Monday, October 31, 2005
The Terrible Two's
Will Alito be a recipient of the Curse of the Two? When a President has lost his first Supreme Court pick in the past 40 years it has been followed by a second refusal. It happened to President Johnson in the 60’s and Nixon in the 70’s and Reagan in the 80’s. Thank goodness this is one curse that Clinton avoided.
Will Bush usher this dubious tradition into this century?
This nomination is a disaster and desperately needs a united Democrat response to stop a second Scalia from lording over us for the next 30 years. There will be no balance whatsoever left on the Supreme Court unless this happens. The pathetic Wurlitzer is already spinning what a really nice guy he is just like they did Roberts and the two tow-headed children are being shown as if it proved something. Was that Harriet’s problem, no blonde progeny to flaunt? If you thought the Presstitutes were beginning to awaken, think again.
Supporting local farms
Ben and Jerry’s announced last week that the company will be once again active in supporting the causes that made them famous:
Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream brand whose image and marketing was built on social consciousness, tonight revives that tradition in its first TV ad campaign in a decade. The ads focus on issues, not ice cream.
In the first of five commercials to run throughout the year, Ben & Jerry’s takes on the decline of family-owned farms in the USA.
CEO Walt Freese admits that Ben & Jerry’s has been soft in recent years on continuing its founders’ tradition of social consciousness.
This is needed and welcome. After Unilever purchased the Vermont ice cream maker, the company went from combining good desserts with social consciousness to simply providing more flavors. The brand may have suffered a little bit as the hunt for profits cut into the amount of funds and energy they spent on raising awareness on the plight of family farms and the declining efforts to live in harmony with the environment.
Their new emphasis on the erosion of small farming is very important in keeping the public’s attention on the fact that as more and more small farms are being squeezed by corporate giants and by suburban sprawl, the further our food will have to travel to get to us while we currently witness a disappearing part of American life. This all ties in together.
By buying locally grown produce, we not only help out smaller, local farms, but we do our part to decrease the amount of fuel it takes for say, apples, to get to us from places like Mexico and Brazil. Its easier to go to a place like A&P and buy apples grown (with pesticides and genetically modified structures) than it is to go to a green market and purchase from local growers, who by the way, tend to grow organically.
As more attention is being paid to these issues, organizations that support Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) are growing and helping connect urban people with area farmers. How this works is as follows: You connect with a local CSA group, buy shares in an area farmer’s production of produce or meats, and then when the harvest comes due, the farmer drives to your area and distributes your share of the food directly to you. You cut out the middleman and you start to develop a relationship with the farmer, their farm, and the growing process.
You can set up visits to come up to the farm itself and see how it is set up and what it takes to grow the foods you have a stake in. This is a wonderful process for everyone involved. As a consumer, you not only know where your food is coming from, but you also are a part of the process of growing and being closer to the land itself. It fosters relationships that are more meaningful than simply going to the local supermarket and buying a bag of apples that have come from who knows where using all sorts of bad farming practices.
Cross-posted by Bob Riven of Meat-eating leftist.
Treason
Out for themselves, and only that. Plainly, after watching 60 Minutes’ story on Valerie Plame-Wilson’s betrayal by the Bush administration. As Melissa Mahle, herself a former NOC herself, put it:
“Of course I do, because we’re talking about lives and we’re talking about capabilities. We do our work. We risk our own lives. We risk lives of our agents in order to protect our country. And when something like this happens, it cuts to the very core of what we do. We’re not being undermined by the North Koreans. We’re not being undermined by the Russians. We’re being undermined by officials in our own government. That I find galling,â€? Mahle said.
It is beyond galling, it is criminal. I know that proving the legal elements would be difficult, perhaps insurmountable, but we all know what this is: treason, base treason, a terrible betrayal carried out by self-righteous idealogues who care only about themselves and their plans for empire. Anthing, ANYONE, who gets in the way of that agenda is expendable. The interests of the country are expendable.
The question is, are the American people going to do anything about it? A sizable minority of people voted for these monsters. A majority of Americans barely pay attention, bother to vote, or seem willing to learn what the hell is being done in their name. As Scott Ritter puts in in an Op-Ed about the Libby indictment:
If the American people go along with such blatant attempts at obscuring the reality of the criminal conspiracy that has been committed, then it is perhaps time we finally lay to rest this experiment we call American democracy. At the very minimum, Congress should be compelled into action. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and in particular its two senior senators, Pat Robertson, R-Kan., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va, should not only complete their investigation into how the Bush administration used (or misused) intelligence to formulate Iraq policy, but also re-open its initial report into the so-called “intelligence failure” regarding the flawed WMD assessments, with the intent to indict any and all who conspired to keep relevant information from, or made false statements to, that committee during the conduct of its original investigation.
There must be a wider investigation into the totality of the criminal conspiracy undertaken by the Bush administration to defraud
Congress and the American people about the issue of war with Iraq, and in particular the case used to justify the invasion of that country. The crime that was committed goes far beyond the outing of a rogue diplomat’s CIA-affiliated spouse, as serious as that charge may be. The deliberate and systematic manner in which the Bush administration, from the president on down, peddled misleading, distorted and fabricated information to Congress and the American people represents a frontal assault on the very system of government the United States of America proclaims to champion.
