Folks are still arguing about whether Obama’s statement about the Cordoba House was sufficiently impassioned or whether his subsequent statements backtracked off the original statement.

Now, that’s not to say that religion is without controversy. Recently, attention has been focused on the construction of mosques in certain communities -– particularly New York.  Now, we must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of Lower Manhattan.  The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event for our country.  And the pain and the experience of suffering by those who lost loved ones is just unimaginable.  So I understand the emotions that this issue engenders.  And Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.

But let me be clear.  As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.  (Applause.)  And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.  This is America.  And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.  The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are.  The writ of the Founders must endure.

We must never forget those who we lost so tragically on 9/11, and we must always honor those who led the response to that attack -– from the firefighters who charged up smoke-filled staircases, to our troops who are serving in Afghanistan today. And let us also remember who we’re fighting against, and what we’re fighting for.  Our enemies respect no religious freedom.  Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam -– it’s a gross distortion of Islam.  These are not religious leaders -– they’re terrorists who murder innocent men and women and children.  In fact, al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than people of any other religion -– and that list of victims includes innocent Muslims who were killed on 9/11.

So that’s who we’re fighting against.  And the reason that we will win this fight is not simply the strength of our arms -– it is the strength of our values.  The democracy that we uphold. The freedoms that we cherish.  The laws that we apply without regard to race, or religion, or wealth, or status.  Our capacity to show not merely tolerance, but respect towards those who are different from us –- and that way of life, that quintessentially American creed, stands in stark contrast to the nihilism of those who attacked us on that September morning, and who continue to plot against us today.

And to be sure, Obama typically conceded the legitimacy of the hurt feelings of all those people in Kansas or Texas outraged that an Islamic cultural center will be built in the general vicinity of lower Manhattan–a city those people will rarely even visit.

But his statement, weak as it was, still allowed the question of constitutionality, of the First Amendment, to begin to contest the din of the fearmongerers trying to use this for political gain.

In response, the fearmongerers have predictably turned on Obama.

But by ascending to the bully pulpit on this issue, it seems Obama has elevated the principles involved (however weakly stated) and made the press enabling the fearmongerers to think twice about the issues involved. Heck, even Mark Halperin is calling on the fearmongerers to stop.

Say what you will about the wisdom of Obama’s policies overall, but his belated commentary on religious freedoms clearly was not done for political gain. Quite the contrary. the President knew that he and his party would almost certainly pay a political price for taking a stand, especially this close to the election, and with few prominent leaders, other than New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on the White House’s side. The reaction since the President spoke has been vitriolic and unvarying from leading voices on the right, painting Obama as weak, naive, out of touch and obtuse (not to mention flip-flopping, after his confusing follow-up comments Saturday suggested to some that he might be hedging his position).

Yes, Republicans, you can take advantage of this heated circumstance, backed by the families of the 9/11 victims, in their most emotional return to the public stage since 2001.

But please don’t do it. There are a handful of good reasons to oppose allowing the Islamic center to be built so close to Ground Zero, particularly the family opposition and the availability of other, less raw locations. But what is happening now — the misinformation about the center and its supporters; the open declarations of war on Islam on talk radio, the Internet and other forums; the painful divisions propelled by all the overheated rhetoric — is not worth whatever political gain your party might achieve.

It isn’t clear how the battle over the proposed center should or will end. But two things are profoundly clear: Republicans have a strong chance to win the midterm elections without picking a fight over President Obama’s measured words. And a national political fight conducted on the terms we have seen in the past few days will lead to a chain reaction at home and abroad that will have one winner — the very extreme and violent jihadists we all can claim as our true enemy.

Maybe Obama will even respond in turn, and point out just what Halperin does: that fighting the Cordoba House only helps al Qaeda. Then we’d really have a useful discussion about how the most aggressive stance often embraced by the fearmongerers is actually counter-productive.

In any case, it was a cautious, rare attempt to use the bully pulpit. But it was a welcome one. And if we can win this argument, Obama might just learn to like this bully pulpit thing.

I know. It almost never pays to read one of MoDo’s columns seriously. But enough good lefties are pointing to this one approvingly, I thought I’d do them the favor of pointing out how typically stupid it is.

