Thursday, March 31, 2011

Those Were The Days, My Friend - Crooks & Liars' Wayback Machine

[Here's a Newstalgia item from Crooks & Liars -- this date, 40 years ago.]

March 31, 2011 07:00 PM

March 31, 1971 - The Lt. Calley Verdict.

By Gordonskene

Crossposted from Newstalgia

enlarge

Lt. William Calley - considered by many to be a scapegoat for an even darker side.
Click for radio clip:

No end to drama or news on this day in 1971. Starting with Sentencing of Lt. William Calley for his role in the My Lai Massacre to life without parole at hard labor and a mass outpouring of support for Calley and suggestions he was scapegoat for an even more sinister involvement to the U.S. Military view of the Vietnam war. Aftershocks continued over Southern California with the latest registering between 4.0 and 4.5 after the big earthquake in February. The Senate Sub-committee, looking into the pension funds of 87 corporations found that only 10% of employees who participated in them ever saw any money (surprise). Jimmy Hoffa was denied parole from prison for a second time. Fighting was continuing in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam while the Pentagon came out with the (sort of) good news that the May draft call-up would be only 15,000, which was 2,000 less than the previous month and lowest for the year so far. A Bill introduced in the Senate to abolish the Draft was defeated by 73-11 and the National Association of Broadcasters released the results of a Roper Poll on People's Attitudes Towards TV News with the findings that most people still got their news from TV, with newspapers, radio and magazines following in that order. 49% thought TV news was most believable (?) - almost 50% believed no more government control was needed than was in place in 1971. And (get this . . .) a whopping 69% believed TV news was fair as far as political stances were concerned. And . . .Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst said the Nixon Administration was against limiting political contributions. Fancy that.

The Boss's Letter To The Editor in Trenton, New Jersey

Thank you for your March 27 front-page story by Michael Symons, "As poverty rises, cuts target aid." The article is one of the few that highlights the contradictions between a policy of large tax cuts, on the one hand, and cuts in services to those in the most dire conditions, on the other.

(Click here to see the article: As poverty rises, NJ cuts target aid.)

Also, you've shone some light on anti-poverty workers and analysts such as Adele LaTourette, Meara Nigro, Cecilia Zalkind and Raymond Castro, among others, all of whom have something important to add to the discussion: real information and actual facts about what is happening below the poverty line.

These are voices that in our current climate are having a hard time being heard, not just in New Jersey, but nationally. Finally, your article shows that the cuts are eating away at the lower edges of the middle class, not just those already classified as in poverty, and are likely to continue to get worse over the next few years. I'm always glad to see my hometown newspaper covering these issues.

Bruce Springsteen

Enormous Tea Party Crowd At Giant Washington Rally! Hundreds Of People!

Dick Armey's FreedomWorks spent weeks using their money and muscle to sponsor a giant Tea Party Rally in Washington. Here's a list of speakers they had planned for the rally:

Dick Armey, Chairman,FreedomWorks
Matt Kibbe, President, FreedomWorks
Lord Monckton [Climate change denier-in-chief]
Andrew Breitbart [!]
Andrew Moylan, National Taxpayers Union
Nic Lott, Mississippi
Rev. C.L. Bryant, Louisiana
Deneen Borelli, New York
Tom Gaitens, FreedomWorks Florida
Tucker Carlson [!]
Brendan Steinhauser
Congressman Ron Paul, TX [!]
Congressman Tom Price, GA

They tried to beef things up somewhat, I guess; I know that speakers included Tea Party crowd-pleasers Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, Mike Pence, Allen West, and Jim DeMint. Still, 200 people, when they got 100,000 in the snow in Madison, Wisconsin? (And that's without funding from Dick Armey -- or George Soros, or anyone else, for that matter.)

This from Salon:

The Tea Party Comes to D.C., in Small Numbers, On Message

Posted Thursday, March 31, 2011 1:29 PM | By David Weigel

Tea Party Patriots and a small constellation of movement organizations held a rally near the Capitol just now, an attempt to back up the House and Senate GOP in the fight over the continuing resolution.

It was a small rally. I estimated that around 200 people showed up; Andrew Langer of the Institute for Liberty quickly challenged that, and said it was a bit bigger, but at the time, we were standing where the crowd was getting thick. Here's a quick shot from the other side of the rally, in front of the seven camera stand-ups:

The media coverage of the event was intense; there seemed to be around four protesters for every reporter. (I was accidentally interrupted twice by camera crews who were trying to grab interviews with people I was talking to.) So the message of the day probably got out, and the message was: Don't blame Tea Partiers if there's a shutdown, blame Democrats. One of the only people who strayed off message was Rep. Mike Pence, who raised the possibility and inspired cries of "Cut or shut! Cut or shut!"

If there's much media focus on how small the rally was, I think that would miss the point [I don't.]. There was a total sense of victory on display. Cindy Wilkerson, a social worker who came up from Mississippi to attend the event, told me she was heading to her representatives' offices next -- three of the state's four members are Republicans, as are both senators -- and telling them to "hold the line." Sen. Rand Paul told me that the Democrats' increasing concessions on spending proved that they were "reading the tea leaves, so to speak."