From what I see and hear everyday in my travels, and on television and radio, I’m not optimistic. I deeply fear that the American race is run, that we’ve long since given up on ourselves, on what we really claim to stand for. We are a rogue nation, run by rogues, for the greed and enrichment of oil magnates, today’s privateers.
Video of Bradley’s report on 60 Minutes can be found HERE.
Thanks to NYBri’s diary for the links.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Pretty hate machines
This story is wonderful.
These two little girls are members of “Prussian Blue,” a white supremacist singing sensation sweeping the nation. With biting social commentary in songs like “Aryan Man Awake” and “Weiss Weiss Weiss” its hard to imagine them not performing at the next Republican convention.
“We’re proud of being white, we want to keep being white,” said Lynx. “We want our people to stay white … we don’t want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race.”
I honestly don’t know what’s worse: Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen teaching kids the insipid values of blind consumerism and boy chasing, or Prussian Blue spreading white hate.
Here are some of my favorite lyrics of theirs:
You finally came back to the borders of our Fatherland. Now enemies came, traitors everywhere at hand. Many people who had fought and died knowing that they had to win. And still it sickens my heart to see a picture of the red flag in Berlin…
And when we finally conquer, our people will be free. And all across this great land, the bold Truth we shall see. So as we march together, to avoid catastrophe, let’s remember always our sacred Destiny…
Hey, at least it all rhymes.
Cross-posted by Bob Riven of Meat-eating leftist.
Thanks for the advice, Bill; now practice what you preach
Bill Clinton has some advice for Democrats:
"You can’t say, ‘Please don’t be mean to me. Please let me win sometimes.’ Give me a break here,” Clinton said. “If you don’t want to fight for the future and you can’t figure out how to beat these people then find something else to do."
Is that so, Bill? And what, pray tell, do you mean by “fighting”? Do you mean publicly defending Bush’s immoral, illegal war on Iraq? Or making excuses for the administration’s non-response to Katrina?
Why this man is a liberal icon is beyond me. He is the person who is perhaps most responsible for pulling the Democratic Party to the right, and he is responsible for more Iraqi deaths than are George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein.
Yes, Democrats need to fight. But not the way Clinton would have them do so.
Posted by Dadahead.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
A Fight Across Generations
"Birds do it, bees do it, Liberal Street Fighters do it, let’s do it, lets fall in love!"
Alexander Sanger was in town recently for a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the WI Chapter of Planned Parenthood, and is interviewed by Lisa Kaiser in the latest issue of Milwaukee’s independent paper, the Shepherd Express:
Shepherd: What aspects of your grandmother’s legacy are still alive in Planned Parenthood today?
Sanger: Her legacy is everywhere. She was a fighter who had to face down fundamentalist Protestants and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. She was intrepid and fearless and an advocate for those who were in desperate need of her services, who were disenfranchised, poor, girls who weren’t part of the system, who were immigrants, uninsured. These women’s needs are as great today as they were in my grandmother’s time. The services provided by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin as well as in the rest of the country are vital to the well-being of women.
Shepherd: Have we made progress since her time?
Sanger: No, which is why I wrote the book. I think my grandmother would not be surprised by the state we find ourselves in. She always knew that resistance would be there fighting back, that we would have to fight to stand our ground and fight even harder to get ahead. She fought for the use of birth control. She had nothing to do with abortion.
Hmmm, I thought, where is he going with this? Well:
Shepherd: You talk about reproductive freedom, not reproductive rights or being pro-choice.
Sanger: I am suggesting that we start the conversation by asking why there should be reproductive freedom in the first place. The debate on our side has been in terms of women’s autonomy, the right to privacy, occasionally public health, the role of government. This is versus a very monolithic argument from the other side saying you’re killing children, or that it’s against one’s faith. The two arguments are two ships passing in the night. There’s no connection between the two. …
We haven’t convinced Americans of the rightness of our argument that it is a better thing for people to make their own decisions about childbearing, but neither has the other side.
You see this politically. Wisconsin is almost as bad as Utah or Missouri. Things have been going backwards politically in Wisconsin, and around the country, too. The count is over 450 laws passed at the state level to restrict abortion.
I’m suggesting in addition to the other framing [about reproductive freedom] that we add a biological, scientific and evolutionary reproductive framing to show the benefit to humanity of family planning, birth control and abortion.
In other words, find ways to show EVERYONE has a stake in this fight. It’s a point worth exploring:
Shepherd: We’re also used to talking about abortion over here and birth control over here and you don’t separate the two.
Sanger: This is probably the hardest to take for a lot of supporters. Because the mantra, from Bill and Hillary Clinton on is that abortion should be safe, legal and rare. Or they say the primary goal is to prevent abortion. But the problem with us in this movement is that we have not gotten rid of the shame of abortion, which is what my grandmother did with birth control. Even though 40% of women are going to have an abortion. We have to show that abortion and birth control are part of our humanity and not separate the two. They are all about the decision not to give birth. …
I love to talk on colleges with the so-called pro-life students. One out of two fertilized eggs will not implant. One out of two implanted eggs will not survive. So left to nature one out of four fertilized eggs will make it to nine months. So I ask the rhetorical question, what is so holy and sacred about a fertilized egg? Others have said before and I say that God is the greatest abortionist on the planet.