Let’s start with this lovely four-sentence passage:

Not because of his outburst against the “professional left.” He was right about that. In an interview with The Hill last week, Gibbs once more proved Michael Kinsley’s maxim that a gaffe is just truth slipping out.

He said the president’s lefty critics “ought to be drug-tested,” would only “be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon,” and “wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

MoDo says Gibbs “was right” in his intemperate rant early this week. Then she goes on to repeat two attacks Gibbs used–that we should be drug-tested and we want to eliminate the Pentagon–that he made up out of thin air.  Even CBS’ Chip Reid–not usually one to point out blatant lies–called Gibbs on the fact that no one, in fact, has ever actually called to eliminate the Pentagon.

Q    Well, who wants to eliminate the Pentagon?

MR. GIBBS:  I think that was — wasn’t that a proposal during the presidential campaign?  Didn’t Dennis Kucinich — or maybe it was adding the Department of Peace.

Q    The Department of Peace —

Q    There’s a big difference between adding a Department of Peace and eliminating the Pentagon.

(Though I will say I am among those who believes Canadian health care would be an improvement.)

Shorter MoDo: I think Gibbs is at his best when he just makes shit up about people I don’t like.

Much of the rest of MoDo’s column illogically complains that Democrats aren’t as effective as Republicans at using their activists, but then accepts the DC narrative that Dems shouldn’t embrace their activists because we’re “radicals:”

Rand Paul and Sharron Angle aside, Republicans often find a way to exploit their extremes for political advantage, while Democratic extremes typically do damage to a Democratic president.One of the most disgusting things about Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, and now the former maverick John McCain, is that they are happy to be co-opted by the radicals in their party to form one movement against President Obama.

On the Republican side, the crazies often end up helping the Republican leadership. On the Democratic side, the radicals are constantly sniping at Obama, expressing their feelings of betrayal.

Therein lies MoDo’s blindness: the problem here is not with liberal activists espousing real solutions. The problem is the fact that Democrats are so disdainful of their activists they prefer demonizing them rather than embracing their moderate solutions that are, themselves, pragmatic compromises. MoDo’s column, then, is actually part of the problem, not something to link approvingly.

Besides, why would any self-respecting liberal link approvingly to what is basically more self-indulgent bitching from the press?

MoDo’s “clever” point is ultimately that Gibbs should be fired not because he made shit up in his attack on the party’s base, but because he is mean to journalists.

He needs to communicate more clearly. And, in that department, Gibbs isn’t helpful. He’s often unresponsive and sometimes hostile to the press. His adversarial barking has only heightened tensions with a press that was once lampooned for fawning over his boss.

Call me crazy, but I think any press spokesperson who gets caught blatantly making shit up about any topic should be fired because he should, after that point, lose all credibility.

But not with this press corps. Not with MoDo, who finds Robert Gibbs most right when he just makes shit up. And then complains that Robert Gibbs doesn’t take “journalists” like her–the ones who applaud him for making shit up–seriously.

Barely expressed in the NYT’s long story about our use of paramilitary strikes in places we’re not officially at war is a conflict between three choices. The NYT piece describes the first two–a covert war run by CIA and briefed to Congress, or a covert war run by JSOC subject less oversight–as the choice the Administration is currently debating.

The Yemen operation has raised a broader question: who should be running the shadow war? White House officials are debating whether the C.I.A. should take over the Yemen campaign as a “covert action,” which would allow the United States to carry out operations even without the approval of Yemen’s government. By law, covert action programs require presidential authorization and formal notification to the Congressional intelligence committees. No such requirements apply to the military’s so-called Special Access Programs, like the Yemen strikes.

Implicit in the choice, is the question of whether or not we want to partner with the Yemeni government as we launch attacks on extremist groups in the country.

In part, the spotty record of the Yemen airstrikes may derive from another unavoidable risk of the new shadow war: the need to depend on local proxies who may be unreliable or corrupt, or whose agendas differ from that of the United States.