**********

Here's a paragraph from Digby at Hullabaloo. I've always thought this was quite obviously the case -- the Tea Party was a diversion to direct political focus away from a Republican party that Bush left in total disgrace -- but I haven't seen it expressed very often, if at all:

The Tea Party as a distinct identity was always going to be short lived. We have a two party system and these so-called non-partisan splinter groups tend to move back into the system after a cycle or two. In this case, it was a brilliant strategy on the part of the GOP and the plutocrats. They had to separate themselves quickly from the Bush legacy of failure so they jumped on/created a separate conservative strain they could portray as distinct from the party and mobilize it for 2010. The succeeded admirably, but they aren't needed anymore. The energy is gone and they are going back to the party.

**********

And here's a link to a comment on the rally from Crooks & Liars.

Spencer Tracy, Inherit The Wind: Still Relevant Today

Tidbits

The first Republican debate, which was to be hosted on May 2 by NBC News and Politico, has been postponed until September, it was announced Wednesday. The reason? Not enough candidates.

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Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, at a Christian supremacist conference, stated that Americans should be forcibly indoctrinated at gunpoint: “I almost wish that there would be, like, a simultaneous telecast, and all Americans would be forced -- forced at gunpoint no less -– to listen to every David Barton message, and I think our country would be better for it. I wish it’d happen.”

[David Barton is a very scary guy. He's known as the commander in chief of Glenn Beck's Black Robed regiment. Follow this link to an anti-Barton site, Liars For Jesus, to find out just how scary.]

[More, from Think Progress:

Appointed by several State Boards of Education and governors to “oversee the writing of history and government standards for public school students,” Barton is revising history textbooks in multiple states. In Texas, he’s ensuring books exchange biographies of George Washington, Thurgood Marshall, and Abraham Lincoln for the role of Jesus “in America’s past.”]

**********

The two houses of the Ohio Legislature approved a far-reaching bill on Wednesday that would hobble the ability of public-employee unions to bargain collectively and undercut their political clout.

They sent the bill to Gov. John R. Kasich, a Republican, who lawmakers said would sign it in the next few days.

[It will not become law for 90 days. In Ohio, the voters can force a referendum on the bill by getting 6% of the electorate to sign a petition. They're mobilizing to do just that, and it looks as though 6% will easily be obtained.]

**********

This from one of the leaders of the "loyal opposition":
Jed Lewison, Daily Kos

On today's broadcast of "Jay Sekulow Live," Rep. Michele Bachmann called in to talk about the overlap between the Tea Party and the Religious Right. But toward the end of discussion, Bachmann turned her attention toward President Obama, claiming that he is intentionally making Americans poorer:

"I think that the agenda that we have seen - we know that sixty-three percent of all households have seen a major decline in their personal wealth, a decline in their personal income, and an increase in their debt level. That's all attributable directly to Barack Obama's principles. I don't think it's by accident we're seeing people struggling and we're seeing redistribution of wealth. I think Barack Obama is getting exactly the outcome that he hoped for.

"All of us, I think are perhaps giving the President too much credit thinking, well, he probably just doesn't understand that liberalism actually makes people poorer. I actually think that this is what the President wants. I believe that he wants to see redistribution of wealth because if you ever notice, the President seems to be angry and irritable and sarcastic about people who have succeeded in the United States and job creators. Those seem to be the two sectors that he most wants to punish."

**********

Click this link. It's an astonishing view of the Dow Jones from Clinton's inauguration to today.

**********

[From Barbara Morrill at Daily Kos]

Allen Greespan really said this:

Today’s competitive markets, whether we seek to recognise it or not, are driven by an international version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is unredeemably opaque. With notably rare exceptions (2008, for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices, and wage rates.

Henry at Crooked Timber compared it to saying, "With notably rare exceptions, Russian Roulette is a fun, safe game for all the family to play."

[Greenspan, just quietly fade away -- please]

More criticism of Greenspan here.

**********

Spread Of The Anti-Union Virus

Andy Kroll

Staff writer for Mother Jones magazine

Return to Wisconsin: The Beginning or the End?

Posted: 03/31/11 11:42 AM ET

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
-- Joan Didion

In the February weeks I spent in snowy Madison, Wisconsin, that line of Didion's, the opening of her 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That," ricocheted through my mind as I tried to make sense of the massive protests unfolding around me. What was I witnessing? The beginning of a new movement in this country -- or the end of an existing one, the last stand of organized labor? Or could it have been both?

None of us on the ground could really say. We were too close to the action, too absorbed by what was directly in front of us.

Of course, the battle between unions, progressive groups, and Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker is not over. Not by a long shot. A county judge recently blocked "publication" of Walker's anti-union legislation, saying it was possible Senate Republicans violated Wisconsin's rigorous open records law when they rammed through a vote on his bill to do away with the collective bargaining rights of state workers. The case could end up before the state Supreme Court. But that didn't stop the state's Legislative Reference Bureau from publishing Walker's bill anyway, touching off another round of arguing about the tactics used to make the bill into law. As of this writing, its actual status remains unclear. If a judge does force a new vote, it's unlikely the outcome will change, though even that's not certain.

Either way, the meaning of Madison, and also of what similar governors are doing amid similar turmoil in Columbus, Indianapolis, and other Midwestern cities, remains to be seen. Without the ability to bargain collectively, unions may indeed be fatally weakened.

