The Promise of a Better Future Is a Distant Dream

Posted on June 14, 2008 by RagBlog


Unfulfilled promises haunt Afghanistan
By Bilal Sarwary / June 13, 2008

KABUL — Gone are the days when the Afghan summer was the season of plenty.

Now, as the snow melts off the Afghan peaks, a sense of foreboding hangs in the air. The summer in Afghanistan is fighting season.

Over a traditional Afghan dinner of rice, lamb and delicious Afghan bread, a senior Afghan official in his Kabul mansion admits he expects Taleban attacks to rise, but insists that they will not win.

“They can’t take over any place,” he says, as he struggles with a bony piece of meat.

After a few seconds he forgets the food and repeats in a serious tone the Afghan government line that continuing Taleban suicide bombings shows their “weakness”.

But he says the fighting is at stalemate and blames alleged outside support.

“We are fighting a war whose very source is based outside of Afghanistan, inside of Pakistan. As long as the Taleban has a base, we won’t be able to win this war.”

Chaotic

While the doubts about the fight against the Taleban continue, so too do the doubts among ordinary Afghans about life since the Taleban were toppled in 2001.

One morning I took an early tour of Kabul.

At 0700 there was already a chaotic traffic jam at Charahi Malak Azghar in the heart of the city.

Land cruisers belonging to the United Nations, warlords and government officials sit alongside taxis and vehicles belonging to common Afghans.

All of these vehicles are competing for space. There are no traffic lights, and no traffic rules. Street children and beggars were gathered along the main road.

Saqib Baghlani, 43, a high school teacher, sits on his old Chinese bicycle.

He welcomes the demise of the Taleban. “Afghanistan has made remarkable progress compared to its pre-war and Taleban days,” declares the tall, confident, blue-eyed teacher.

But he says the failures of his government are unacceptable.

He insists that President Hamed Karzai should fire corrupt officials and provide people with basic services, such as health care and clean drinking water, as this could bring peace.

“Go and see who owns these expensive houses in (the suburb of) Wazir Akbar Khan and who is driving land cruisers,” he says. “Karzai should ask these officials how they got so rich overnight, instead of making empty promises again and again.”

He castigates government ministers. “We are not asking for skyscrapers. The demands of our people are simple. Millions of dollars are going towards land cruisers and salaries. Everyone is corrupt.”

What puzzles poorer Afghans is why so many basic problems haven’t been solved, despite the billions of dollars of international aid.

A short walk from the affluent neighbourhoods of Wazir Akbar Khan and Shari Naw, in the streets of downtown Kabul, Afghanistan’s unemployed are gathered in their hundreds.

Most say they have to wait for days, hoping to find one day’s work to feed their entire family.

Kabul is considered the safest spot in the country, but basic services such as clean drinking water, electricity, and sewage systems remain unavailable to most people.

Waiting outside one of Kabul’s main government hospitals is Haji Baz Mohammad. He has accompanied a patient from his home province in northern Afghanistan. He is busy praying and is visibly sad.

”We are not politicians or people who have the aid money,” he says. “Where are the roads, clinics and reconstruction that were promised to us?”

Climate of mistrust

Driving through west Kabul, you can still see the destruction wrought during the factional infighting between warring Mujahideen factions in 1992, which left at least 70,000 Kabulis dead and the Afghan capital destroyed.

One of the most pervasive problems in post-Taleban Afghanistan is corruption.

Cabinet ministers and parliamentarians vow to fight it at every level. President Hamid Karzai has established several anti-corruption offices.

But, for Afghans like Ajmal Haidary, 42, a shopkeeper in West Kabul, this is another empty promise. “Every night, I hear ministers and MPs talk about corruption; this is all talk.”

One aide to President Karzai admits the government has failed and that it needs to attend to the plight of the people.

But he says you have to remember the strains on Kabul, a city originally built for 400,000 that is now home to almost four million people.

“From traffic jams to corruption to a lack of electricity, it’s a failure that needs to be fixed before it is too late,” he says. “However, don’t forget the improvements we have achieved.”

One judicial official warns that there is a culture of impunity in Afghanistan now that creates a climate of mistrust among common Afghans.

Seven years after the Taleban were removed from power, the worry is that for many Afghans the promises of a better future seem to be becoming a distant dream.

Source / BBC News

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When Will This Man Stand Trial?

Posted on June 14, 2008 by RagBlog

President Bush at news conference in Rome, 12 Jun 2008

Now here’s a surprise – Junior is contemptuous of the Supremes’ decision to uphold habeas corpus. In his own words, “It’s just a god damned piece of paper.”

As Juan Cole points out, this 5-4 Supreme Court ruling mimics the one that brought Junior to the White House in 2000.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Bush Disagrees with High Court Guantanamo Bay Ruling
By Paula Wolfson / June 12, 2008

ROME — U.S. President George Bush says he disagrees with a Supreme Court ruling that prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility have the right to challenge their detention before civilian judges. VOA’s Paula Wolfson reports Mr. Bush spoke out on the high court ruling while in Rome for talks with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

While the president was meeting with Italian leaders, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its latest ruling on Guantanamo.