We can see that some of grandma’s fire lives on. I’ve probably copied far too much of this article, so follow the link above and give them the page hits. It’s a good paper. I wanted to make sure as many people as I could expose to them read what Mr. Sanger had to say. We need to figure out a way to advance our cause, because right now the wingers are winning. I’ll leave this with his last question and answer:
Shepherd: How do we include men in the movement?
Sanger: You have to start by understanding that they are reproductive beings, just like women. They want to have children, too. The whole battle of the sexes is a battle for control of reproduction. Women actively control reproduction so that they can provide for the children that survive childbirth. Men try to control reproduction to increase the chances that they’re raising their own children. That’s why they pass restrictive laws on abortion and adultery, invented the chastity belt and so on. They wanted to punish women for having sex outside of marriage.
Reproductive freedom is caught right in the middle of that. For all of human history, up to about 10 years ago, men couldn’t really know who their children are, what’s known as paternity uncertainty. Even Aristotle wrote about it. But we can give men paternity certainty. That’s what DNA testing is all about. The testing rate for paternity is going up about 10% a year. It’s now 350,000 tests a year.
Provacative thoughts, and they could drive a discussion we need to have if we’re to move forward. What do you think?
Friday, October 28, 2005
As the Wurlitzer Spins: Will Libby be on the Label?
As we wait for the indictments to come in I’m watching CNN and they are spinning furiously. I swear they could make butter if there was any milk handy.
Consider this an open thread for all things Plame.
Update: Libby Indicted for Perjury, Giving False Statements and for Obstruction. CNN reporting 5 counts in all.
Update 2- Scooter Resigns
Press Conference with Patrick Fitzgerald at 2:15pm EST
More to come?
Stay tuned, we will be. And feel free to comment and speculate while the Mighty Wurlitzer gobbles it all up.
Danforth Meet Whitman, and Multiply
Former Senator John Danforth gave a speech at the Bill Clinton Center in Arkansas lamenting the takeover of his party by religious extremists who don’t respect the boundary between Church and State. The interesting thing here about Danforth is not only is he a Republican but he is also an Episcopal priest. In THIS PIECE we see:
Former Sen. John Danforth said Wednesday that the political influence of evangelical Christians is hurting the Republican Party and dividing the country. Danforth, a Missouri Republican and an Episcopal priest, commented after meeting with students at the Bill Clinton School of Public Service, a graduate branch of the University of Arkansas on the grounds of the Clinton presidential library. “I think that the Republican Party fairly recently has been taken over by the Christian conservatives, by the Christian right,” he said in an interview. “I don’t think that this is a permanent condition, but I think this has happened, and that it’s divisive for the country.” He also said the evangelical Christian influence would be bad for the party in the long run.
Republican National Committee spokeswoman Tracy Schmitt declined to comment on Danforth’s remarks. Danforth, who recently served as ambassador to the United Nations, made similar criticism of the party in an opinion article published by the New York Times in June. In that article, he called for religious moderates to take part in public life. Danforth, considered a conservative on social issues, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976 and served three terms.
Now maybe Danforth can get together with “It’s My Party Too” author and ex-Gov Christie Todd Whitman and start a campaign to do just that. Please get your Party out of the hands of the extremist nutcases. If you succeed at that while the other side tries to get the rest of the elected officials to represent a real Opposition Party this country might have a chance.
photo via the Associated Press
Thursday, October 27, 2005
"Grieve little and move on,"
he wrote. “I shall be looking over you. And you will hear me from time to time on the gentle breeze that sounds at night, and in the rustle of leaves."
Bob Herbert highlights this final goodbye from Sgt. Anthony G. Jones, a soldier fallen in Iraq, to his wife, the mother of his newborn child, in his stinging rebuke of the criminals responsible for the senseless slaughter ongoing in Iraq:
Much of the nation is mourning the more than 2,000 American G.I.’s lost to the war in Iraq. But some of the mindless Washington weasels who sent those brave and healthy warriors to their unnecessary doom have other things on their minds. They’re scrambling about the capital, huddling frantically with lawyers, hoping that their habits of deception, which are a way of life with them, don’t finally land them in a federal penitentiary.
See them sweat. The most powerful of the powerful, the men who gave the president his talking points and his marching orders, are suddenly sending out distress signals: Don’t let them send me to prison on a technicality.
This is not, however, about technicalities. You can spin it any way you want, but Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby et al. is ultimately about the monumentally conceived and relentlessly disseminated deceit that gave us the war that never should have happened.
He excerpted Sgt. Jones’ words from James Dao’s 2,000 Dead: As Iraq Tours Stretch On, a Grim Mark, a hard read, but it is important that we pay witness to the price being paid by these soldiers, these families.
Every state in the country was represented on the roster of the dead, as were Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, Guam, Micronesia, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa. California and Texas had the most deaths, as they did for the first 1,000, followed by New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. At least 17 of the last 1,000 dead were women.
For Iraqis, too, the death toll seems to have accelerated. Estimates for Iraqis are not precise and are subject to much controversy. But according to figures compiled by the allied military forces in Iraq and analyzed by Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, a nonprofit research group, Iraqis have suffered on average more than 50 casualties a day in 2005, including wounded and dead, compared with fewer than 40 a day in 2004.
Attention must be paid.