American officials have a troubled history with Mr. Saleh, a wily political survivor who cultivates radical clerics at election time and has a history of making deals with jihadists. Until recently, taking on Al Qaeda had not been a priority for his government, which has been fighting an intermittent armed rebellion since 2004.

And for all Mr. Saleh’s power — his portraits hang everywhere in the Yemeni capital — his government is deeply unpopular in the remote provinces where the militants have sought sanctuary. The tribes there tend to regularly switch sides, making it difficult to depend on them for information about Al Qaeda. “My state is anyone who fills my pocket with money,” goes one old tribal motto.

The Yemeni security services are similarly unreliable and have collaborated with jihadists at times. The United States has trained elite counterterrorism teams there in recent years, but the military still suffers from corruption and poor discipline.

So we are partnering with forces with occasional ties to our enemies, but the Administration fights fully briefing this stuff to Congress for fear it will be leaked?

Partnering with local governments also make them a target for al Qaeda retaliation, effectively setting off a contest between the government and al Qaeda about who does more damage. It seems to me this creates a need for a counterinsurgency strategy–but with a governmental partner that (like the corrupt Hamid Karzai) we don’t particularly want to partner with.

Meanwhile, this expanded secret war always seems to be expanding into places were the absence of real government and civil society creates a haven for extremists.

Which is presumably why the former Ambassador to Yemen suggests we need to do far more to develop government and civil society.

Edmund J. Hull, the United States ambassador to Yemen from 2001 to 2004, cautioned that American policy must not be limited to using force against Al Qaeda.

“I think it’s both understandable and defensible for the Obama administration to pursue aggressive counterterrorism operations,” Mr. Hull said. But he added: “I’m concerned that counterterrorism is defined as an intelligence and military program. To be successful in the long run, we have to take a far broader approach that emphasizes political, social and economic forces.”

Obama Administration defenders say they are–but they emphasize training troops, not investment in things that would lead to civil society.

Obama administration officials say that is exactly what they are doing — sharply increasing the foreign aid budget for Yemen and offering both money and advice to address the country’s crippling problems. They emphasized that the core of the American effort was not the strikes but training for elite Yemeni units, providing equipment and sharing intelligence to support Yemeni sweeps against Al Qaeda.

As I read the article and thought about these issues, I kept thinking back to one of the better responses to the flap over the Time cover showing the mutilated Afghan girl. Richard Sanchez argues that the problem for women in Afghanistan–indeed for all Afghans–arose from a US policy that served to strengthen warlords. He argues that the solution must aim to eliminate the divisions that empower warlords.

The answer to the warlords — and more importantly to what Afghans, especially the young, call “warlordism” — is the economic strengthening of the popular base. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently unveiled a program to lure the economic Taliban, that is, fighters who fight mainly for the wage, away from the insurgency with the lure of jobs. In this she has heeded the words of Karl Eikenberry, now the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, but formerly the commander of U.S. forces there, who told the House Armed Services Committee in 2007: “Much of the enemy force is drawn from the ranks of unemployed men looking for wages to support their families.”

But Clinton’s proposal threatens to fail by not going far enough. If jobs, preferably involving the construction of basic infrastructure, are politicized and given only to those who quit the Taliban, then those ex-combatants and their families will become targets for retaliation. This would add yet further impetus for violence.

A decade after it was a central topic of debate in the Presidential election, we still haven’t figured out how to “nation build,” how to eliminate the vacuums of power that al Qaeda’s affiliates exploit. And we seem to have little imagination of how to do so outside of the context of militarization which tends to polarize communities in dangerous ways.

The Administration seems focused on whether to conduct such polarizing strikes with or without a discredited partner. But both options, it seem to me, serve to undermine the most powerful alternative to al Qaeda, the development of a credible alternative.

Now, I presume the COIN folks would say that’s precisely what they’re trying to do. But so long as we’re dropping cluster bombs, so long as we’re choosing one corrupt leader over other corrupt alternatives, how seriously can we be trying?

The lowest paid full time employees at the White House–Christopher Liegel and Elizabeth Jackson–make $37,826 and $37,983 respectively (they’re both “Records Management Analysts”). They presumably also get those great benefits federal employees make.