The president said he disagrees. “We will abide by the court’s decision. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.”

Speaking at a joint news conference with Prime Minister Berlusconi, Mr. Bush said the White House will study the narrow 5-4 court opinion to see if new legislation is needed.

“It was a deeply divided court. And I strongly agree with those who dissented,” he said.

The status of the prisoners at the military facility at Guantanamo Bay has been a source of friction between the United States and Europe.

Throughout his European tour, Mr. Bush has been urging European leaders to look beyond such differences and work with the United States on global issues, such as the diverse challenges found in the Middle East.

During their talks in Rome, Prime Minister Berlusconi said once again that Italy wants to be included in the group of countries working to convince Iran to suspend uranium enrichment.

The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany are already involved in the initiative. President Bush said in Rome he will consider the Italian request. But White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley says Italy, which is one of Iran’s biggest trading partners, might not make a good addition to the negotiating team.

“Italy has a very robust set of commercial relations with Iran. This is always a problem for countries when their commercial ties sometimes seem to be at variance with their national security requirements,” he said.

During his appearance with President Bush, Prime Minister Berlusconi dismissed that notion, saying those commercial ties are an asset.

“Our offer [to join the negotiations] is based on the fact we know Iran very well from the inside, we have some leading companies that are in these countries [this country] and therefore we think this would be very useful,” he said.

Mr. Bush’s official welcome in Rome was warm. But the reception was very different in the streets of the Italian capital where the president is very unpopular, mainly because of the Iraq war.

Security is extremely tight for his visit, with thousands of extra policemen deployed throughout the city.

Demonstrators greeted the president when he arrived in Rome Wednesday, and there were protest banners hanging across the street from a hillside villa where he held a morning meeting with Italian entrepreneurs.

The president will meet with Pope Benedict at the Vatican on Friday before heading on to Paris, London and Belfast – the last stop on his so called “farewell tour” of Europe.

Source / Voice of America News

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There’s Just Something Wrong About Profit on Water

Posted on June 14, 2008 by RagBlog


Tapped Out
By Lisa Margonelli / June 15, 2008

To paraphrase an old axiom: You don’t buy water, you only rent it. So why did Americans spend nearly $11 billion on bottled water in 2006, when we could have guzzled tap water at up to about one ten-thousandth the cost? The facile answer is marketing, marketing and more marketing, but Elizabeth Royte goes much deeper into the drink in “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It,” streaming trends cultural, economic, political and hydrological into an engaging investigation of an unexpectedly murky substance. Partway through her undoctrinaire book, Royte, a lifelong fan of tap water, refills her old plastic water bottle, reflecting that “what once seemed so simple and natural, a drink of water, is neither. All my preconceptions about this most basic of beverages have been queered.” And by the end of the book she will have discarded the old plastic bottle too, but not the tap.

“Bottlemania” is an easy-to-swallow survey of the subject from verdant springs in the Maine woods to tap water treatment plants in Kansas City; from the grand specter of worldwide water wars, to the microscopic crustaceans called copepods, whose presence in New York’s tap water inspired a debate by Talmudic scholars about whether the critters violated dietary laws, and whether filtering water on the Sabbath constituted work. (Verdict: no and no.) Water is a topic that lends itself to tour-de-force treatment (the book “Cadillac Desert” and the movie “Chinatown” come to mind), as well as righteous indictments and dire predictions (“Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water,” “When the Rivers Run Dry: Water — The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century”). Where others are bold, “Bottlemania” is subversive, and after you read it you will sip warily from your water bottle (whether purchased or tap, plastic or not), as freaked out by your own role in today’s insidious water wars as by Royte’s recommended ecologically responsible drink: “Toilet to tap.”

BOTTLEMANIA: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It.
By Elizabeth Royte.
248 pp. Bloomsbury. $24.99.
Related
Op-Ed Contributor: A Fountain on Every Corner (May 23, 2008)
The ‘Bottlemania’ Web Site

Eww. Sorry. Let’s talk about those evil marketers. In 1987, Americans drank only 5.7 gallons of bottled water per person per year, but the cumulative impact of ad campaigns and the vision of Madonna fellating a bottle of Evian in “Truth or Dare” more than doubled consumption by 1997. In 2000 the chief executive of Quaker Oats bragged to analysts that “the biggest enemy is tap water.” By 2005, the enemy had become the consumer’s bladder; and in 2006, Pepsi, which owns Aquafina, spent $20 million suggesting that Americans “drink more water.” That year we drank 27.6 gallons each at a rate of about a billion bottles a week.