It seems we need these ritualized notices of big round numbers, of anniversaries and milestones and markers. It helps us to wrap emotional and intellectual ribbons around the chaotic, the painful, the joyous and important events in our lives. It helps us to understand an often incomprehensible world.
The Pentagon, of course, doesn’t see it that way:
On Tuesday, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a military spokesman in Iraq, wrote in an e-mail to reporters, "The 2,000 service members killed in Iraq supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a milestone. It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives."
But on Wednesday, the Times ran a front-page story marking the 2,000th fatality—plus four pages of photos of the dead inside. The gallery covered every death since the paper last performed this service, at the 1,000 mark in early September 2004.
There was once a time when the sacrifices paid in our names were on public record. The Pentagon, apparently, thinks that they must happen in secret, that they are of import only to the direct family of the dead. What kind of society cares not for the names of the foot soldier, the sergent, the officer?
Eric Alterman publishes the letters from Major Bob Bateman on his blog regularly, and I think the one up today highlights what is wrong with the civilians prosecuting this war. He describes in his letter the tradition of the salute, that to soldier’s and officers it is a sign of professional respect, one honorable professional to another:
Ahead of me, sitting on a bench, resting from the weight of his battle-rattle, was a soldier.
The gravel crunched under my feet. Ten yards away a soldier tilted his head slightly, catching a surreptitious glance. My pace was neither fast nor slow, but was closer to the normal ground-eating amble I adopt when carrying a load. Seven yards. Five yards.
The sergeant comes to his feet. It is not a springing motion but a smooth fluid one. In the same liquid manner his right arm shoots upward, coming to a rigid position at a 90-degree angle from his body while the forearm moves higher. His right hand snaps intro position, knife-edge towards me with the palm turned slightly inward. He is rendering the “hand salute.� It is crisp. Clean. Professional.
Conditioned at a near-Pavlovian level, my own arm executes the same ballet. Three yards.
“Afternoon sir.�
“Afternoon sergeant.�
My hand snaps down. A tenth of a second later the sergeant’s does as well. Almost as quickly he drops back to his seat and is again utterly relaxed.
He goes on to explain that this is a tradition, NOT a regulation:
Many people who have never served do not understand what the salute is to us. Outsiders, it seems, often see it as a quaint tradition at best. Less generously, some consider the hand salute as indicative of our hidebound nature, or a hold-over from older, darker days, marking one man as inferior and one man as superior. Perhaps one day, long past, it was this. But that is no longer the case, and has not been for a long time. Not among Professionals.
Between us it is a greeting. A mutual acknowledgement. It starts, by tradition but not regulation, with the lower ranking man. The higher ranked soldier returns the salute, and drops the salute, then the initiator drops his. That is the process. But the meaning is hidden.
For us it is recognition. One pro to another, and that is all. Thus, if an enlisted man, or a lower ranking officer approaches me, and his hands are full, I will salute him. Not to do so would be disrespectful of his service, just as his not initiating a salute (assuming he saw me, and had empty hands) would be disrespectful of mine. Who salutes first matters a lot less. Again, that is why it is a tradition, but not a regulation.
He goes further to relate how the Iraqi military has not developed this tradition. Soldiering isn’t looked at as something professional, a relationship demanding respect both up and down the chain of command in order for it to work:
This, friends, is why it is taking so goddamned long to teach the Iraqi Army. No, we’re not trying to make them just like us. But we are trying to give them the tools of the professional. In the Iraqi Army under Saddam, indeed in all other Middle Eastern armies extant, the officers do consider the enlisted men a sub-class. They treat them as chattel. They act as though they are entitled. And in all of this they show that they just don’t get it. Those attitudes did not work 1,000 years ago, and they do not work today. That is what we are trying to pass on here; The idea that your men matter. Ultimately your men matter more than you do, and no matter what, you must respect them. It all comes down to one simple rule we have in the American Army.
It is an inviolate rule, especially in the infantry where things can occasionally run short. This is a rule which says as much about us as does the salute, but which nobody outside the Army sees. In one line, this is a rule which exemplifies what we are trying, hard, to pass on here. A rule which if we can pass it on, and make them understand and believe, will make them capable.
Officers Eat Last.
If this is how officers are supposed to support their troops, how then about the man the military’s officers answer to, the civilian Commander in Chief? Does he not offer them a duty of care. Should he not eat last?
This, I think, is a clue to why the prosecution of this unnecessary war has been so criminal. This:
They treat them as chattel.
This, I think, sums up neatly the attitude displayed by the “leaders” of our government, especially the Commander in Chief, in the legislature and the executive, on Capitol Hill and in the White House. After all, why pay notice to the passing of chattel? All of the pretty words spewed at photo ops and in press releases are just window dressing, purfume to cover the stench from the abattoir.
This is why we aren’t to show, aren’t to count, aren’t to notice, aren’t to honor the actual dead in anything more than the abstract. They are chattel in a society increasingly built on making more and more people chattel. Chattel and owners. Carcasses and butchers.
Attention must be paid.
Minutemen start patrolling the U.S.-Canada border
In an effort to stop sneaky Canadians slipping into our country in search of expensive prescription drugs and eroding human rights, the Minutemen have started to patrol the U.S.-Canada border in the Northwest.
