This story in Massachusetts’s Patriot Ledger is disturbing: A National Guardswoman, Clara Durkin, who worked with financial accounting in Afghanistan came home to Quincy, Massachusetts, last month on leave. According to her sister,

‘‘She was in the finance unit and she said, ‘I discovered some things I don’t like and I made some enemies because of it.’ Then she said, in her light-hearted way, ‘If anything happens to me, you guys make sure it gets investigated,’’’ [her sister] said. ‘‘But at the time we thought it was said more as a joke.’’”

Two weeks later, back in Afghanistan, she was found dead on her own military base, shot once in the head. An investigation is in progress.

Dave sent me the link to this pretty darned amazing story about a bear who was crossing the Rainbow Bridge near Donner Summit, got spooked by some oncoming cars, and jumped over the edge. Somehow instead of plunging to its death, it managed to clutch on to a concrete beam underneath the bridge, dangled for a while by its front paws, pulled itself up somehow, and scrambled onto the beam.

Where it was royally stuck, with nowhere to go but down. And down was an 80-foot drop into a ravine strewn with boulders. Needless to say, it stayed put where it was, and eventually fell asleep on its narrow perch.

The next day a group of volunteers led by an animal control officer executed a seriously cool rescue mission. Whew.

You’ve got to check out the photos. It looks absolutely inevitable that that bear is a goner, and yet it all ends happily. Just amazing.

From John Allen’s column in the National Catholic Reporter:

Later he apologized for the reference to Jews, adding that he had intended to say “Masons.”

Hungry bears around Lake Tahoe whose usual feeding grounds were burned have been venturing into human territory looking for food. According to the Contra Costa Times

“We’re seeing a huge increase in the number of (bear) entries into homes,” said Ann Bryant, executive directive of the Bear League, which advises Tahoe basin residents on bear conflicts. “We also have never had so many calls to our office where people sight bears where they’ve never seen them before. The bears are bewildered.” …

The Lake Tahoe Wildlife Center in South Lake Tahoe received about six calls about bears a day, double normal levels, in the two weeks after the fire.

The number is down this week, but it’s still higher than normal, said Cheryl Millham, the center’s executive director. …

“When you have people that leave windows and doors open, the bears are going to be tempted,” Millham said. … One woman who called Millham’s center had placed ripening peaches on her kitchen windowsill and left the window open. A bear picked up the scent.

“The bear ripped off the screen, ate the peaches, and spit the pits back inside,” Millham said.

Lead paragraph in a London Times story the other day:

Fears that one of the world’s rarest creatures had been driven to extinction have been allayed by a tribesman who told conservationists he had recently eaten one.

From today’s New York Times:

“It shows the power of data,” said Daniel Kaufmann, an author of the report and director of global programs at the World Bank Institute, a knowledge-sharing and training arm of the bank. “It begins to challenge these long-held popular notions — that the rich world has reached nirvana in governance.”

Nirvana in governance? What planet is he living on? On mine, the great majority of people are something less than ecstatic about those who are governing the rich world.

Curiously, the headline and lead paragraph of this article manage to say the exact opposite of each other:

World Bank Report on Governing Finds Level Playing Field

Africa, often stereotyped as a place of epic corruption and misrule, emerges in a World Bank report as a continent of great variety, with some countries — Tanzania, Liberia, Rwanda, Ghana and Niger — making notable progress over the past decade, and others — Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast and Eritrea — moving backward.

In other words, about as far as possible from being a level playing field, no?

Granted, the overall point of the article is that corruption is getting to be as bad in wealthier countries as it is in poorer ones, but even so, spinning that as a “level playing field” when what you mean is that the playing field is increasingly non-level everywhere takes some remarkable contortion of thought.

“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.”
— George W. Bush, Sept. 30, 2003

I have not the slightest doubt of that.

Someone on the WELL pointed out a good reason why Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence but didn’t grant him a full pardon: Libby can now still plead the Fifth in future testimony. If he had a full pardon, he couldn’t.

And another thing: If Bush is opposed to “activist judges” who are allegedly reinterpreting law rather than just following the given guidelines, what is he doing saying that Libby’s sentence is too harsh when it falls smack in the middle of the range of possible sentences for what Libby was convicted for?

According to SFGate:

Three former leaders of a ministry that counsels gays to change their sexual orientation apologized, saying although they acted sincerely, their message had caused isolation, shame and fear.
The former leaders of the interdenominational Christian organization Exodus International said Wednesday they had become disillusioned with promoting gay conversion.

Boy, do I give them points for this. Exodus contributes to the brainwashing of queer people to feel ashamed and afraid of their own feelings, and it must have been a long, difficult, and painful journey for these three to get from there to here, to a place of sufficient self-acceptance that they can make an apology like this. Taking some responsibility for the harm they have caused to others, however unintentionally and misguidedly, is a profound step toward wholeness.

There’s some discussion on the WELL this morning of a line from Al Gore’s new book that is apparently quoted in David Brooks’s New York Times column today as an example of muddled thinking:

“The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way — a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.”

Well, I don’t think the sentence is all that bad. I certainly don’t think it shows muddled thinking. I do wish Gore were plainer spoken, but I wish that were true of all politicians, and I’m sorry to say especially the ones on our side, who have a tendency to write as though they were trying to impress their college professors or something.

But Gore’s sentence is no worse than most such writing, and the only problem I can see with it is that it uses college-reading-level vocabulary and sentence structure to express an idea that doesn’t require it. The thinking isn’t muddled, it’s just not expressed as plainly as it could be.

But boy, I gotta say that I’d sure like it if just once in a while I could hear Gore or any other Democratic politician say something like, “You know, folks, our democracy here in America is in terrible shape, and we’re going to lose it if we don’t do something. I think there’s only one way to get it back, and that’s to get a real, honest discussion going again between our citizens and our leaders, like we used to have in this country. Americans need to be able to say what they think, and make suggestions, and come up with good ideas, and then they need to know that the people who are running this country have heard what they said. Our leaders have to start responding in ways that mean something, not just in empty cliches and form letters.”

Same idea, just different words. Republicans don’t shy away from writing and speech-making at an eighth-grade reading level, and it looks to me like a lot of Americans vote for them not so much because they agree with the Republicans more than with the Democrats but because the Republicans are the only politicians these people can make sense of. I think a lot of this “culture war” crap boils down to the fact that a lot of Americans feel like liberals are more concerned about showing off their college-level vocabularies than they are about the country. Hell, I get to feeling that way sometimes myself, and I’m generally in agreement with these blowhards. And I sure don’t know what else you could expect people to think about politicians who refuse to bring what they’re saying down to their level. It’s got to give the impression that Democratic politicians don’t care a whole lot about folks like them.

Granted, Democrats are usually trying to put across more complex ideas than the easy but false answers the Republicans tend to be selling nowadays. But if more lefties could learn to explain themselves better to the less well educated, I think we’d start capturing the hearts and minds of a fair number of people who are at the moment solidly in the Republican base. My hunch, anyway.