But marketing swings both ways. As quickly as bottled water became a symbol of healthy hyperindividualism — sort of an iPod for your kidneys — a backlash turned it into the devil’s drink. In 2006, the National Coalition of American Nuns came out against bottled water for the moral reason that life’s essential resource should not be privatized. New numbers surfaced: each year the bottles themselves require 17 million barrels of oil to manufacture, and, one expert tells Royte, “the total energy required for every bottle’s production, transport and disposal is equivalent, on average, to filling that bottle a quarter of the way with oil.” Mayors from San Francisco to New York suddenly became aware of the new symbolism of bottled water as a waste of taxpayer money, a diss of local tap water and a threat to the environment. Some canceled their city’s bottled water contracts. Chicago began taxing the stuff. And celebrities — among them Matt Damon and … Madonna — started backing a dazzling array of water charities in support of domestic tap and African water supplies, associating themselves with the magical ur-brand of “pure water” just as marketers and Madonna did in the early ’90s.

Royte asks, perceptively, if the pro-bottle and anti-bottle movements aren’t cut from the same plastic: “Is it fashion or is it a rising awareness of the bottle’s environmental toll that’s driving the backlash? I’m starting to think they’re the same thing.” To Royte, the author of “Garbage Land,” righteousness requires a greater commitment.

She finds it in Fryeburg, Me., a town of 3,000 that is trying to stop Nestlé’s Poland Spring from sucking 168 million gallons of water a year out of the pristine aquifer buried under its piney woods. As Royte arrives the town is in an uproar, with neighbor pitted against neighbor and rumors of secret planning-board meetings and of dummy corporations. Fryeburg is a “perfect example of water’s shift from a public good to an economic force,” she observes. The locals are more blunt: “This is what a water war looks like.” Fryeburg bears the burden of living at the other end of the giant green Poland Spring pipe. Residents of nearby Hiram count 92 water tankers rolling through their town in one typical 24-hour period; they feel themselves under siege precisely because their watershed is clean, while 40 percent of the country’s rivers and streams are too polluted for swimming or fishing, let alone drinking. Fryeburg residents try to repel the water company. They demand tests, throw a Boston Tea Party by dumping Poland Spring in a local pond, take the issue to Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court and hold a town meeting straight out of Norman Rockwell. Here I wish Royte had devoted more energy to the narrative. The people of Fryeburg and their complaints feel tentative — a sketch where a portrait could have been. And although her writing always flows, I sometimes wished for something less utilitarian.

That comes, unexpectedly, as Royte stands at the edge of the Ashokan Reservoir in upstate New York. “Ignoring the bluish mountains that form its backdrop and the phalanx of security guards in our foreground,” she gazes “down onto the spillway which curves and drops like a wedding cake, in four tiers, before sending its excess through a granite passage,” supplying 1.2 billion gallons a day through 300 miles of tunnels and aqueducts and 6,200 miles of distribution mains. There once was grandeur in public works, and Royte captures the mythic heroism that inspired the politicians and engineers to build great reservoirs more than a century ago. Their outsize civic largesse makes our current culture of single-serving bottles feel decidedly crummy. But returning to public water’s golden age, if it’s possible, will not come cheap. Royte says the country needs to invest $390 billion in our failing water infrastructure by 2020.

By the time I finished “Bottlemania” I thought twice about drinking any water. Among the risks: arsenic, gasoline additives, 82 different pharmaceuticals, fertilizer runoff sufficient to raise nitrate levels so that Iowa communities issue “blue baby” alerts. And in 42 states, Royte notes, “people drink tap water that contains at least 10 different pollutants on the same day.” The privatization of pristine water is part of a larger story, a tragic failure to steward our shared destiny. And if you think buying water will protect you, Royte points out that it too is loosely regulated. And there is more — the dangers of pipes and of plastic bottles, the hazards of filters, and yes, that “toilet to tap” issue. But there is slim comfort: Royte says we don’t really need to drink eight glasses of water a day. Drink when you’re thirsty, an expert says. That’s refreshing.

Lisa Margonelli is an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of “Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long Strange Trip to Your Tank.”

Source / The New York Times

Thanks to Betsy Gaines / The Rag Blog

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Sen. Bond’s "Compromise" on Warrantless Wiretapping

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Act now to save our rights
By Jim Retherford / The Rag Blog / June 13, 2008

Remember the Bill of Rights? Habeas corpus? Rule of law? It seems the New Corporatists view these concepts as “relics” of a bygone past.

Senator Kit Bond of Missouri is now floating legislation that he
calls a “compromise” on warrantless wiretapping. Unfortunately, the
bill would be a disaster for our civil rights and the rule of law. It
gives the President everything he’s demanded, including retroactive
immunity for telecom companies that spied on us without the warrants required by the current FISA law.

I just signed a petition calling on my representative to reject
Senator Bond’s legislation when it gets to the House. I hope you will
too.

Please have a look and take action.

