Fri - July 20, 2007America Still At WarNot long ago the Republicans blocked a vote in
the Senate on a bill that would have made preparations for bringing home the
troops from Iraq. Way to
go.
In related news, Keith Olberman unveils the hypocrisy of the administration when it accuses anyone who questions the Iraq war as an "enemy propagandist." Given that nearly 80% of America wants this war concluded, the administration's lackeys are implying that all of us are on the side Al Quaida. Let's kick these bums out, shall we? How can we stand for such unrelenting disrespect from those we voted to lead us for four years? Posted at 02:07 PM Fri - July 13, 2007Support The Troops: Withdraw Them(Via ContraryBrin)
Gen. William Odom (former director of the NSA) wrote the following on what “supporting our troops” would actually be. Supporting the Troops Means Withdrawing Them COMMENTARY | July 05, 2007 By William E. Odom Every step the Democrats in Congress have taken to force the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq has failed. Time and again, President Bush beats them into submission with charges of failing to "support the troops." Why do the Democrats allow this to happen? Because they let the president define what "supporting the troops" means. His definition is brutally misleading. Consider what his policies are doing to the troops. No U.S. forces have ever been compelled to stay in sustained combat conditions for as long as the Army units have in Iraq. In World War II, soldiers were considered combat-exhausted after about 180 days in the line. They were withdrawn for rest periods. Moreover, for weeks at a time, large sectors of the front were quiet, giving them time for both physical and psychological rehabilitation. During some periods of the Korean War, units had to fight steadily for fairly long periods but not for a year at a time. In Vietnam, tours were one year in length, and combat was intermittent with significant break periods. In Iraq, combat units take over an area of operations and patrol it daily, making soldiers face the prospect of death from an IED or small arms fire or mortar fire several hours each day. Day in and day out for a full year, with only a single two-week break, they confront the prospect of death, losing limbs or eyes, or suffering other serious wounds. Although total losses in Iraq have been relatively small compared to most previous conflicts, the individual soldier is risking death or serious injury day after day for a year. The impact on the psyche accumulates, eventually producing what is now called "post-traumatic stress disorders." In other words, they are combat-exhausted to the point of losing effectiveness. The occasional willful killing of civilians in a few cases is probably indicative of such loss of effectiveness. These incidents don't seem to occur during the first half of a unit's deployment in Iraq. After the first year, following a few months back home, these same soldiers are sent back for a second year, then a third year, and now, many are facing a fourth deployment! Little wonder more and more soldiers and veterans are psychologically disabled. And the damage is not just to enlisted soldiers. Many officers are suffering serious post-traumatic stress disorders but are hesitant to report it – with good reason. An officer who needs psychiatric care and lets it appear on his medical records has most probably ended his career. He will be considered not sufficiently stable to lead troops. Thus officers are strongly inclined to avoid treatment and to hide their problems. … [Bush’s] recent "surge" tactic has compelled the secretary of defense to extend Army tours to 15 months! (The Marines have been allowed to retain their six-month deployment policy and, not surprisingly, have fewer cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome.) … If the Democrats truly want to succeed in forcing President Bush to begin withdrawing from Iraq, the first step is to redefine "supporting the troops" as withdrawing them, citing the mass of accumulating evidence of the psychological as well as the physical damage that the president is forcing them to endure because he did not raise adequate forces. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress could confirm this evidence and lay the blame for "not supporting the troops" where it really belongs – on the president. And they could rightly claim to the public that they are supporting the troops by cutting off the funds that he uses to keep U.S. forces in Iraq. … The president is strongly motivated to string out the war until he leaves office, in order to avoid taking responsibility for the defeat he has caused and persisted in making greater each year for more than three years. To force him to begin a withdrawal before then, the first step should be to rally the public by providing an honest and candid definition of what "supporting the troops" really means and pointing out who is and who is not supporting our troops at war. Posted at 10:37 AM Fri - July 6, 2007ImpunityWell, fan-freaking-tastic. An appeals court today
ruled that the lawsuit challenging Bush's constitutionally
illegal spying program must be dismissed in a 2-1 decision based on
narrow technical grounds. Essentially, the plaintiffs didn't have the 'standing'
to bring the suit.
Which apparently means, no one has the standing to bring a lawsuit? Is Bush free to violate the Surveillance Act with impunity? You and I are free to be wire-tapped with no accountability by those who we the people elect to govern? All the fireworks set off in my neighborhood a few nights ago are a symbol of how we threw off an oppressive government. We have to stay vigilant folks, lest we the people are someday forced to throw off a new, home-grown oppressive government. Posted at 11:52 AM Fri - May 4, 2007Three HalfwitsSo, it turns out that three of the current
republican candidates for PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA do not "believe" in evolution.
(Huckabee, Brownback, and
Tancredo.)
Holy freaking crap. When you work at a company whose existence relies solely on using evolutionary mechanics to generate drug candidates, as I did for three and a half years, it becomes particularly hard to understand how people can be so naive they can blithely deny reality by saying, "I don't believe in evolution." It's like saying, "I don't look at the evidence to make decisions," and being proud of such stupidity. A little rusty on evolution yourself? Take a gander at this play-by-play transcript describing evolution, which was what convinced the Bush-appointed judge in the Dover trial that, yes, perhaps there is something to this talk about evolution after all. Posted at 11:53 AM Fri - February 16, 2007Taking America BackWe're making incremental progress in taking
America back from the neoconservative policies that have so wrecked both the
once stolid Republican party, and worse, that has toppled America's standing in
the world both as a superpower and as a moral leader.