So, you could argue that the wave of attacks by conservative governors will gut public-sector unions in those states, if not wipe them out entirely.

On the other hand, those same efforts have mobilized startling numbers of ordinary citizens, young and old, educated and not, in a way none of us have seen since perhaps the 1930s. I know this for a fact. I was there in Madison and watched hundreds of thousands of protesters brave the numbing cold while jamming the streets to demand that Governor Walker back down. The events in Madison radicalized many young people who kept the flame of protest burning with their live-ins inside the Wisconsin State Capitol.

What remains to be seen is whether the new spark lit by the Republican Party's latest crusade against unions can in some way fill the space left by those unions which, nationwide, stare down their own demise.

"Take the Unions Out at the Knees"
Madison was the beginning. When Scott Walker threatened to use the Wisconsin National Guard to quell a backlash in response to his draconian "budget repair bill," it set off a month of protests. Almost as soon as Madison erupted, Ohio Republican Governor John Kasich, a former executive at Lehman Brothers, unveiled a union-crushing bill of his own, known as Senate Bill 5. Kasich sought even more power to curb unions than Walker, proposing to eliminate bargaining rights for all public-sector unions -- Walker's exempts firefighters and cops -- and even outlaw strikes by public workers.

Romney Can't Get The Republican Nomination -- He's Halfway Sane

[Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich, Bachmann, Barbour, Caine, Bolton, Santorum, Trump -- my God, what a crew! The only credible and sane candidate the Republicans have got is Romney, but he won't pass the Tea Party test.]

Former Romney Adviser Jonathan Gruber: Without RomneyCare, We Wouldn’t Have ObamaCare

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has attempted to distance his statewide health care plan from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as he positions himself for the 2012 presidential primaries.

But MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, who advised both Romney and President Obama on their health care reform plans, told the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin today that without Romney’s plan (and more specifically, that plan’s individual mandate) President Obama never could have gotten his plan through Congress:

He says that as the federal health care plan emerged, the Massachusetts plan was “widely discussed.” [...]

In his opinion, without the Massachusetts plan the federal individual mandate plan wouldn’t have garnered acceptance and gotten through. “It was huge,” Gruber says, to have the Massachusetts plan to point to. And without it, he thinks “it’s likely” ObamaCare wouldn’t have become law.

While there was extensive debate about the individual mandate, Gruber said, its inclusion was ultimately Romney’s decision, and the former governor was the plan’s biggest “champion.” Gruber is also skeptical of the argument Romney now makes, that the Massachusetts reform is different because it is a state-controlled plan. Gruber said that it is incorrect to say, “Massachusetts did it on its own,” since it received federal funding to implement the proposal.

A Romney spokesperson declined to respond to Gruber’s claim, saying only that Romney is “proud of what he accomplished for Massachusetts in getting health insurance to everyone,” but that he still supports repeal of the ACA and a “state-by-state approach to health reform.”

Romney’s health care reform — particularly the individual mandate — has greatly expanded coverage in the state. Currently, 98 percent of Massachusetts residents, including 99.8 percent of children, are enrolled in a health care plan — the highest in the nation. As Gruber notes, it is both “sad” and “depressing” that Romney has to run away from that sort of an accomplishment in order to satisfy conservative primary voters.

[The fact that he enacted an excellent and successful health-care plan in Massachusetts disqualifies him with Tea Partiers.]

Ron Paul, Enigma

[Ron Paul is an interesting guy. The darling of the wingnut rights at CPAC, he still has a significant appeal to leftists. His libertarian philosophy finds a lot of leftist support when he stands up for individual rights -- like the marijuana question -- or when he decries foreign military adventures. Leftists may feel he is a kindred spirit when he opposes traditional Republican positions. But on the other hand, he proposes off-the-wall right-wing stuff like this. On balance, I'd say Ron Paul is dangerous.]

Rep. Ron Paul Argues States Can Ignore Constitution By Nullifying Federal Laws

ThinkProgress filed this report from the NICHE Homeschool Day in Des Moines, IA.

One of the most powerful lines in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech was his call for racial unity even in Alabama, a state with “its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification.” Indeed, following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, nearly every southern congressman signed the “Southern Manifesto,” which asserted that states were free to ignore federal laws and directives. Now, 48 years later, the unconstitutional idea that states can invalidate federal laws which they don’t like is making a comeback in conservative circles.

This week, the nullification camp, led by right-wing historian Thomas Woods, got a boost from a sitting congressman: Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX).

Speaking at an Iowa homeschool event, Paul told the crowd that “in principle, nullification is proper and moral and constitutional.” “That is why,” Paul declared, “I am a strong endorser of the nullification movement, that states like this should just nullify these laws”:

PAUL: The chances of us getting things changed around soon through the legislative process is not all the good. And that is why I am a strong endorser of the nullification movement, that states like this should just nullify these laws. And in principle, nullification is proper and moral and constitutional, which I believe it is, there is no reason in the world why this country can’t look at the process of, say, not only should we not belong to the United Nations, the United Nations comes down hard on us, telling us what we should do to our families and family values, education and medical care and gun rights and environmentalism. Let’s nullify what the UN tries to tell us to do as well.