Say No to Senator Bond’s FISA Capitulation
For over 30 years, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has dictated necessary and appropriate ways for the U.S. government to collect intelligence on its own citizens for the sake of national security. Two key provisions of this law are that:

*The government must obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) before spying on a citizen.

*Citizens have the right to sue if they believe they were spied upon illegally.

FISA provided broad leeway for every President from Carter to Clinton to conduct extensive intelligence-gathering operations. However, President Bush has decided that he is above warrants and judicial review, and major newspapers have reported that he has been using big telecoms like AT&T to spy on Americans without warrants for years.

Now, there are over 40 lawsuits against this arguably unconstitutional practice, and rather than taking his chances in court, President Bush is looking to his allies in Congress for a legislative back door solution. In February, the House of Representatives stood up to President Bush and protected the Constitution, but now the Senate is getting ready to cave in again. Senator Kit Bond is proposing a complete overhaul of FISA — he calls it a “compromise,” but we call it a catastrophe.

Here are some features of Senator Bond’s attack on civil liberties:

*Unlimited warrantless wiretapping for this President and every President for the next six years.

*Retroactive immunity for all the telecoms that helped President Bush wiretap illegally during the past 8 years — this time dressed up as a “trial” in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court where a note from the President amounts to a get out of jail free card.

*No future judicial review for the President, either: the Attorney General gets to decide whether the President’s warrantless wiretapping is legal or not.

In order to avoid this disastrous legislation, all the House has to do is stand strong on their February vote, and stick with the current version of FISA. Send a message to your representative today, and him or her to vote for the Constitution by voting against Senator Bond’s catastrophic FISA “compromise” when it comes to the House.

Go here to sign the petition: Source. / Credo Action

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Jim Hightower on The Media and a War Gone Missing

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

“And not a word about the war…”

And now a word about the war…
By Jim Hightower / June 11, 2008

George W keeps telling us that America is at war. But if were at war, he wouldn’t need to tell us, for we’d be fully engaged in the national effort.

In fact, America is not at war. Oh, our troops and their families most certainly are deep in the hell of George W’s war, but 99 percent of us have no personal involvement in it. We are making no sacrifices whatsoever, not even being taxed to pay for it. We’re at beaches, bars and barbeques this summer – not at war.

Neither is America’s media establishment. Media monitor David Carr reports that coverage of the war has fallen to a mere three percent of print and broadcast news, down from 25 percent as recently as September. Collectively, network TV is now devoting only four minutes a week to a war that already has killed 4,100 of our soldiers and is draining $12 billion a month out of our national treasury.

Why this big media yawn? Some publishers and editors have decided that the “story” isn’t that interesting anymore (of course, if their families were the ones at war, they undoubtedly would find the story riveting). Also, conglomerate owners are cutting newsroom budgets to jack up their profits, so they have fewer reporters to bring us war news.

But perhaps the biggest reason for the drop in coverage is this: the government does not allow it. At White House insistence, the Pentagon has so severely restricted the movements and freedoms of reporters and photographers in Iraq that most can’t do their jobs. Frustrated, many media outlets have simply withdrawn, choosing not to pay for reporters who aren’t allowed to report. I can certainly appreciate their frustration – but, wait a minute, isn’t this government lockdown of our media a rather huge story in itself? Surly that’s worthy of intensive reporting?

Meanwhile, people keep dying in a war that practically no one supports.

Source. / JimHightower.com

Cpl. Jessica Ann Ellis, 24, a medic, was injured in Iraq but wanted to return to the field. She was killed on May 11.

The Media Equation
The Wars We Choose to Ignore
By David Carr / May 26, 2008

Gen. John A. Logan was a Union officer, a fierce Republican partisan, an early advocate of the kind of volunteer army the United States now fights wars with. He is also one of the people credited with coming up with the holiday that we celebrate today. A statue in Logan Circle in Washington shows the general on horseback flanked by two female figures said to represent America at war and America at peace.

Given public indifference to a war that refuses to end, perhaps a third statue should be added: America at peace with being at war.

Even as we celebrate generations of American soldiers past, the women and men who are making that sacrifice today in Iraq and Afghanistan receive less attention every day. There’s plenty of blame to go around: battle fatigue at home, failing media resolve and a government intent on controlling information from the battlefield.

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September.

“Ironically, the success of the surge and a reduction in violence has led to a reduction in coverage,” said Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “There is evidence that people have made up their minds about this war, and other stories — like the economy and the election — have come along and sucked up all the oxygen.”

But the tactical success of the surge should not be misconstrued as making Iraq a safer place for American soldiers. Last year was the bloodiest in the five-year history of the conflict, with more than 900 dead, and last month, 52 perished, making it the bloodiest month of the year so far. So far in May, 18 have died.

Television network news coverage in particular has gone off a cliff. Citing numbers provided by a consultant, Andrew Tyndall, the Associated Press reported that in the months after September when Gen. David H. Petraeus testified before Congress about the surge, collective coverage dropped to four minutes a week from 30 minutes a week at the height of coverage, in September 2007.