Vaughn and Loop, members of a volunteer “Minuteman” contingent like those that stirred controversy earlier this year in Arizona, hang out for several hours but see nothing out of the ordinary. It is a far cry from the desert of the U.S.-Mexican border, where undocumented immigrants try to sneak into America every day. That doesn’t matter to these Minutemen. They say they’re here to make a political statement about the vulnerability of the nation’s borders.
Is it me, or would people living in a neighboring country that is better off than we are, NOT cross into our cultural and economic wasteland?
Cross-posted by Bob Riven of Meat-eating leftist.
Buh-Bye Harriet, Hello Trouble
As reported here by Bloomberg News Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination.
U.S. President George W. Bush is back where he started in seeking a successor to retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: trying to balance competing calls for a woman or racial minority, a staunch conservative and someone who won’t provoke a showdown with Democrats.
The controversy surrounding Harriet Miers, whose nomination the White House withdrew this morning, adds a new complication to the president’s decision. Bush almost certainly will want to placate his conservative allies whose opposition to Miers, the White House counsel, was instrumental in sinking her nomination.
So now we’ll get a truly certifiable wingnut, as if Harriet didn’t qualify there! Senator Schumer said today at the press conference afterward that if Bush keeps listening to the extreme right wing of the Republican Party there will be dark days ahead for America. Well Chuck, it would be nice if you kept saying that loud and clear and get your Democrat brethren to join you for this chorus. Until that happens there is no chance your prophecy won’t come true.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Inverse Learning Curve
Bigger, Stronger Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths
By John Ward Anderson, Steve Fainaru and Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 26, 2005; A01BAGHDAD, Oct. 25—After 31 months of fighting in Iraq, more than half of all American fatalities are now being caused by powerful roadside bombs that blast fiery, lethal shrapnel into the cabins of armored vehicles, confronting every patrol with an unseen, menacing adversary that is accelerating the U.S. death toll.
U.S. military officials, analysts and militants themselves say insurgents have learned to adapt to U.S. defensive measures by using bigger, more sophisticated and better-concealed bombs known officially as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. They are sometimes made with multiple artillery shells and Iranian TNT, sometimes disguised as bricks, boosted with rocket propellant, and detonated by a cell phone or a garage door opener.
The bombs range from massive explosives capable of destroying five-ton vehicles to precision “shaped charges” that bore softball-size holes through thick armor, the main defense of troops in the field, and they are becoming a key factor in the fast-rising U.S. death toll.
It took about 18 months from the start of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq to reach 1,000 U.S. deaths; it took less than 13 months to reach 1,000 more. A major reason for the surge, statistics show, is the insurgency’s embrace of IEDs, together with the military’s inability to detect them.
While the criminal Bush Administration repeats the blunders of the past, it seems an insurgency in Iraq is proving to be a veritable graduate school in the art of inflicting death by explosive. The death toll from IED’s is rising, both of “coalition” troops and Iraqi civilians and officials.
According to a former Iraqi army officer who lives in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi and is now a member of al Qaeda in Iraq, the group headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi, insurgents have advanced beyond the crude bombs they once used, such as dynamite or gunpowder mixed with nails and buried beside a road. Now, he said in an interview, militants have access to TNT from Iran that he said was about seven times stronger than the TNT available in Iraq. He said they were also using old Austrian missiles from the former Iraqi army and detonating them with electric wires, cell phones and other remote-control devices.
An Oct. 15 IED attack on a U.S. convoy in the village of Albu Faraj, just east of Ramadi, illustrated some of the new methods.
Haj Ali Eedan, 52, a farmer who watched the operation, said armed men planted a cylinder that looked like a hospital oxygen tank near a road, then moved it twice before finally hiding it in a pile of discarded nylon baskets. His son, Hussein, 30, said he thought the final site was selected for a reason other than that the cylinder would be well-hidden there.
“They were trying to find a solid place—like metal, iron, or concrete—to put the IED on,” he said. “This makes the explosion three times more powerful than burying it.”
The deadliest such attack came in August, when 14 Marines and an Iraqi civilian died in a single blast near Haditha, 125 miles northwest of Baghdad. The military later said insurgents had detonated a stack of three antitank rounds under an amphibious assault vehicle, the moderately armored personnel carrier used by Marines.
“We got better armor, they started getting better ordnance,” Col. Bob Chase, the operations chief for the 2nd Marine Division, based in Ramadi, said at the time.
The insurgents have hidden the bombs in gunny sacks to disguise them as part of the garbage that litters the streets of Kirkuk, soldiers said. They have embedded them in concrete blocks similar to those used as building materials in new Kurdish settlements. As the Americans adapt their tactics, so, too, do the insurgents.
On the night of their Baghdad patrol this week, a platoon from the Army’s 4-64 Armor Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division studied every pile of trash on the side of darkened streets for telltale wires and other signs of explosives.
Earlier in the war, “We had an enemy who we could see,” said Sgt. Brian Zamiska, 27, of Bentleyville, Pa., tapping the hood of a black Opel sedan as the patrol passed it. “We didn’t have to worry about looking at every cardboard box in the road or every car like this and wondering if it was going to blow up.”
His platoon mate, Lt. Lennie Fort, 30, of Clarksville, Tenn., said this style of warfare was frustrating.