Watch it:

Despite Paul’s insistence that nullification is proper and constitutional, Article 6 of the Constitution clearly states that Acts of Congress “shall be the supreme law of the land…anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” That’s why one of our founding fathers, James Madison, argued that nullification would “speedily put an end to the Union itself” by allowing federal laws to be freely ignored by states.

ThinkProgress legal expert Ian Millhiser noted that nullification isn’t just blatantly unconstitutional, it’s “nothing less than a plan to remove the word ‘United’ from the United States of America.”

Today's News From Think Progress

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has condemned the actions of the five American soldiers charged with the murder of three unarmed Afghan men. Karzai, in his first public comments on the soldiers: “They killed our youth for entertainment. They killed our elders for entertainment.”

Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) is maintaining his position that a government shutdown could be good for the country. In an interview with CBS News, Walsh said that “if we need a jolt, if we need the government shutdown for a few days for us to really get serious, I think the American people are with that.”

An Ohio House committee passed a bill that would severely limit the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions yesterday, and the legislation is expected to pass the full House today. The bill will leave “hundreds of thousands of Ohio’s families with less job security, lower wages and, in many cases, no job at all,” said Representative Dan Ramos, an Ohio Democrat.

“IBM is breaking with other American multinationals by not pushing for a corporate tax holiday,” a proposal which Republicans and their corporate backers have been pushing recently. The tech giant called a tax holiday a “distraction” from more meaningful tax reform. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has signaled it may hold a similar position.

[The tax holiday idea is apparently getting a lot of push from companies with billions of offshore money they'd like to repatriate at a token rate -- like 5%, instead of the 35% they would actually owe. Only this was tried before. In 2004, the U.S. enacted a tax holiday. The corporations used the money to multiply compensation to their executives and to intensify their efforts to export American jobs overseas. Here's a link to the Think Progress article.]

Yesterday, the House voted to terminate the Home Affordable Modification Program, the Obama administration’s program “designed to reduce mortgage payments for homeowners” in danger of foreclosure. While helping 600,000 homeowners, the program has underperformed and House Republicans said “it is a prime example of a federal program that isn’t worth the cost to taxpayers.”

In a speech on U.S. energy policy today, President Obama “will set an ambitious goal” to cut oil imports by a third over 10 years. He plans to outline four areas of focus to curb U.S. foreign oil dependence — domestic energy production, more natural gas in vehicles, car and truck efficiency, and encouraging biofuels.

Two co-founders of Park 51, the Muslim community center planned to be built blocks from Ground Zero in New York City, are considering a new project: building an interfaith cultural center to be built nearby. “Once we are ready to announce our new vision, we will talk to the property owner and see if it is the right location for us,” said co-founder Daisy Khan.

Watch This Video!

[An Indiana congressman says that if abortion laws have a loophole for women who are victims of rape or incest, women will lie; there's an emotional rebuttal from a woman who was an Indiana sex crimes investigator for six years.]

It's My Long-Held Belief That ... Oh, Wait.

[Is it something in the Arizona water?]

David Nir at Daily Kos

• AZ-Sen: Jeff Flake then:

That's the difficulty of a campaign. I mean, it's easy to just say, "Seal the border and enforce the law." What does that really mean? What does that entail? And when you're able to explain it, then they're all right. And I think for those who don't agree with my position—think that it ought to be something different—at least I think they give me a little credit for sticking with my position because I've always believed this is what we need and I continue to believe regardless of the political environment.

Jeff Flake now:

In the past I have supported a broad approach to immigration reform - increased border security coupled with a temporary worker program. I no longer do. I've been down that road, and it is a dead end. The political realities in Washington are such that a comprehensive solution is not possible, or even desirable, given the current leadership.

Tax Cuts

By Kos (Daily Kos)

"There is no evidence that perpetual tax cuts stimulate any economies. Instead, GOP-fueled cuts end up decimating the kinds of assets that do attract businesses -- an educated workforce, infrastructure, and quality of life features (like parks and cultural facilities) that attract top talent. There's a reason that places like NYC and the SF Bay Area continue to attract new businesses despite their high taxes. A top-notch business environment costs money to maintain."

Democrats Are Restricting Drilling?

"... approval rates for drilling permits are up, and industry lays idle hands on over 21 million acres of public lands."

[Republicans have been shouting lately that the administration is throttling drilling in the U.S., costing thousands of jobs.]

Only half of federal lands leased for drilling are in production.

By David O. Williams | 03.30.11 | 10:23 am (Colorado Independent)

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today released a report requested by President Barack Obama showing that two-thirds of all offshore oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico and half of all onshore leases on federal lands are not currently being used by the energy companies that purchased the leases.

In fact, the report reveals, the companies not only aren’t producing any oil and gas on the leases, they also aren’t currently conducting any exploration. The report is part of the administration’s attempt to counteract Republican accusations that Salazar, a former Democratic senator from Colorado, has implemented too many environmental restrictions on domestic oil and gas drilling and is costing the country jobs.

“We continue to support safe and responsible domestic energy production, and as this report shows, millions of acres that have already been leased to industry for oil and gas production sit idle,” Salazar said in a release.