It was also pointed out that when Katie Couric, CBS’s embattled anchor, went to Iraq to report the story, she and her network were rewarded with their lowest ratings in over 20 years. Hollywood producers who had hoped there would be a public interest in cinematic perspectives on this war have been similarly punished.

The war remains on the front burner for some outlets. On Sunday, The Los Angeles Times gave over much of its front page to chronicling Californians who have died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Washington Post continues to personalize the war with a series called Faces of the Fallen.

Earlier this spring, Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times wrote about flying in a C-130 in Iraq, accompanied by soldiers, including one in a coffin at the back of the plane.

“I wondered what exactly he had died for. And although I did not know him, I felt melancholy as we flew onward, accompanied now by ghosts and memories of loss,” she wrote.

She may have been haunted by her proximity, but the rest of us? Not so much. I asked Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, how a war that had cost thousands of lives and over $1 trillion was losing news salience.

“There is a cold and sad calculation that readers/viewers aren’t that interested in the war, whether because they are preoccupied with paying $4 for a gallon of gas and avoiding foreclosure, or because they have Iraq fatigue,” he wrote in an e-mail message, adding that The Times stays on the story as part of an implied contract with its readers.

Other news editors have made the judgment — perhaps prodded by falling revenue and slashed news budgets — that public attitudes toward the war have become so calcified that few are interested in learning more. Why bother when things don’t change?

Except that they do, in a heartbeat. Last Thursday, Steve and Linda Ellis of Baker City, Ore., held a funeral for their daughter, Army Cpl. Jessica Ann Ellis. Corporal Ellis, a 24-year-old combat medic, died May 11 in Baghdad, a victim of a roadside bomb during her second tour of Iraq. She had been injured just three weeks before in a similar attack, but chose to go back out. She was assigned to the Second Brigade Special Troops Battalion, Second Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division and had curly, unruly hair, which brought her the nickname “Napoleon Dynamite” early in her military career.

More than 300 people gathered around this collective wound at St. Francis de Sales Cathedral, according to The Baker City Herald. In the funeral Mass, Bishop Thomas Connolly spoke plainly of her contribution.

“She was a good medic, well-trained and as brave as could be,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Hanging in the building where I work, there is a striking picture from the newspaper’s archives (by Angel Franco, a New York Times photographer) of a young soldier in Arizona looking up into the eyes of her father, saying goodbye, her eyes shiny with love and fear. I look at the picture every day as I walk by and think of my 20-year-old twin girls, safe at college. The feeling of gratitude is always followed by guilt. My girls are out of harm’s way, but what about that man’s daughter? What about Ms. Ellis?

On Saturday, her parents received an e-mail message from one of the colleagues in Iraq she was charged with looking after.

“There are wounds that don’t show on the outside,” he wrote. “She gave me the best medicine for what I had — hope and love.”

In a phone call Sunday, Mr. Ellis set aside his grief to describe his loss and the loss to the country she served.

“She wanted to be there for her guys; she told us that,” he said. “She gave the largest sacrifice a person possibly could, selflessly, like she did every day of her life.”

He added, “Jessica was a child who had no care in the world, none, besides making you smile, besides making you feel better.”

And although the Pentagon and the current administration will go to great lengths today to talk about the pride we should all feel in the fighting women and men of this country, increasingly onerous rules of engagement for the news media and the military make it difficult for the few remaining reporters and photographers to do their job: showing soldiers doing theirs.

Yes, the message seems to be, we honor the dead, but do not show them in your pictures. Of course, we care deeply about the wounded, but you now need their signed permission to depict their sacrifice. As the number of reporters and photographers has gone down, the efforts to control those who remain have gone up.

Ashley Gilbertson, a freelance photographer who has covered the war for Newsweek, Time and The New York Times and has written about covering the conflict in a book called “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” will be going back to Iraq in June. It will be his sixth time there, temperatures will range up to 130 degrees, and each time he has gone back there have been new restrictions.

“Many of my colleagues have turned away from the story because it has gotten to the point where they feel they just aren’t going to get anything useful, which I completely understand,” he said, adding that nonetheless, when the surge ends this summer, he wants to be there to chronicle what follows.

General Logan wrote long ago that both the glories and the consequences of war needed to be shared by all. He warned against “the dangers of confining military knowledge to a comparatively small number of citizens, constituting the select few who may hold the destinies of the country in their hands.”

Source. / New York Times

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Surprise!

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

We’re Voting Republican!

Thanks to Rik Sternberg / The Rag Blog

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Gore Vidal’s Article of Impeachment

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Fightin’ words: Rep. Dennis Kucinich brandishes his pocket Constitution on the campaign trail in New Hampshire last January. Photo by Stephan Savoia / AP

I listened with awe to Kucinich…
By Gore Vidal / June 11, 2008

On June 9, 2008, a counterrevolution began on the floor of the House of Representatives against the gas and oil crooks who had seized control of the federal government. This counterrevolution began in the exact place which had slumbered during the all-out assault on our liberties and the Constitution itself.