After those two, the lowest paid people in the White House (specifically, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds) are a bunch of craftsmen restoring the stonework in EEOB. If they work full time this year, they’ll make $39,270 for skilled work. And they get no healthcare benefits. All in one of the most expensive cities in the country.

That’s because the General Services Administration working for a Democratic President hired a non-union contractor to do the second phase of this project. The union workers who did the first phase of this project–under George Bush–made something closer to $60,000 a year, plus benefits (the median salary at the White House is $66,000 a year).

Now, I realize I might get branded as a member of the Professional Left for complaining about this.

But shouldn’t the guys working in the White House get paid in the same range as the staffers working in the White House? Shouldn’t a President fighting to make sure all Americans have health care ensure those working just outside his own window–working on the offices of his Vice President and others–have health care?

We will not get out of this recession until wages stop falling. And one way to ensure that happens is to make sure skilled craftsmen get paid a viable wage. Apparently, we have to start that fight right on White House grounds.

Things are not going well in our Kangaroo Court. After quickly determining a fake sentence for Osama bin Laden’s cook, Ibrahim al Qosi, matters turned to trying Omar Khadr for an alleged murder that normally wouldn’t be a crime that he allegedly committed as a teenager using evidence gotten through rape threats.

So they picked a jury (but not, thanks to a disqualification from the prosecution team, the guy who agreed with Barack Obama that Gitmo should be closed) and proceeded to the witnesses. Lieutenant Colonel Jon Jackson was in the middle of highlighting the many inconsistencies of prosecution witness testimony when he collapsed in the court room. Daphne Eviatar was in the court room when it happened:

On Thursday afternoon I watched Omar Khadr’s sole defense lawyer, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, collapse in the Guantanamo Bay courtroom in the middle of conducting a cross-examination of a key government witness. He was taken away on a stretcher by ambulance, hooked up to an I.V. Fortunately he was breathing normally and I hope will be fine, though as an observer in the courtroom I was stunned. It all happened so suddenly and he seemed to be in perfect health and in complete control of his questioning. It seems unlikely at this point that this historic trial will resume on Friday, as scheduled.

It turns out the collapse was related to complications from gall bladder surgery Jackson had about six weeks ago. He just got medivacked to the US for treatment and Khadr’s trial has been suspended for at least 30 days. So the showcase war crime trial for allegations that most don’t consider to be a war crime will have to wait (and they may have to start all over again with jury selection).

And Omar Khadr, who has been held for a third of his life, has another month gone from his life.

Update: Here’s Carol Rosenberg’s report on all this.

While everyone has been focused on the hope that gays and lesbians may soon get the rights straight people enjoy, in Florida a court ruled that womb-bearers have some rights too, specifically to decide their own medical treatment when pregnant. From the ACLU press release:

In an important decision for the right of women to make their own medical choices, the Florida District Court of Appeal today ruled that the rights of a pregnant woman were violated when she was forced to remain hospitalized against her will after disagreeing with a hospital’s recommended treatment. The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Florida filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of themselves and the American Women’s Medical Association (AMWA) supporting the woman in her case against the state.

“Women do not relinquish their right to determine their own medical care when they become pregnant,” said Diana Kasdan, staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, who presented oral argument in the case along with Samantha Burton’s attorney, David Abrams of Tallahassee, Florida. “We are glad that the court has upheld the constitutional right of a pregnant woman to make her own medical decisions.”

In March 2009, the Circuit Court of Leon County ordered Burton – a mother of two suffering from pregnancy complications – to be indefinitely confined to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital and forced to undergo any and all medical treatments the doctors there deemed necessary to save her fetus. The lower court order forbade her from transferring to another hospital of her own choosing. After three days of state-compelled hospitalization and a compelled cesarean section, Ms. Burton suffered a stillbirth and was released.

So if you’re a pregnant woman, you now have the radical right to choose your own doctor and have a say in your treatmetn, even if a judge thinks he knows better. Radical!!

Kind of crazy, all this rights-upholding going on. It might just lead you to believe we were in the United States or something.