“There’s no one to shoot back [at], no one to kill,” he said. “Honestly, it just gets us amped up to go out and get someone, but there’s never anyone to get.”
“Now they get a hose and they lay it across the road, and when you drive across it, it ignites the IED,” said Clinton, the Alpha Company sergeant in Kirkuk. “You know years ago, when you had service stations where you’d drive across the rubber hose and it would go, ‘ding, ding, ding’? Here you drive across a little hose and it sends water back into a little bottle with wires sitting there. When water goes back into the bottle, it connects wires, and off goes the IED. It’s just so simple and so stupid."
Here in the states, politicians continue along this deadly track, refusing to learn the lessons of wars past. Despite growing public sentiment against the war, a war they started despite a sizable minority opposing it, a conflict blundered into on a oily slick of lies and greed and immorality. They continue a headlong and self-righteous insistance on the “legality” of torture, a policy that Vice President Cheney is still pressing:
VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. “Cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.
This nation, which once claimed to be a champion of human rights, which was once moving slowly forward, haltingly trying to correct its mistakes of the past, has a sizable minority on the right cheering on this monster and the President he serves. Frightened, ugly and venal, the United States is a criminal nation, violating international law and it’s own laws and Constitution (signed treaties have the full force of law in our system) in pursuit of blood and black gold.
Opposition has been muted by indifference on the part of our media, and cowardice on the part of the Democratic Party, a party seemingly “led” by a majority of foppish courtiers willing to ignore the rabble’s rising alarm in order to maintain their station.
A philosophical question: if a protest happens in the public square, and no television camera relays it, does it really happen?
Despite the corporate media doing its best Hellen Keller imitation, the protests DO go on, and this week promises to see an escalation as we surpass two thousand officially dead troops in Iraq:
I am in Washington, DC, now and along with a coalition of peace groups and local activists, we will be holding vigils at the White House for the rest of the week from 12 noon to 8 p.m.
Each day, we will be passing out black wrist bands, and we will have each person who picks one up write a KIA troops’ name and number on it. Each wrist band will also stand for 50 innocent Iraqis killed. Every day at 6 p.m., we will have a “die-in.” We will ask everyone who is present at 6 p.m. to lie down and represent a dead soldier. At that point, the park police will give us three warnings before they arrest us. We are not encouraging people to get arrested. That is a very personal decision. I am planning to not get up on the day after the 2,000th soldier is killed. I may be arrested. Then, when they let me out, I will go back and lie back down. We in America have let this criminal administration get away with murder for too long. Enough is enough. It’s time to start practicing non-violent civil disobedience ( C.D.) on a large scale.
On Tuesday the 25th, we will be fasting for the length of the vigil in solidarity with the hardships that Americans and Iraqis are enduring on a daily basis. We are asking America to fast in solidarity with us.
On Wednesday the 26th at 10:30 a.m., we will be going to Arlington Cemetery to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Then to the White House for our vigil.
On Thursday the 27th at 10:30 a.m., we will be delivering a wreath and signed sympathy cards to the Iraqi Embassy. We are asking people who come out to our vigil on the Lafayette Park side to bring sympathy cards. Then to the White House for our vigil.
On Friday the 28th at 10:30 a.m., we will be delivering flowers and get well wishes to Walter Reed Hospital, and we are asking people to bring get well cards to our vigil. Then off to the White House for our vigil.
Tomorrow I will be calling on President Bush to answer my original question: “What Noble Cause?” There is absolutely no noble cause. Our children and the Iraqi people are dying and suffering for no cause except for power and money-greedy criminals.
The numbers are staggering. More American soldiers have been KIA in the first 32 months of Iraq so far than in the first four years of Vietnam. This isn’t another Vietnam, people - this is worse.
We cannot allow the people who are running our country to keep on running it into the ground.
It is time to exercise our sacred duty as human beings.
Let’s get peacefully radical.
We and the Iraqis are currently on inverse learning curves. As we destroy cities, deliver death from above and fail to protect and provide basic services, more and more Iraqis, angered by the deaths and maimings of loved ones, will learn the arts of war. Some will fight. Some will fashion bombs. Some will offer support and encouragement for the insurgents. They are learning at a staggering pace, these people who have fought off invaders before, this sophisticated and educated people who’ve turned away Mongols and Brits are only going to get stronger. There is a long and strong and proud history there, a history demonstrating great cruelty and heart-breaking beauty. Sadly, we have created a cauldren where the fires of civil war will burn as elements of the country resist us and the others side with us.
Can we reverse our headlong plunge into barbaric ignorance. Will we stare into that hard black reflective wall cut into the Mall in DC and look at our past shining a bloody red light, will we allow it to illuminate our crimes before we commit too many more?
We’ve Been Here Before - Anna Quindlen
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a tapering wall of black granite cut into the grass of Constitution Gardens. Maya Lin envisioned a scar when she designed it, a scar on this land, which is exactly right. Maybe someday his security detail could drive George W. Bush over to take a look. He’ll be able to see himself in the reflective surface.[...]
The Vietnam Memorial stands, in part, as a monument to blind incrementalism, to men who refused to stop, not because of wisdom but because of ego, because of the fear of looking weak. Not enough troops, not enough planning, no real understanding of the people or the power of the insurgency, dwindling public support. The war in Iraq is a disaster in the image and likeness of its predecessor.
