Happy Holidays - I’ve returned after my long hiatus of backbreaking labor, moving and general disaffection with the world at large. And I should note that the world didn’t help me with any of those concerns this sluggish, cyclical November. The news was as drab and empty as my new apartment. But lo, a new month has begun, and with it, some signs that things worth writing about are happening to occupy the increasingly ample writing time of my days.

So here we have it, loyal readers - A “How De Do” list of headlines that keep me warm at night during those cold Southern California nights:

First and foremost, there’s now a Web site devoted to holding Hilary accountable for her feeble jabs at fellow Democrats. Barack Obama is graciously hosting it, as he’s the one most of the lunges are aimed at. This record of ripostes has among its entries her griping about Iran, gay rights and, of course, the all-time classic accusation that Obama was calculating his Presidential bid as a cold-blooded kindergartener.

You know Christmas is coming when you get the gift of fruit cake, I tell you.

Yes, the news media seems to have become serious about shoving Hilary in front of its bus’ newscycles. After extolling her bravery and acumen for emotional manipulation lost its luster with the press-purchasing public, they actually began commenting on the inaccuracies, grim implications and general blandness of her statements as a candidate. Then came the record of coercion of the press, ruthless control of her records and surprisingly sloppy oversight of her donors. Next thing you know, the blood is in the water.

It is surely too late to pop the champagne. A lot of people want Hillary to win, and the media has yet to decide what story it wants to tell - the one where the charismatic Kennedy-come-lately Obama rises above the establishment wreck of the Clinton campaign while the media sings “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead”, or the one where the media-money darling, Hillary takes her rivals’ best shots and still wins out because despite an abyssmal voting record, she’s got moxie and knows how to win hearts. Yet I reserve the right to have some glimmer of hope for the political process, and right now, that hope is leading in Iowa.

And speaking of Hope, Mike Huckabee is also leading in Iowa, suggesting this race may get a /whole/ lot more interesting than I could’ve expected. Nothing will chase the mid-election season clouds away like a bass-playing wiseacre with Nanny State politics and fundamentalist beliefs!

And, speaking of the apocalypse…

Our second joyful holiday news item is that someone finally wrenched the mike away from the White House long enough to give it to the CIA and US intelligence community. For months, we’ve been drinking a witches’ brew of paranoia and dark portent from our ever-vigilant Commander-in-Chief about Iran’s nuclear program, as all the while the fine print on the articles noted that his intelligence personnel were telling him to settle down. At last, the National Intelligence Estimate rolled off the presses and stated definitively that Iran is /not/ an immediate threat, and that all indications are that it’s been largely on the up-and-up about the civilian application of its program.

“…in a finding likely to surprise U.S. friends and foes alike, the latest NIE concluded: “We do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

That marked a sharp contrast to an intelligence report two years ago that stated Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons.”

That having been said, Iran is still proceeding to acquire and implement nuclear technology, and whether those technologies have immediate military applications or not, they are still steps along the path to nuclear armament. The question then becomes whether they’re illegal or not, and whether Iran has any real incentive to use them to threaten the US. At least, for now, the mushroom cloud has been crammed back into the smoking gun, the bogeyman back into the closet, and Dick Cheney’s opinions back into the padded cell and out of the public square.

If anything, this report indicates that sanctions do indeed work. The NIE, after all, switched dramatically over the time period of the internationally-backed sanctions we initiated. All indications are that we did something good, and it worked.

And as a fringe benefit, it seems only Bush and conservatives in Israel - the two parties in the globe that need as much ammunition against Iran as they can get - remain convinced that Iran is going full throttle for a nuclear nightmare. One hopes this will further damage the credibility of the Israeli intelligence services. Then, maybe, our media will start listening to the Knessetand Haaretz, rather than whatever reactionary, uniformed flavor of the month the conservative Israeli Defense Force stands behind a microphone in order to justify our unconditional support and billions of military aid for his country.

And, finally, the Teddy Bear Terror is over.

Yes, the latest installment of the increasingly assinine and alarming outrages in the Muslim world has run its course. The British teacher who thought it would be kosher for a kid to name his stuffed bear after himself - Mohammed - only to find it led to roaring throngs demanding her death by beheading is home safe.

After a reunion with her children John and Jessica at Heathrow, the 54-year-old teacher spoke of her shock and terror after being arrested and accused of insulting Islam for allowing her pupils to call a teddy bear Mohammed.