“These are resources that belong to the American people, and they expect those supplies to be developed in a timely and responsible manner and with a fair return to taxpayers. As we continue to offer new areas onshore and offshore for leasing, as we have done over the last two years, we will also be exploring ways to provide incentives to companies to bring production online quickly and safely.”

In Colorado and neighboring Utah, states with between 1 million and 5 million federal lease acres, only 32 percent and 22 percent of those acres, respectively, are currently being used for oil and gas production.

In Wyoming and New Mexico, both states with more than 5 million federal lease acres, only 33 percent and 69 percent of those acres, respectively, are being used for oil and gas production.

Immelt's GE Pays No Taxes, Doubles His Compensation

I knew that Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric CEO, was recently appointed as the head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competiveness. And I knew that there's a lot of outrage recently about the fact that GE paid no American taxes in 2010. What I didn't know was that Immelt’s compensation doubled.

GE has also been a leader in greatly expanding its business all over the world while cutting American jobs.

Send A Message To Obama (Literally)

Here's a link to send an email to President Obama.

[Politicians really do pay attention to letters they receive. They figure that for every person who makes the effort to send a letter (which, admittedly, takes more effort and commitment than clicking on an email link), there are 100 people who feel the same way but don't express themselves.]

And here's what you'll see:

Contact the White House

President Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible administration in American history. To send questions, comments, concerns, or well-wishes to the President or his staff, please use the form below.

Required

Stay Connected

Inside the White House: Letters to the President

watch the video

You can also call or write to the President:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Phone Numbers

Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461

TTY/TDD

Comments: 202-456-6213
Visitors Office: 202-456-2121

Gifts & Items Sent to the White House

For security reasons, please do not send perishable gifts -- such as food, liquids or flowers -- to the White House. The White House is unable to accept cash, checks, bonds, gift certificates, foreign currency, or other monetary equivalents. Additionally, items sent to the White House are often significantly delayed and can be irreparably harmed during the security screening process. Therefore, please do not send items of personal importance, such as family photographs, because items may not be returned.

If you are an organization submitting comments on behalf of your membership, please use our Organization Contact Form.

Darrell Issa, worth $164 million, needs help from Congress

[Here's a link to the thinkprogress article.

The sad part is that this probably won't even get any traction or media attention: This kind of thing is just business as usual.]

Crooks are Crooks

by digby (at Hullabaloo)

Oh my goodness, I think someone's going to have to convene an investigative hearing:

ThinkProgress has discovered more troubling evidence that Issa may have blended his work as a lawmaker with his own business empire. After founding a successful car alarm company, Issa invested his fortune in a sprawling network of real estate companies with holdings throughout his district. One of Issa’s most valuable properties, a medical office building at 2067 West Vista Way in Vista, California, is called the Vista Medical Center, and was purchased in 2008 for $16.6 million. Described as “a long-term investment,” the property was bought by a company called Viper LLC, a business entity operated by Issa’s family that Issa has up to a $25 million dollar stake in.

Around the same time Issa made the Vista Medical Center purchase, the congressman began requesting millions of dollars worth of earmarks to widen and improve the highway adjacent to the building. In 2008, he requested $2 million to expand West Vista Way, the road in front of his “long-term investment,” but only received $245,000 from the government. The next year, Issa made another earmark request for improving the West Vista Way highway next to his building. He earmarked another $570,000, bringing his total to $815,000, to add parking lots, widen the road, add bus stops, improve the sewer system, and other utility work.

One of the things I love best about the Republicans is their remarkable ability to embody everything they purport to hate. It's like a mass personality disorder.

Issa is, and was, a crook. It's his defining characteristic. Why anyone thought it was good idea to put him in charge of an investigative committee is anyone's guess. (Maybe they just didn't have anyone better?)

Monday, March 28, 2011

War Is A Many-Splendored Thing: U.S. Army Murder Squad

[Here's a link to a previous post on this subject]

Rolling Stone
The Kill Team
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses -– and how their officers failed to stop them.

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging "savages" and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

Bravo Company had been stationed in the area since summer, struggling, with little success, to root out the Taliban and establish an American presence in one of the most violent and lawless regions of the country. On the morning of January 15th, the company's 3rd Platoon – part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington – left the mini-metropolis of tents and trailers at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in a convoy of armored Stryker troop carriers. The massive, eight-wheeled trucks surged across wide, vacant stretches of desert, until they came to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated farming village tucked away behind a few poppy fields.

To provide perimeter security, the soldiers parked the Strykers at the outskirts of the settlement, which was nothing more than a warren of mud-and-straw compounds. Then they set out on foot. Local villagers were suspected of supporting the Taliban, providing a safe haven for strikes against U.S. troops. But as the soldiers of 3rd Platoon walked through the alleys of La Mohammad Kalay, they saw no armed fighters, no evidence of enemy positions. Instead, they were greeted by a frustratingly familiar sight: destitute Afghan farmers living without electricity or running water; bearded men with poor teeth in tattered traditional clothes; young kids eager for candy and money. It was impossible to tell which, if any, of the villagers were sympathetic to the Taliban. The insurgents, for their part, preferred to stay hidden from American troops, striking from a distance with IEDs.