The White House Ethics Czar, Norman Eisen, has gotten himself nominated to serve as Ambassador in one of the greatest places on earth, Prague, Czech Republic. To replace the function of Ethics Czar, the White House has announced that White House Counsel Bob Bauer will take over, and Steven Croley (who worked on the campaign) will lead a team of six to oversee ethics.

Ethics wonks are mixed about whether this arrangement will meet the high standards Obama set when he came into the White House. POGO’s Danielle Brian takes Bauer’s appointment as a good sign that ethics will continue to be a priority. OMB Watch’s Gary Bass is happy the White House worked so quickly to implement a plan to replace Eisen. But Sunlight Foundation’s Ellen Miller views the appointment of Bauer–who has a history of supporting bad ethics habits–as a setback.

This concern is magnified manifold when Eisen’s key successor – Bauer — can hardly be described as having the DNA of a ‘reformer.’  This is the man who invented the rationale for the acceptance of “soft money’’ – unregulated (chiefly corporate) funds that flooded elections to the tune of $1.5 billion between 1992 and 2002, and the man who sided with arch conservatives in their defense of lack of transparency.

[Update: CREW has concerns as well.]

I’ll leave it to the ethics wonks to decide whether Bauer can do the job–on ethics–well or not. And FWIW, the one time I’ve seen Bauer’s work close up (during an election-related suit here in MI in 2008), I thought he was the kind of fighter Dems need more of.

But I am worried about what this says about the Administration’s focus on two other critically important functions. You see, when Bauer took over for Greg Craig, he was hailed as the kind of guy who could solve two problems Craig had failed to: judicial confirmations and closing Gitmo.

Bmaz has recently catalogued some of the ongoing problems with judicial nominations and confirmations (here and here).

And Josh Gerstein reports that Lindsey Graham just filed a bill to try to force the White House to take a position on things like habeas corpus. Now, frankly, I consider it partly a good sign that the Administration has stopped trying to placate Lindsey’s wishes to carve out huge holes in our civilian legal system. But I couldn’t help but notice that when Robert Gibbs was asked yesterday about the promises Obama hasn’t kept–pointing specifically to gay rights and Gitmo–he said the Administration had a process in place to end DADT, but remained silent about Obama’s promise to close Gitmo.

Q    And what about the rest that is outstanding — gay rights, Guantanamo —

MR. GIBBS:  I will say this — all things that the President made commitments on and is focused on doing.  We have a process underway with the Pentagon to make changes, as the President outlined in the campaign and, quite frankly, even before the campaign, in “don’t ask, don’t tell” as somebody running for the U.S. Senate in 2004.  We have a process to make good on overturning “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Not to mention the squabble over where Ibrahim al Qosi will have to spend his two year secret sentence all seems to assume he’ll remain in Gitmo for that time.

Now, as with many things, the Administration doesn’t deserve all of the blame on these two issues. Republicans have held up key judiciary positions–but the Admin hasn’t even identified a nominee for many of them. Congress has consistently voted against funding the closure of Gitmo, but aside from a few pathetic squeaks explaining how important closing Gitmo and using civilian trials was, the Administration has just left it at that, still forgoing the bully pulpit to explain how important closing Gitmo is. (In news potentially related to Gitmo, Obama’s approval ratings in the Arab world have taken an astonishing nosedive–with those “hopeful” about Obama’s policy in the Middle East dropping from 51% to 16%–though much of that appears to stem from inaction on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)

Judicial nominations have to be a priority, not least because of the decades-long assault on the judiciary by the Federalist Society.  And Obama has always listed closing Gitmo as one of his big priorities. Yet he just gave the guy who was supposed to resolve those two issues a new, different job to do.

Remember when Omar Khadr wrote this about the military commissions?