But despite her ordeal, Mrs Gibbons praised the people of Sudan, stressing that no one should be put off working there.

She even pointed out there was a vacancy for a teacher in her old job.

“I am very sorry to leave,” she said.

And yet I, Mrs. Gibbons, am rapidly running out of patience with Sudan. Darfur is bad enough. But legal action that makes the reaction over the Danish cartoons of the prophet look rational, even right, by comparison? It may be a straw compared to hundreds of thousands dead and raped by government-backed Islamic militias, but it could be a final straw all the same.

But in the spirit of the holidays, it seems like everyone - from the government in Khartoum, to the western press, to kindly Mrs. Gibbons and innocent little Mohammed - are letting this one blow over. So it will be back to business: Our slowly trudging towards a modicum of security for the agonized millions in Sudan while China grips the whole region like a pearl in its dragon claws.

Xin Nian Kuai Le, everybody! It’s good to be back!

The news since Wednesday has been following a steady course. I felt at risk of beating the same tune out on the drumskin of the blog - treating you all to the old, dirgelike beat that has settled like a stretch mark into the flesh of our world’s history this long, indolent August.

So, rather that whip out the razor wit and cutting insight only to treat you to the same messy dish of dissected details, I thought we might do this nice and tidy. Consider the following a chicken nugget history of the past four days. Devour with whatever sauce of slant your partisan heart desires.

Hillary Clinton - Still as cloyingly negative as the Brewster sisters’ nightly tipple. Her comrades are finally beginning to catch on - or, more likely, smell blood in the water, since Obama weathered a rhetorical beating far better than she. She is also still sheet-white, knees-knocking afraid of hypotheticals:

It’s a horrible prospect to ask yourself, ‘What if? What if?’…

I’m sure if anyone informed Hillary that hypotheticals have been known to mutate into the larger, even more dangerous Hypotheses, she would flee with heel-snapping speed for the hills. Her quote was actually about how a terrorist attack in America between now and the election would “automatically hand” Republicans an advantage. And, indeed, that’s a scary thought - what will happen to the Democrats’ industrious crafting of a global utopia that they’ve been so glowingly successful at? It’ll be back to the dark ages, led by the flag-pin-wearing troupe of the 20-odd Republican Senators who still support the war, with people cheering for Bush’s third term on the grounds that he did such a bang-up job of protecting them this one.

Maliki - Still seeming like a shill for Iran. And, alright, I’ll be fair, we’ll stack up the chips and see who’s running his table. He’s a representative of the Islamic Dawa Party, which is not only wholly responsible for appointing and backing him, it could also be considered the godfather of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Funds that we give to him, not to mention heaps of arms, just seem to vanish. Could they possibly be going into the hands of Iraqi police and Army that, to account for the “counter-surge” of Iranian backed attacks, are blowing us into chunks with IEDs?

So let’s see…We drive al-Qaeda from Baghdad, by and large, and suddenly we’re being bombed by weapons known to have come from a government that is practically the same political party as the Prime Minister who rules Baghdad belongs to. Meanwhile, said Prime Minister sucks in aid money and weapons that are believed to be going to militias of the same nationality and religion as himself, his party, and Iran. He simultaneously blocks all efforts to shift power away from his federalist government, while lashing out at people who say he doesn’t want unity and should be replaced…hmmm.

To coin a phrase, “With friends like these, who needs Saddam?”

Petraeus - Still doing a terrific job. He’s politick, he’s powerful, he proves we’re unbeatable in the field. Now if only that was all that mattered, we’d have this thing sewn right up. But considering my perspective above about Maliki, it seems increasingly clear that Petraeus is, strategically speaking, just doing a terrific job killing off Iran’s rivals and earning more time to fund and arm Shiite militias masquerading as Interior Ministry troops and Army.

Those that turn their nose up at the Vietnam analogy are definitely right in one sense. In Vietnam, we didn’t fight the enemies of the Communists while a Communist regime squatted in Saigon, sucking up arms and aid, attacking us to keep us weak for the day when we’d leave and they could link hands with Uncle Ho to the North in an orgy of sectarian violence. That level of SNAFU and moral fracture is reserved for Iraq alone.