While the officers of 3rd Platoon peeled off to talk to a village elder inside a compound, two soldiers walked away from the unit until they reached the far edge of the village. There, in a nearby poppy field, they began looking for someone to kill. "The general consensus was, if we are going to do something that fucking crazy, no one wanted anybody around to witness it," one of the men later told Army investigators.

The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that time of year. The two soldiers, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky shoots. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. But the farmer was the only Afghan in sight. With no one around to witness, the timing was right. And just like that, they picked him for execution.

He was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. Not much younger than they were: Morlock was 21, Holmes was 19. His name, they would later learn, was Gul Mudin, a common name in Afghanistan. He was wearing a little cap and a Western-style green jacket. He held nothing in his hand that could be interpreted as a weapon, not even a shovel. The expression on his face was welcoming. "He was not a threat," Morlock later confessed.

Morlock and Holmes called to him in Pashto as he walked toward them, ordering him to stop. The boy did as he was told. He stood still.

The soldiers knelt down behind a mud-brick wall. Then Morlock tossed a grenade toward Mudin, using the wall as cover. As the grenade exploded, he and Holmes opened fire, shooting the boy repeatedly at close range with an M4 carbine and a machine gun.

One Year Ago: How the 'Era of WikiLeaks' Began

Posted: 03/28/11 10:31 AM ET,

Huffington Post

Exactly one year ago this week, Julian Assange and a crew of WikiLeaks volunteers -- including Birgitta Jonsdottir, who has since become a critic -- assembled in Reykjavik, Iceland, to edit and add subtitles to a video of a 2007 incident in Baghdad that Assange himself would title, "Collateral Murder."

At that point, WikiLeaks and Assange were far from household words in the U.S., despite three years of leaks that intermittently gained notice. Of course, everything has changed since.

A U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Pvc. Bradley Manning was arrested within weeks and eventually charged with leaking the video, and so much more that would put WikiLeaks in the headlines worldwide to this day: classified documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and then "Cablegate." Manning now is incarcerated in near-solitary conditions at the Quantico base in Virginia. He's the subject of my new book and e-book, Bradley Manning: Truth and Consequences, which also explores the "Collateral Murder" leak.

A little more than a year ago, intrigued by WikiLeaks' activities, New Yorker writer Raffi Khatchadourian e-mailed Assange, and then chatted with him on the the phone, establishing a certain level of trust. Assange mentioned the video, in somewhat vague terms. The writer knew it would make a splash if released. He'd wanted to write about WikiLeaks anyway and so, with an okay from his editor, he flew off to frigid Reykjavik, Iceland, in late March. Khatchadourian, author of The Kill Company (on Operation Iron Triangle in Iraq) and a profile of Adam Gadahn (an American who joined Al Qaeda), must have seemed to Assange like a good man for this job.

"Our Civilization Is On The Edge Of A Systemic Breakdown"

["...we're headed for a seriously dark dystopia if we don't turn civilization as we know it around, and fast. A catastrophic confluence of food and water shortages, overpopulation and pollution, collapsed governments and communities and more natural disasters than Roland Emmerich can dream up await us on the other side of Plan A ..."]

Time for Plan B: Our Civilization Is on the Edge of a Systemic Breakdown

Lester Brown talks about whether our civilization can survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states.

March 26, 2011 |

"How many failing states before we have a failing global civilization?" asks environmental pioneer Lester Brown in Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, premiering March 30 on PBS as part of its continuing Journey to Planet Earth series. It's a Gordian knot of a question with no simple answer and nothing but complex, demanding solutions, fearsomely put forth as the fate of humanity totters in the balance.

Based on Brown's book of the same name, Plan B is likely the scariest horror film that was ever disguised as a documentary, despite its calm narration from superstar Matt Damon. That's because the acclaimed environmentalist has deeply studied the variety of environmental and geopolitical tipping points we are fast approaching, and found that we're headed for a seriously dark dystopia if we don't turn civilization as we know it around, and fast. A catastrophic confluence of food and water shortages, overpopulation and pollution, collapsed governments and communities and more natural disasters than Roland Emmerich can dream up await us on the other side of Plan A, which Brown calls "business of usual."

"Environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the planet is going to be around for some time to come," Brown told AlterNet by phone from his Washington D.C. office at the Earth Policy Institute, which he founded at the turn of the century after decades of public and private service in the name of sustainability. "The question is will civilization as we know it be around for some time to come? Can it survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states? These are the real threats to our security now, but we're not responding to them."

In a sense, we are without knowing it. Japan's bungled response to a mounting nuclear crisis, thanks to one of Earth’s most destabilizing earthquakes and tsunamis, has in a cosmological eyeblink reset the entire world's nuclear ambition. Uprisings in hotspots like Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and more, compounded by America's continuing quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, are squarely knitting together civilization's crappy experiments like preemptive war, biofuels and light-speed financial stratagems into one titanic mess that is demanding new theories of cleanup.

It's no longer intellectually feasible to consider any of these events as separate, because they, like the warming climate, are interconnected nightmares that are keeping us more awake than ever, whether we like it or not. And no matter how we spin them, Plan B argues, we're eventually all going to have to work together to survive what is without a doubt an existential crisis of historical proportions. Only the depth and vigor of our mutual efforts and understanding separate us and every other failed civilization in the planet's incomprehensibly expansive history.