Like Vietnam in some ways, yes, but in many ways much, much worse. We seem a harder and colder people now, two decades after Reagan’s “morning in America” dawned upon a age with a free market worshipped alongside a bloody and angry fundamentalist conception of God, a brutal new America where worth is counted only in dollars, and we have no time or soul left with room for compassion or justice.
Perhaps the leaders of the Democratic Party should take time off from their fund-raisers and visit the Vietnam Memorial, too. They should remember one of the most powerful men the party ever produced, Lyndon B. Johnson, and how he was destroyed by opposition to the war in Vietnam and bested by those brave enough to speak against it.
At least Johnson had the good sense to be heartbroken by the body bags. Bush appears merely peevish at being criticized. Someone with a trumpet should play taps outside the White House for the edification of a president who has not attended a single funeral for the Iraqi war dead. As I am writing this, the number of American soldiers killed is 1, 992. By the time you read it, it may have topped 2,000. Will I be writing these same things when the number is 3,000, 5,000, 10,000? If we are such a great nation, why are we utterly incapable of learning from our mistakes? America’s sons and daughters are dying to protect the egos of those whose own children are safe at home. Again.
Isn’t it past time we learned that this rightward tragectory into imperial martial expressions of brute explosive force and unconstrained self-interest is killing us, is killing our future, is killing our planet and making us more and more of a danger to the world around us? Isn’t it time we reversed our joyful expression of our childish, brutish national id and rejoined the civilized world?
When will we learn?
Postscript
Some perspectives on the carnage:
Enemy Body Counts Revived - U.S. Is Citing Tolls to Show Success in Iraq
Rising Civilian Toll Is the Iraq War’s Silent, Sinister Pulse
Interactive Graphic - A Look at Those Who Died in Iraq
Wal-Mart: Sick and elderly need not apply
What is the best way for a retail giant to save some money on health care costs? Discourage people with poor health from applying. How do you do that? Well, at Wal-Mart, one ingenious VP came up with this plan:
In the memorandum, M. Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart’s executive vice president for benefits, also recommends reducing 401(k) contributions and wooing younger, and presumably healthier, workers by offering education benefits. The memo voices concern that workers with seven years’ seniority earn more than workers with one year’s seniority, but are no more productive.
To discourage unhealthy job applicants, Ms. Chambers suggests that Wal-Mart arrange for “all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering).”
The memo continues on by acknowledging the poor state of economics that a lot of Wal-Mart employees are in:
Acknowledging that Wal-Mart has image problems, Ms. Chambers wrote: “Wal-Mart’s critics can easily exploit some aspects of our benefits offering to make their case; in other words, our critics are correct in some of their observations. Specifically, our coverage is expensive for low-income families, and Wal-Mart has a significant percentage of associates and their children on public assistance.”
This is especially comical since her solution to this image problem is not to offer cheaper coverage, but to prevent people in poorer health from applying!
Cross-posted by Bob Riven of Meat-eating leftist.
Indictments S'il Vous Plait
Get your fresh hot Indictments.
Well, the blogosphere is hopping and sweating about the possibility of Fitzgerald lowering the boom. Who, how many and for what are the questions. As for when, this article at The Washington Note gives us this info:
Indictments Coming Tomorrow; Targets Received Letters Today
An uber-insider source has just reported the following to TWN (since confirmed by another independent source):
1. 1-5 indictments are being issued. The source feels that it will be towards the higher end.
2. The targets of indictment have already received their letters.
3. The indictments will be sealed indictments and “filed” tomorrow.
4. A press conference is being scheduled for Thursday.
Feel free and add your own speculation!
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Slip Sliding Away
A sobering piece in the NY Times highlights the snowballing (sorry, couldn’t resist) damage being caused in the artic by global warming:
At age 73, Dr. Koerner, known as Fritz, still regularly hikes high on the ancient glaciers abutting the warming ocean to extract cores showing past climate trends. And every one, he said, indicates that the Arctic warming under way over the last century is different from that seen in past warm eras.
Many scientists say it has taken a long time for them to accept that global warming, partly the result of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, could shrink the Arctic’s summer cloak of ice.
But many of those same scientists have concluded that the momentum behind human-caused warming, combined with the region’s tendency to amplify change, has put the familiar Arctic past the point of no return.
The particularly sharp warming and melting in the last few decades is thought by many experts to result from a mix of human and natural causes. But a number of recent computer simulations of global climate run by half a dozen research centers around the world show that in the future human influence will dominate.
Even with just modest growth in emissions of the greenhouse gases, almost all of the summer sea ice is likely to disappear by late in the century. Some of the simulations, including those run on an advanced model at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., show much of the summer ice disappearing by 2050, said Marika Holland, a scientist there who is working on the sea-ice portion of that model.
The corpoflack “scientists” that the Republicans like to put forward as experts like to insist that what we are actually seeing are just natural cycles, the same argument used to deny that the recent increase in hurricane severity has anything to do with human impacts on the environment. In typical winger/greedhead fashion, we’re presented with a simple minded formulation: it’s EITHER a natural cycle OR it’s the result of human action. Apparently they have never watched a child push a hula-hoop downhill, where a NATURAL result of gravity is FACILITATED by human action. Too complicated for simple minds, I suppose:
The emerging picture of great Arctic changes ahead comes from the interlaced efforts of the modelers in their climate-controlled computer rooms and field scientists with numb toes and frosted beards. It will long remain a work in progress. But the underlying trends are robust, many Arctic scientists say.