I wish to draw the attention of the blog world to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment presented to the House in order that two faithless public servants be removed from office for crimes against the American people. As I listened to Rep. Kucinich invoke the great engine of impeachment—he listed some 35 crimes by these two faithless officials—we heard, like great bells tolling, the voice of the Constitution itself speak out ringingly against those who had tried to destroy it.

Although this is the most important motion made in Congress in the 21st century, it was also the most significant plea for a restoration of the republic, which had been swept to one side by the mad antics of a president bent on great crime. And as I listened with awe to Kucinich, I realized that no newspaper in the U.S., no broadcast or cable network, would pay much notice to the fact that a highly respected member of Congress was asking for the president and vice president to be tried for crimes which were carefully listed by Kucinich in his articles requesting impeachment.

But then I have known for a long time that the media of the U.S. and too many of its elected officials give not a flying fuck for the welfare of this republic, and so I turned, as I often do, to the foreign press for a clear report of what has been going on in Congress. We all know how the self-described “war hero,” Mr. John McCain, likes to snigger at France, while the notion that he is a hero of any kind is what we should be sniggering at. It is Le Monde, a French newspaper, that told a story the next day hardly touched by The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or, in fact, any other major American media outlet.

As for TV? Well, there wasn’t much—you see, we dare not be divisive because it upsets our masters who know that this is a perfect country, and the fact that so many in it don’t like it means that they have been terribly spoiled by the greatest health service on Earth, the greatest justice system, the greatest number of occupied prisons—two and a half million Americans are prisoners—what a great tribute to our penal passions!

Naturally, I do not want to sound hard, but let me point out that even a banana Republican would be distressed to discover how much of our nation’s treasury has been siphoned off by our vice president in the interest of his Cosa Nostra company, Halliburton, the lawless gang of mercenaries set loose by his administration in the Middle East.

But there it was on the first page of Le Monde. The House of Representatives, which was intended to be the democratic chamber, at last was alert to its function, and the bravest of its members set in motion the articles of impeachment of the most dangerous president in our history. Rep Kucinich listed some 30-odd articles describing impeachable offenses committed by the president and vice president, neither of whom had ever been the clear choice of our sleeping polity for any office.

Some months ago, Kucinich had made the case against Dick Cheney. Now he had the principal malefactor in his view under the title “Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush”! “Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate.” The purpose of the resolve is that he be duly tried by the Senate, and if found guilty, be removed from office. At this point, Rep. Kucinich presented his 35 articles detailing various high crimes and misdemeanors for which removal from office was demanded by the framers of the Constitution.

Update: On Wednesday, the House voted by 251 to 166 to send Rep. Kucinich’s articles of impeachment to a committee which probably won’t get to the matter before Bush leaves office, a strategy that is “often used to kill legislation,” as the Associated Press noted later that day.

Source. / truthdig

Kucinich, O’Reilly face off over impeachment


Thanks for video to Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog

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Port Arthur Site Set to Burn Toxic PCBs

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Life in Port Arthur, Texas is about to get worse. Photo by AP.

EPA poised to let Mexican imports be destroyed in Texas town
By Matthew Tresaugue / June 13, 2008

PORT ARTHUR — The west end of this Gulf Coast refinery town is a weedy pocket of poverty, with blocks of shuttered storefronts and blue tarps still covering the rooftops of houses damaged by Hurricane Rita nearly three years ago.

Hilton Kelley, 47, sees his neighborhood’s commercial activity moribund, its residents sick, its children with nothing to do, and he blames the fire-and-fume-belching cluster of oil and petrochemical plants around Port Arthur.

Now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is poised to grant a request by the operator of a Port Arthur incinerator to import up to 20,000 tons of highly toxic PCBs from Mexico for their disposal. To many people living on the city’s predominantly black west end, the proposal is the ultimate affront.

“This adds insult to injury,” said Kelley, who heads the Community In-Power and Development Association. “Enough is enough already.”

Veolia Environmental Services’ petition comes nearly 30 years after legislation that banned the manufacture of PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, also prohibited bringing them into the United States. The EPA ruled in 1996 that the chemical compounds may be brought into the country for incineration, but a federal appeals court overturned the decision.

Agency officials, echoing the reasons for reversing the ban a decade ago, argue that the destruction of PCBs in this country is safer than allowing stockpiles to fester in Mexico and other nations.

But critics contend that there are cleaner, safer disposal methods for PCBs. When burned, they produce dioxin, which is linked to cancer, brain damage, reproductive problems and other ailments in humans.

Despite precautions, incinerators emit minute quantities that enter the food chain through meat, dairy products and fish — leading some to wonder why Port Arthur residents should again shoulder such an onerous burden.