But after 77 years spent on Earth, most of them trying to educate its inhabitants on the dangers of taking its astronomically singular bounty for granted, the soft-spoken Brown remains a cautious optimist. That's a comforting sign for those of us at our wits' end and wondering when the rest of civilization will get its ass in gear to forestall what passes for a collective execution.

"Change comes very quickly and unexpectedly sometimes," Brown said. "The question is whether we can turn things around quickly enough. But I don't think we have a lot of time. Time is our scarcest resource."

I picked Brown's deeply experienced brain on geopolitical and environmental change, Japan's nuclear crisis, China's powerhouse green economy, food and water scarcity, technological bandaids like desalination and lab-grown meat and much more. Taken together with Plan B's accessible yet apocalyptic programming, it points the way forward for a civilization on the edge of a systemic breakdown.

Interview after the jump

The Power Of The National Security State

[This is a transcription of a long, thoughtful speech by Glenn Greenwald about the principles and ethics of journalism, the future of free speech on the Internet, the power of the National Security State in the U.S. and how would-be whistleblowers are intimidated, especially as it all relates to Wikileaks.]

"Greenwald: I actually do believe that the battle over Wikileaks will easily be one of the most politically consequential conflicts of our generation, if not THE most politically consequential. I think that we're just at the very incipient stages of this conflict, and that how it plays out is still very much still to be determined. I think what's at stake is whether or not the secrecy regime that is the linchpin for how the American government functions will continue to be invulnerable and impenetrable or whether it will start to be meaningfully breached. And I also think that Internet freedom, the ability to use the Internet for what has always been its ultimate promise, which is to have citizens band together in a way that no longer needs large corporate and institutional resources, to subvert and undermine the most powerful factions, to provide a counterweight to them, whether that Internet freedom will be preserved."

Glenn Greenwald: How the US Government Strikes Fear in Its Own Citizens and People Around the World

In a recent speech, Glenn Greenwald discussed how the government and media treatment of WikiLeaks reveals a total lack of respect for the law and government transparency.

March 21, 2011 - AlterNet

[AlterNet Editor's note: The following is a transcript of a speech that Constitutional lawyer and Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald delivered for the Lannan Foundation on March 8. The speech was transcribed by the blog Contumacious.]

I've been speaking more at events like this and at various college campuses and the like over the last year. And one of the things that typically happens before the event is that there's a lot of time and mental energy spent on figuring out what the topic of the speech is going to be and what the title is going to be. The speaker and the sponsors of the event go back and forth over what will be an interesting topic, what's timely, what will be interesting to people. And then the title gets worked on and changed and edited. I have several speeches planned over the course of the next month, and there are all different topics and titles that were all worked out as part of this arduous process. What I found is that, as much time and energy that's spent on that process, it actually ends up being completely irrelevant, because I find that no matter what the topic is, I keep speaking about the same set of issues, no matter what the title is.

The reason why that happens is not because I have some monomaniacal obsession with a handful of issues I can't pull myself away from no matter what the topic is. That may be true, but that's not actually the reason. The reason is because political controversies and political issues never take place in isolation. They're always part of some broader framework that drives political outcomes, and that determines how political power is exercised. And so it doesn't really matter which specific topic or which specific controversy of the day you want to discuss; the reality is, you can't really meaningfully discuss any of them without examining all the forces that shape political culture and that shape how political outcomes are determined. So in order to talk about any issue, you end up speaking about these same, broad themes that are shaping, and I think plaguing, the political discourse in the United States.

This is something that I first realized when I started writing about politics in late 2005. One of the very first topics on which I focused was the scandal about the Bush administration eavesdropping on American citizens without the warrants required by law. This was first exposed by the NYT in December of 2005, so it happened around six weeks after I began writing about politics. I had this very naïve idea that this was going to be avery straightforward and simple political controversy. The reason I thought that, in my naiveté, was because what the Bush administration got caught doing [eavesdropping on Americans without warrants from the FISA court] is as clear as could possibly be a felony under American law. You can actually look at the criminal law that existed since 1978, when FISA was enacted. It says that doing exactly what the Bush administration got caught doing is a felony in the U.S., just like robbing a bank, or extortion, or murder, and that it's punishable by a prison term of five years or a $10,000 fine for each offense.

The report that the NYT published was that there were at least hundreds and probably thousands of instances where American citizens were eavesdropped on illegally and in violation of the law. So I thought that this was going to be a fairly straightforward controversy, because I had this idea that if you get caught committing a felony, and the NYT writes and reports on that, and everybody's talking about that, that that's actually going to be a really bad thing for the person who got caught doing that. I know it was really naïve. I'm actually embarrassed to admit that I thought that, but that really was what I thought at the time. I also thought that basically everybody would be in agreement that that was a really bad thing to do....that thing that the law said for 30 years was a felony and punishable by a prison term and a large fine. As it turned out (and I realized this fairly quickly), none of that actually happened. It wasn't a really bad thing for the people who got caught committing that felony.

Not only did everyone not agree that that was a bad thing, very few people actually agreed that that was a very bad thing. So what I thought I was going to be able to do was to take this issue and write very legalistically about it and demonstrate that what the Bush administration had done was a crime; that it was a felony under the statute. and that the legal defenses for it that they had raised were frivolous and baseless, and that would be the end of the story. Crime committed, investigation commenced, punishment ensues. So what immediately happened, when I realized that none of that was really going on, of course then the question became: Why? Why was my expectation about what would happen so radically different than what in fact happened?