Iran - Still defiant. Why shouldn’t they be? They’ve got the region on a string and they’re sitting on Gravity’s Rainbow with their missile program. Sure, sanctions are stinging them, but the hardliners in government are happy to keep the people distracted with propaganda and soul-crumpling crackdowns on freedoms.

Darfur - Still dying. Just not quite so quickly.

Obama - Still tough and smart, gathering the backing from the right people while drawing gutless censure from the wrong.

His comments on Cuba, now controversial, are supported by Cuban-Americans who want to send money home, for it allows them to do just that and only that - it does not lift the trade embargo, but does open a dialogue to determine what human rights efforts would need to be made to do that.

“Until there’s justice in Cuba, there’s no justice anywhere,” Obama said. “We will talk to our enemies as well as our friends and both to our enemies and to our friends, we will tell them the truth and tell them what we stand for.”

Considering what half a century of silence with Cuba has done to the Castro regime relative to the people of Cuba, I think it’s not so much of a stretch that advocating a change of action has merit.

Bush - Still no sign of change of action.

Humanity - Still brutish, still weirdly tragic, still muddling on despite it all.

One of the gravest evils in the world today is the practice of human trafficking, and today the US government took a brave move in bringing binding censure against these modern day sex slavers. They did this by leveling criticism that could be turned into harsh action against not only its traditional enemies but to traditional allies as well.

The scope of the problem is massive. Any and all efforts to raise awareness on the issue and to lay the grounds for action are worthy efforts. According to US State Department figures, “estimated 600,000 to 820,000 men, women, and children [are] trafficked across international borders each year, approximately 80 percent are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors. The data also illustrate that the majority of transnational victims are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation.” Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both state that even those figures are but the tip of the iceberg.

Let me frame this catastrophe in the proper gut-ripping terms. Those child sex farms they are rumored to have in Southeast Asia are real. The rape video sites from Russia on the internet are likely broadcasting real rapes, real torture. The harems of the Middle East are full of women from around the world, kidnapped from their homelands, often as children, maimed and brutalized, for the rest of their lives. This happens in countries across the globe, even in the US and Canada.

And now, setting other matters aside, the US has accused its allies in the Arabic world - Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman - of taking not even the slightest action to prevent this atrocity. Kuwait’s total compliance with our military agenda is critical. Oman and Bahrain consistently help us with intelligence in the War On Terror. But this does not - morally and now officially - prevent them from being taken to task. They have been called out, as good friends should be, to mend their bad behavior.

Now action should follow words. For words to mean anything, they must be followed with consistent and resolute action. In many ways, the US has succeeded at this - with Kennedy’s call for the Peace Corps, with Reagan’s support of the socialist Solidarnost movement that still has us beloved by Poland today, and with Clinton’s actions against the Serb aggression in the Balkans in the 90s. In many ways, the US has failed. From Small Arms, to land mines, to the conditions of women in the chaos that has become Afghanistan, we have spoken strongly for rights that we then failed to secure.

This cannot be one of those exceptions. The means for the censure of governments that neglect or even facilitate the problem of the global slave trade exist. They are the “United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children” and the “United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime” among others. The provisions in them are brutally fierce and the inspections a solid, necessary first step. Now that we’ve spoken, it’s time for us to act.

Joe Biden spoke to this essential factor in politics - one that, in a political climate that’s increasingly frustrated and increasingly defined by empty rhetoric, is all the more important and endangered. At the CNN debates, the Democratic candidates were debating the convoluted and hypothetical political channels that might or might not bring an end to the daily butchery in Darfur. Biden then spoke up.

He had said, “You could send 2,500 troops and wipe out the janjaweed“, the militias instrumental in the genocide. He is right. Even with the US military ‘bogged down’ in extended conflicts, we do retain those ready men, capable of doing immediate and final harm to clear targets like the janjaweed. And as the other Democrats talked of years and years of diplomacy that had to be done delicately, Biden retorted:

“These people will be dead! They’ll be dead!”

Darfur is an unparalleled butchery and misery in our current age. It is going on right now. If it stopped right now, lives would be saved. If it is not stopped right this minute, more will be raped, mutilated, killed.

Biden called for military force, applied with speed and direction, to stop a crime we know will happen. “There’s your moral authority.” He said.

There is the same imperative and the same principle in the case of the global slave trade. With the declaration today, we have identified who we and the world need to act against to stifle it. Now comes the hard part, the important part, the only part that matters:

We know how to act. We can act. We should.