“They’re getting all of the emissions and none of the prosperity,” said Jim Blackburn, a Houston-based environmental attorney who represented Port Arthur residents in a recent lawsuit over Motiva Enterprises’ expansion plans. “Why should we make an exception to put more pollution on a community that already has taken on more than its fair share?”

Environmentalists have dubbed the area “The Cancer Belt,” but there is no proven link to the refineries and Jefferson County’s cancer rate, which was 23 percent higher than the state overall, according to the Texas Cancer Registry’s most recent data.

• What: EPA hearing

• Where: Port Arthur City Hall, 444 Fourth St.

• When: 3:30-8:30 p.m., June 19

Refinery to expand

The health problem is part of the plight of Port Arthur, where the median household income is about $35,000 a year, less than half of Sugar Land. While there isn’t much left of downtown, new houses, restaurants and big-box stores are sprouting along the corridor leading to Beaumont and away from the biggest plants.

Last year Motiva began an expansion that will more than double the capacity of its Port Arthur refinery to 600,000 barrels a day by 2010 and make it the largest in the country. The plant is across the street from the Carver Terrace public housing project.

The Army also began shipping 1.7 million gallons of a nerve gas byproduct called hydrolysate from Indiana to Veolia’s incinerator, located about five miles west of downtown on Texas 73. The contract is worth $49 million.

Veolia applied to import PCBs in November 2006 before receiving the Army contract. Under the proposal, the company would ship the compounds by truck through Houston to Port Arthur — a distance of about 460 miles from entry points in Brownsville and Laredo.

Mexico now sends PCBs to Europe for incineration, exposing the compounds to loss at sea. The transportation cost for overseas shipment is at least three times more expensive than moving the waste from Monterrey, Mexico, to Port Arthur, according to the company.

Plant’s estimate

The Veolia facility, permitted to handle up to 150,000 tons of hazardous waste per year, burns between 20 million and 30 million pounds of PCB wastes from domestic sources annually. Mitch Osborne, the plant’s general manager, said smokestack tests show the incinerator destroys more than 99 percent of the material.

But environmentalists are not so sure about the plant’s safety record, pointing to the 1,933 pounds of PCBs that it reported releasing into the air in 2006, the most recent data available.

The plant alone accounted for more than two-thirds of the PCB releases nationwide, according to the federal Toxics Release Inventory, which is based on industry estimates.

Osborne said the plant’s estimate is wrong because of a bookkeeping error. In correspondence with the EPA last month, company officials said the amount should be less than one pound.

“If we didn’t think we could do it safely, then we wouldn’t bring it here,” Osborne said. “We have proven our capability over 15 years. It’s safer to burn here than to leave it in place.”

The EPA apparently agrees.

Position called absurd

The agency is proposing a one-year exemption for Veolia to import and burn the PCBs because the company “has demonstrated that no unreasonable risk to health or the environment would result,” EPA spokeswoman Roxanne Smith said.

The agency also contends that because the proposal poses no unreasonable health hazards to Port Arthur’s residents, there is no “environmental justice” issue.

Neil Carman, a former Texas Commission on Environmental Quality inspector who now works with the Sierra Club’s Lone Star chapter, said the EPA’s position is “absurd” because “incineration is a dinosaur technology.”

Carman said there are EPA-approved, non-burn technologies that could be used to dispose of the compounds in Mexico. A process called chemical dechlorination, for example, treats the PCB waste with a liquid agent that breaks down the toxins by removing their chlorine components.

“It’s inexcusable for Veolia to burn PCBs because they don’t all burn up,” Carman said, adding that the Sierra Club would sue if the EPA grants the plant’s request. “This could set a precedent that opens up the floodgates.”

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Source. / Houston Chronicle

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Obama Web Site : Fight the Smears

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Obama has launched a web site to take on
malicious rumors about him, his family, and his campaign. Running this would be a 24/7 job for more than one person.

Guess I’m showing my geezerhood but it still amazes and confounds me that some slimy son of a bitch can fabricate a lie, throw it out on the Internet, and immediately it acquires a certain aura of “truth.”

Anyway, here’s the link to Fight the Smears. You can even see a copy of his birth certificate, and yes, he was born in Hawaii, and yes his name is really Barack Hussain Obama II.’

The truth shall make you free and piss a lotta fascists off.

twisty / The Rag Blog / June 12, 2008

Go to Fight the Smears

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Fox News : "Obama’s Baby Mama"

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Fox Forced to Address Michelle Obama Headline
By Jim Rutenberg / June 12, 2008

For the third time in less than three weeks, Fox News Channel has had to acknowledge using poor judgment through inappropriate references to Senator Barack Obama.

The network has released a statement saying it should not have referred to Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, as “Obama’s Baby Mama,’’ as it did on Wednesday in an on-screen headline commonly called a “chyron.”

“A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron during the segment,” Bill Shine, a Fox News senior vice president, said in a statement.