Glen Greenwald is one the stalwarts in the conflict on the side of reason. He recently debated Frank Gaffney on the Alan Colmes show. Gaffney was and remains one of the leading lights celebrating the policies implemented by the Bush administration. Here, Greenwald describes how, in his view, he handily revealed Gaffney as a bully and liar. But, in case we think Greenwald is biased toward himself, he offers us an audible track of the entire debate. Posted at 03:36 PM Thu - February 15, 2007Al Franken DeclaresAl describes how social security survivor
benefits made the crucial difference for his wife when she was a child. And he
declares his run for the the US Senate.
Posted at 09:09 AM Mon - January 29, 2007Defending Markets From The AristosDavid Brin posts an (as always) interesting essay
on his web site. He describes how only open-eyed vigilance can defend free
markets from "cronies of the King."
Those who portray government as somehow an intrinsic enemy of market productivity/creativity/fecundity tend to be people who know (or let themselves see) human history. Posted at 10:02 AM Mon - January 22, 2007Bastards Get An Early StartFamily members are beginning to forward to my
wife and I, in all earnestness, how Barack HUSSEIN Obama was raised as a muslim,
oh my god! The machine is getting an early start tarring the (arguably) most
charismatic Democratic presidential hopeful for '08. (Of course, the subtext
here is that merely being of Muslim faith, or exposed to Muslim faith, is enough
to render one unclean.) The perpetrators of this email 'warning' sicken me on a
couple levels.
And it saddens me people I know and am related to trust pretty much anything they read in print. They can't conceive the incredible reach the influence peddlers and outright liars have achieved in the last couple decades, financed by business interests. But, here is a news report that tries to set this particular lie aright. From HorsesAss.org: The other day Fox News smeared Sen. Barack Obama, implying that the Indonesian elementary school he attended as a six-year-old was an Islamic madrassa. Fox chose to repeat this pile of right-wing bullshit, without any confirmation or further investigation. But not CNN. Wolf Blitzer righteously smacks down his cable “news” rivals: “CNN did what any serious news organization is supposed to do in this kind of a situation… actually investigate and learn the facts.” Yep, they actually sent a reporter to Indonesia and reported the truth, because unlike FOX, CNN considers itself a “serious news organization.” You can view the clip here. Posted at 09:07 PM Mon - December 11, 2006Leaders and FollowersOur constitution gives ordinary citizens power
equal to any other citizen of the United States. Whether your fellow citizen has
been elected or appointed to hold high office or whether that person sits in the
cubicle one down from you, you are on equal footing and deserve equal regard
before the law.
Many of us have allowed ourselves to feel undue deference for those who we've elected to sit in high power, as if they were kings of old. What most fairy tales about kings fail to mention is how kings held brutally to the reigns of power through a monopoly on information, claims of divine right, and the promulgation of class division. But we must all remember that our elected officials are not kings or nobles or members of some sort of elevated class. Everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time. More to the point, no one deserves unquestioned, unexamined power. No one. Why? Despite the respect due to a particular office, every office is held by a human being. And we all know what human beings are prone to, right? Error. And that's fine; being human means learning from our mistakes. The best lessons are learned when we've first tried to accomplish a task the wrong way. What isn't fine is when errors are hidden behind a screen of authoritative secrecy, so that such errors never come to light. When errors made by our delegated leaders do not come to light, no lessons can be learned, and error begets yet more error, corruption, and potentially even illicit action. At the very least secrecy is a breeding ground for misguided policy. As Geoffrey Stone puts it in this article: We elect a president and members of Congress to make decisions on our behalf. But they are answerable to “We the People.” This means not only that “We the People” get to vote every two, four, or six years, but also that we have a right to know what our representatives are up to. We delegate to them a certain degree of authority, but they are accountable to us. Posted at 08:35 AM Wed - December 6, 2006How I Learned To Relax and Love Warrantless SurveillanceThe administration's hand-picked panel created to
monitor government policies that encroach its citizens' civil liberties,
recently met.
It turns out, the panel may be just for show. From Wired: The three-hour meeting, held at Georgetown University, quickly established that the panel would be something less than a fierce watchdog of civil liberties. Instead, members all but said they view their job as helping Americans learn to relax and love warrantless surveillance. Posted at 03:05 PM Tue - December 5, 2006Torture in Your NameEven dismissing how weak the federal case has
turned out to be against Jose Padilla, all of us should stand up and take note
at the sort of treatment our government is experimenting with on those it can
now legally disappear from US soil (via the "Military Commissions Act of
2006"):
-Breaking the Mind of Jose Padilla Posted at 08:13 AM Sun - October 29, 2006Call for ChangeLike Paul
Kemp and others, I'd like you to consider an attempt to restore some
sanity to the United States. Democrats are certainly not golden children, but
they are the opposition party. It's clear we need some sort of check on the
current administration's power stranglehold. You can do more than vote for
change--you can volunteer a couple hours to get out the Democratic vote via your
cell phone.
Posted at 11:34 AM Sun - October 8, 200610 Liberal ValuesGeoffrey Stone presents 10 core liberal values,
with overall analysis and some point-by-point follow
here. The values:
1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. 2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference. 3. Liberals believe individuals have both a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate. 4. Liberals believe “we the people” are the governors and not the subjects of government, and that government must treat each person with that in mind. 5. Liberals believe government must respect and affirmatively safeguard the liberty, equality and dignity of each individual. 6. Liberals believe government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. 7. Liberals believe government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith. 8. Liberals believe courts have a special responsibility to protect individual liberties. 9. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible. 10. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, without unnecessarily sacrificing constitutional values. Posted at 03:45 PM Wed - October 4, 2006More on Senate Bill 3930More analysis on Senate Bill 3930 (as pointed out in my last post) provided through
the link below. It is... unsettling to suddenly live in a society where
-http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/10/welcome_to_the_fascist_states.php Posted at 09:03 AM |
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