Tea Party Influenced By Radical Mormon Right-Wingers

[Glenn Beck and the warped philosophy of John Birch Society's Cleon Skousen]

The Bizarre Religious Myths Mormon Right-Wingers Are Pushing on Tea Partiers -- With Glenn Beck's Help

With the rise of the right, the National Center for Constitutional Studies' bizarre version of U.S. history is gaining adherents.

March 22, 2011 |

FAIRMONT, W. Va. — One fine Saturday morning last year, around 60 mostly middle-aged conservatives trickled onto the otherwise deserted campus of Fairmont State University. Clutching notebooks and coffee cups, they looked like groggy Continuing Ed students as they took seats in a modern lecture hall on the ground floor of the school's engineering building. In a sense, they were Continuing Ed students. The room had been booked months in advance for a one-day, intro-level history and civics seminar entitled, "The Making of America."

But this was no ordinary summer school. Randall McNeely, the seminar's kindly, awkward, and heavy-set instructor, held no advanced degree and made no claims to being a scholar of any kind. He was, rather, a product of rote training in a religious and apocalyptic interpretation of American history that has roots in the racist right of the last century. His students for the day had learned about the class not in the Fairmont State summer catalog, but from the website of an obscure nonprofit run by fringe Mormons. Founded as the Freeman Institute in Provo, Utah, in 1971, the outfit now goes by the name National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCSS), and works out of a remote farmhouse in Malta, Idaho (population 177).

This humble base of operations, however, constrains neither the outfit's national ambitions nor its missionary zeal. The NCCS has been touring the country and propagating its ultraconservative Mormon message for nearly four decades. Yet its message has never been in greater demand than in 2010. Since the rise of the Tea Party circuit, the all-volunteer NCCS has experienced exploding interest from Tea Party-affiliated groups such as the 9.12 Project and the Tea Party Patriots. On any given Saturday, several of nearly 20 "Making of America" lecturers are giving seminars across the country in spaces like the rented classroom in Fairmont, with $10 tickets and NCCS book sales paying for their travel and expenses.

Along with a busier schedule, the NCCS also has a growing list of allies. In the media, it has found a powerful voice in the form of Fox News' Glenn Beck, who is a Mormon himself and has used his pulpit to advocate for NCCS books and ideas. Through Beck's sustained and energetic advocacy, once-forgotten NCCS tracts of Mormon-flavored pseudo-history such as The 5,000 Year Leap have become unlikely online bestsellers. As a result, traveling volunteer NCCS lecturers like McNeely today have no shortage of students eager to learn his version of "truth."

"In our time together, we're going to learn the truth about American history and what our government is supposed to do—and not do," said McNeely, after opening the August seminar in Fairmont with a Christian prayer and a patriotic song of his own authorship. "We're going to learn sound principles. Once we have possession of these sound principles, we can solve nearly every problem in America, the way the Founders would have liked."

As the morning progressed, it became clear that the NCCS worldview and program were based on three major pillars: understanding the divine guidance that has allowed the United States to thrive; rejecting the tyrannical, implicitly sinful, nature of the modern federal government; and preparing for a divine reckoning that will bring down America's government and possibly tear society as we know it asunder, thus allowing those with sound principles — i.e., godly NCCS graduates — to rebuild the republic along "sounder," more pious lines.

Senators Grassley and Hatch: They were for a health-care mandate before they opposed it

Back in 1993, Clinton Democrats proposed a health-care reform bill. Republican Senators Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) made a counteroffer, a competing bill -- which called for an individal mandate. (The individual mandate makes it compulsory that everyone buy health insurance; that throws a bunch of young, healthy people into the pool to help pay for those who are more at risk -- the elderly, infants, people with chronic health problems.)
Today, with the Tea Party screaming that the individual mandate is unconstitutional and an invasion of the individual's personal liberty, they think differently.

Here's Rachel Maddow on the subject:

Grassley: "If it was unconstitutional today, it was unconstitutional in 1993, but I don't think anybody gave it much thought" back then.

Hatch: "Back on Hillary-care they had a mandate in there. I didn't realize it, I didn't pay attention to it. [No, no, Senator. I don't know whether "Hillary-care" had a mandate or not, but we're not talking about the Democrats' plan; we're talking about the one that you and Grassley proposed. "I didn't realize it, I didn't pay attention to it"? Senator, you wrote the proposal.] We were trying to defeat Hillary-care. The more I studied since then, the more I've looked at it, the more I've come to the conclusion it would be unconstitutional to force people to buy something they don't want to buy."

Oh, by the way, Britt Hume on Fox News said that if only the Democrats had included some Republican ideas in the health-care bill, it wouldn't have been so adamantly opposed. He's lying. In the first place, the Republican strategy was to stonewall the bill completely, rather than negotiate to try to improve it; even so, more than a few Republican suggestions were in fact included in the bill. I bring this up because in the same interview quoted above, Grassley said it was a bad bill "even though it's got a lot of good things," even "a lot of things that I wrote."

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