Field work suggests that past Arctic warm spells, like a stretch through the 1920’s and 1930’s, were limited to certain regions, while the recent warming has largely progressed in concert with rising temperatures around the Northern Hemisphere - a sign of large forces at work, climate scientists say, not regional variability.
Field studies have also provided information on how energy flows from air to ocean and into melting ice, how melting ice freshens water and growing ice makes it saltier - all dynamics that have helped modelers refine their programs.
Recent expeditions on icebreakers have started building the first detailed picture of the communities of algae, plankton, small cod, seals and polar bears that form an ice-based ecosystem as tenuous as the ice itself.
In the virtual Arctic of computer simulations, thousands of lines of computer code mimic how ice, oceans and the atmosphere interact and are components of larger global models of earth’s climate and oceans.
The models are the only way to test how the planet may react to various human actions. Because there is only one earth, there are no other options for such studies, given that the real earth is already well along in an unintended experiment - the rapid buildup of long-lived greenhouse gases.
Those who work in that realm have steadily improved their simulations. A decade ago, for instance, most depicted sea ice just as static reflective slabs, and almost all now replicate how ice is tugged by wind and ocean currents, Dr. Holland said.
The inevitability of summer ice retreats, she and other Arctic experts say, is a result of the nature of the climate system, which is something like a heavy flywheel. Once started, flywheels tend to keep going. Within a few decades, say many scientists focused on the region, the insulating power of greenhouse gases will dominate natural climate fluctuations, possibly for centuries.
And the flywheel in the Arctic moves faster than in other areas because the region amplifies change. The most obvious mechanism is the difference in how bright white sea ice and the dark sea act under sunlight. Ice reflects most of the solar energy striking it back into space. Water absorbs most of it.
A result is that each area of ocean exposed by melting ice soaks up heat, melting more ice, exposing more sea, soaking up even more heat - and so on, until the annual marathons held each spring on the floating ice near the North Pole are replaced by boat races.
Of course, many of us wimpy lefties focus on destroyed cultures and species facing extinction. There is, however, if you look at it with the right bloodthirsty eyes, a bright side to these changes:
Even with just modest growth in emissions of the greenhouse gases, almost all of the summer sea ice is likely to disappear by late in the century. Some of the simulations, including those run on an advanced model at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., show much of the summer ice disappearing by 2050, said Marika Holland, a scientist there who is working on the sea-ice portion of that model.
Of the various simulations, all done for an international scientific report on climate trends to be issued in 2007, the only ones that retain much summer sea ice in the Arctic by 2100 are those that assume global greenhouse-gas emissions are held constant at rates measured in 2000 - something that only five years later is already impossible.
The other models all produce an Arctic Ocean in summer akin to the “open polar sea” that was sought by oceanographers and explorers in the mid-1800’s. "There would definitely be shipping along the Eurasian coast, and the polar bears would have some serious issues,” Dr. Holland said.
Shipping which will most likely produce opportunities for profit. So it’s not all bad. Maybe a complete Mastadon skeleton or two will bubble to the suface of the bogs that are forming where there was once permafrost.
Those authors and many other experts have settled on the same picture of the region late this century: tundra retreats and forests spread; most sea ice disappears in late summer; coastlines wear away under the assault of wind-driven waves on waters that previously were sheathed in ice; permafrost turns to bogs; and ancient lakes that once sat atop permanently frozen ground drain like unplugged bathtubs.
Climatologists say the effects eventually could extend far beyond the sparsely populated north, contributing to climate and ocean shifts that could dry the American West and possibly slow north-flowing warm currents in the Atlantic Ocean that keep northern Europe milder than it would otherwise be.
The effects could also include a sharp increase in the rate at which seas are swelled by melting glacial ice and far greater warming as even more greenhouse gases, locked in permafrost and the Arctic seabed, are liberated by warming.
For example, American and Russian scientists studying lakes in northeastern Siberia recently reported that the melt of permafrost is generating methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In spots, so much methane is being released that roiling streams of bubbles prevent the surface from freezing even in the depths of the Siberian winter.
The most that can be expected, some climate scientists say, is to limit the human contribution to warming enough to forestall the one truly calamitous, if slow motion, threat in the far north: the melting of Greenland’s ice cap.
Rising two miles high and spreading over an area twice the size of California, this vast reservoir - essentially the Gulf of Mexico frozen and flipped onto land - contains enough water to raise sea levels worldwide more than 20 feet.
In recent years, the ice sheets of Greenland have been building in the middle through added snowfall but melting even more around the edges in summer. Many Greenland experts say the melting is already winning out.
There is more info (LOTS more) available at the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. In any event, decades of stonewalling by the rightwing and the business community may very well have pushed us past the point of no return. With the ongoing assault on reason, learning, science and higher education, it’s liable only to get worse, and attempts to mitigate the damage will also be thwarted.
Dr. Koerner, the Canadian glaciologist, pointed out on time scales of millenniums, the recent warming has even trumped a long cooling trend.
“The warming trend is even more significant,” he said, “because it’s not on a flat background but something that maybe should be getting colder."