changed the second term of George W. Bush, leaving him open to other attempts to curtail the sweeping power he had assumed for himself.

Speaking of Vanity Fair, don't miss the 'Morpholution' on the front page of their site (slide the arrow...).

Blogger Jon Swift: suffering from 'Conservative Fatigue Syndrome'.

The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage does it again, with Cheney Aide is Screening Legislation.

And, following up on the Al Gore story, here's Andrew Sullivan in The Times Online: Gore goes from bad joke to great white hope. Among the arguments:

Then there’s the issue of karma. Gore won the popular vote in 2000. If a few old Jewish ladies in Palm Beach had not been confused by their ballots and voted for Patrick Buchanan, Gore would have won Florida as well — and the presidency. Everyone knows this — and that election still wounds America in ways that a Gore candidacy might assuage.

But,

I also recall the ineptitude of the 2000 campaign, the tone-deaf rhetoric, the palpable unease in elective office that made Gore — and the rest of us — miserable for so long.

If he really is a new man, if he really is finally comfortable in his own skin, he’ll stay on his porch in Tennessee. Or be dragged by his party, huffing and sighing, off it.