Firstly, the unfairness and unjustice of it. I say this because not one of the lawyers I’ve had, or human right organization or any person say that the commission is fair, or looking for justice, but on the contrary they say it is unfair and unjust and that it has been constructed solely to convict detainees and not to find the truth (so how can I ask for justice from a process that does not have it or offer it?) [new color ink–apparently added later] and to accomplish political and public goal and what I mean is when I was offered a plea bargain it was up to 30 years which I was going to spend only 5 years so I asked why the 30 years? I was told it make the US government look good in the public eyes and other political causes. [my emphasis]

Best as I can tell, the fake plea bargain Khadr was offered–in which he would be sentenced publicly, but in which there was a secret agreement that he would serve just a fraction of that time–is what happened to Osama bin Laden cook Ibrahim al Qosi today. After making great show of picking a jury and directing them they could sentence Qosi to between 12 and 15 years, the military commission sentenced al Qosi to 14 years.

But everyone knows that 14 year sentence doesn’t represent Qosi’s real sentence. Instead, he is reported to be serving 2 more years–though there is a bit of a dispute because his plea promised he’d serve his time in communal quarters even though DOD regulations prohibit that.

The day opened with Air Force Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, Qosi’s judge, reversing herself on an order to the prison camps Monday that, whatever sentence Qosi receives, he must be held in a communal POW-style camp for compliant prisoners.

Paul issued the order Monday, saying she understood captivity in the company of some of the other cooperative detainees at Guantánamo was part of a secret annex to his plea agreement approved by retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, the top Pentagon official overseeing military commissions.

But by Wednesday she noted that collective confinement was not a promise but a recommendation, in part, because, despite a Pentagon bureaucrat’s directive in 2008, the U.S. military has never developed a policy or plan for how to confine war court convicts at Guantánamo.

Call me crazy, but if I were Qosi I’d be really nervous about this double secret plea deal, given that two years is longer than most people are deployed to Gitmo, and two years from now we’ll be in the middle of Presidential election season again.

But that’s what passes for justice in America’s prison colony these days, I guess.

You’ve heard about Steven Slater.

He’s the Jet Blue flight attendant who got fed up, bitched out a nasty passenger over the flight intercom, grabbed two beers, then escaped via the emergency slide (the YouTube is the Taiwanese animation dedicated to his meltdown).

And he’s become the latest hero to those who are fed up with their lack of dignity on the job — or the equally large number of people who are fed up with the lack of dignity when flying.

I don’t blame people for empathizing with Slater (though I do confess to having gotten into a cursefest with a flight attendant who tried to check my bag — one of the first on the plane — because her own was taking up an entire overhead bin).

But I do find it telling given last year’s airline hero: Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who saved 155 passengers by successfully landing a US Airways jet in the Hudson river (note, BorowitzReport is the first person I saw make this comparison). I made the point then that the success of the landing and evacuation likely had something to do with the fact that the all-union crew and (with the exception of the Coast Guard) first responders had had years of safety training largely won through organizing.

This year’s airline hero, by contrast, works for an airline that has avoided unions.

Mind you, I’m not crazy enough to believe that flight attendants on any of America’s crappy unionized airlines have much more dignity at work, particularly in the face of crabby passengers. And the indignity of flying is pretty much universal in this country.

But it will be interesting to see what happens with Slater (who has not yet been fired from his job).

And more generally, it is a telling statement about where we are headed as a country when last year’s dramatic plane landing has been replaced by the deployment of the emergency chute by one disgruntled employee.

That last thread is getting a bit long, and since McCaffrey the MilleniaLab says we’re going on a walk NOW, I wanted to throw up more space for discussion.

So let me just make this observation. Apparently, not one of the crack reporters at yesterday’s White House press conference asked any question about what it means that a judge speaking for the United States of America decided the other day that using rape threats with teens is an acceptable way to force confessions.

As I suggested, perhaps Robert Gibbs’ intemperate rant wasn’t so stupid after all. It distracted from the sad state of America’s claims at being a law-abiding nation. Lots of questions about the professional left. No questions about threatening a teenager with rape and then using the confession that results as admissible evidence.

Which brings me to a point WaldenE made. Used to be, these kinds of questions got asked in White House press briefings. Back when Helen Thomas was still the Dean of the White House press corps, she would have asked about military interrogators using rape threats with teens (after which, Robert Gibbs would have sighed and given her a patronizing response). No longer. Because she was chased out because–they say–she was an opinion journalist and because she made a comment that Robert Gibbs might call “inartful.”

These things are all connected somehow…