The chyron appeared during a discussion between the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly about political attacks against Mrs. Obama. It read in full, “Outraged Liberals: Stop picking on Obama’s baby mama!” It was first publicized on Wednesday by Alex Koppelman of Salon.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as one “chiefly in African-American usage” that refers to, “The mother of a man’s child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner.”

Earlier this week, the Fox News anchor E.D. Hill had apologized for raising the possibility that the Obamas affectionate fist bump during the senator’s victory rally in St. Paul on June 3 was “a terrorist fist jab.’’ Two weeks prior, the Fox News analyst Liz Trotta said she regretted making a joke about a possible assassination of Mr. Obama.

Her mea culpa followed that of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas a week earlier after he made a similar crack at a gathering of the National Rifle Association.

In other news, Fox News Channel announced today that it was hiring Mr. Huckabee as a contributor.

Source. / The Caucus / NYT

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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Singin’ on Thursday – Save the Country

Posted on June 13, 2008 by RagBlog

Rosanne Cash with Rodney Crowell

This tune comes thanks to Betsy Gaines. It is Rosanne Cash singing Save the Country.


The Rag Blog

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BushCo Demands Are Unacceptable to Many Iraqis

Posted on June 13, 2008 by RagBlog


Iraq officials question need for U.S. troop presence
By Ned Parker / June 11, 2008

Negotiations are underway between the two countries to decide how long troops will stay. The U.S. is scaling back its forces.

BAGHDAD — Officials in Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s ruling coalition are questioning whether Iraq needs a U.S. military presence even as the two countries press forward with high-pressure negotiations to determine how long American forces will remain.

Some officials in Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party and his larger Shiite United Iraqi Alliance bloc, which has cooperated with the U.S., have spoken in favor of imposing severe restrictions on U.S. forces after the United Nations mandate authorizing their presence expires at the end of the year.

Maliki and President Bush last year outlined goals for an agreement covering military, trade and cultural relations. They pledged to return Iraq to full sovereignty and said the agreement was expected to be finalized by July 31.

According to Iraqis, Americans supported a draft of the agreement that called for allowing U.S. forces to detain Iraqis and conduct missions without the government’s permission. They have also said the Americans required up to 58 permanent bases, control of Iraqi airspace and immunity for troops and contractors.

American officials have refused to disclose their negotiating stance and have accused their critics of deliberately distorting U.S. positions.

David Satterfield, the State Department’s senior advisor on Iraq, said Tuesday that the U.S. remained committed to an agreement by late July. He denied that the U.S. was pushing demands that infringed upon Iraq’s independence.

“We want to see Iraqi sovereignty strengthened, not weakened,” he said.

U.S. forces are scaling back from a massive troop buildup last year known as “the surge,” which helped put the brakes on Iraq’s civil war. U.S. troop levels are expected to drop to an estimated 140,000 by July as the Americans evaluate the effect of their military reductions on Iraq’s security. It remains to be seen whether the fragile peace between the country’s Shiite majority and onetime Sunni elite will hold if the Americans quickly leave the country.

United Iraqi Alliance lawmaker Sami Askari, who is considered a member of Maliki’s inner circle, said the changes in opinions in many cases are gradual.

“There is the camp who still believe that we need the Americans to stay and the other camp that says we don’t need them anymore,” Askari said. “You can’t draw a line, even within the Dawa Party, even within” the alliance, he said.

Shiite officials like Askari have warned there is no way any Iraqi politician could back the current U.S. security agreement proposals.

“If I’m from the group that believes in the need for the Americans to stay, and then they face me with such a draft, then I’ll say, look, I’d rather go with the others,” Askari said.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, has defended the agreement. “The recent statements you’ve heard, the recent politicking you heard by different groups has really been very unhelpful,” he said. “There has been no agreement yet.

“Secondly, most of the statements are coming from people who are unaware or not involved in the heart of this negotiating procedure. It has really been used for political brinksmanship,” Zebari said.

Senior Iraqi politicians and Western officials confirmed the friction and debate within the alliance about an agreement.

“Of course there are some people who are against it, no doubt,” said Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, who is a leading negotiator on the Iraqi side. Salih vowed that the Kurds, Maliki and the country’s presidency council would get approval for a bilateral agreement despite any opposition within the alliance.

Others warned that some Dawa members were seeking to sabotage a long-term deal.

“There is a lot of misrepresentation. It is deliberate. Some people don’t want this on principle. Some people may have ideological problems with this. Now they are showing their true colors,” said a senior Iraqi official who did not wish to be identified because it could endanger his position.

He warned that even Maliki’s backing was not a given. The prime minister is faced with pressure within his party. In the past, officials have described Maliki as flip-flopping on government decisions.

The official described Dawa members as having become overconfident after successful military campaigns this spring in the southern port of Basra, Baghdad’s Sadr City and Mosul that relied heavily on U.S. air support to defeat Sunni and Shiite armed groups.

Read all of it here. / Los Angeles Times

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