April 2008 archive

Apr 07 2008

EENR For Progress: Stand with Our Military Families and Our Veterans

[cross-posted from EENR blog]

“I believe in a sacred contract between our country and America’s veterans and military families. We must stand by those who stand by us. When our service men and women sacrifice so much to defend our freedom and secure peace around the world, we have a moral obligation to take care of them and their families.” – John Edwards

Yes, I know, John Edwards is not in the race for president any longer. But that does not diminish the power of his efforts to ensure that we treat our military with the respect they deserve — the active military and their families and the veterans.

Apr 07 2008

La Cumbia de la Doctrina Bush w/poll

Original article, subtitled Colombia Kills Four Mexican Students in Ecuador Bombing, by John Ross via Counterpunch.com.

As we find out more about the bombing of the FARC base in Ecuador, it becomes clear that we weren’t being told the whole truth about the situation.  Surprised, aren’t you?

Apr 07 2008

Midnight Thought on the Arc of the Sun (6 April 08)

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for the Arc of the Sun (6 April 08),

in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by kos,

though to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t know it.

The Coming Revolution in Africa, is how G. Pascal Zachary titles his piece for the Wilson Quarterly (Winter 2008, Vol. XXXII, no. 1, pp. 50-66.{1}) …

… and yes, it takes a journalist to see the coming Revolution clearly, since so much of the so-called “development” profession has a conflict of interest. As Pascal notes well into his piece:

Even as a steady diet of stories about “urgent” food crises in Africa dominated public discussion, these successes became impossible to ignore. In 2004, the International Food and Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) published a series of papers titled “Successes in African Agriculture”. The papers both reflected and provoked a revolution in thinking about African farming. They also ended a long conspiracy of silence among aid agencies and professional Africanists. For decades the “food mafia,” led by the World Food program and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, had refused to acknowledge any good news about African farming out of fear that evidence of bright spots would reduce the flow of charitable donations to the UN’s massive “famine” bureaucracy, designed to feed the hungry.

Apr 07 2008

The Slow Destruction of the US Embassy in Baghdad

A rain of mortars and artillery rockets has commenced on the Green Zone, the headquarters of the US occupation authorities in Iraq. Rumors have circulated that US embassy personnel have withdrawn from the Green Zone to undisclosed locations. What is now in question is the fate of the colossal, newly-constructed US embassy compound. The half-billion-dollar complex of massive buildings has never been fully occupied, because of numerous construction flaws, but there is now a larger issue.

How well does a complex of office buildings hold up under daily mortar and rocket fire? Although the buildings are heavily reinforced, all structures have weak points. The air conditioning, water, and electrical systems are all potentially vulnerable to damage or disruption through incoming rocket fire. The insurgent rockets are inaccurate, but the embassy complex is a huge target. Day by day, it is likely that serious damage is being done. Unless the rockets are stopped, the embassy is doomed. Even if it is not physically destroyed, if the grounds of the embassy become so dangerous that vehicles and helicopters cannot safely approach it, the embassy becomes useless, and is functionally nullified.

America made a huge error is constructing this enormous symbol of occupation power in the heart of Baghdad. It was like putting up a huge “come and get us” sign to the insurgents. Now Al Sadr’s insurgents are pounding away, and the dearth of news coverage of damage in the Green Zone suggests that things are not going well there.  

Apr 07 2008

Help Bury a Blogger

A few days ago, I posted on the untimely death one of our blogging brethren, New Orleans native  Dr. Ashley Morris

For those of you unfamiliar with Ashley’s work, here is, IMHO, the finest rant I have ever read. He posted this the November after Katrina hit New Orleans. It has become something of a legend on the Gulf Coast, and it is now known simply as FYYFF:

   

Apr 07 2008

Updated: Tibet, and Panic In The Streets of London

Londoners awoke on a lazy, snowy Sunday morning to images of protest flooding their television screens, including one moment when a protester was almost successful in dousing the Olympic flame as it was carried by British celebrity Konnie Huq:

Apr 07 2008

Pony Party: Sunday music retrospective

Eurythmics



Sweet Dreams

Apr 06 2008

Obama’s Ultimate Test: The Sequel

Candidates for the Presidency of the United States raise hundreds of millions of dollars and compete in primaries and caucuses in state after state in order to win convention delegates.  They engage in a series of nationally televised debates, appear on political programs like Meet the Press and Hardball, and strive to demonstrate to America and the world in the early months of presidential election years that they are ready to take their campaigns to the next level.  

Obama’s campaign strategists knew all of these campaign events were relatively important, but realized they were just preliminaries to the supreme test of leadership that awaited him.  They knew by early April that the time had come to get serious, that the time had come to launch the most crucial phase of Obama’s presidential campaign, that the time had come for Obama to go where the votes are, to go to the only place he could go in all of America to face that supreme test of leadership.  

Grand Forks, North Dakota.  

I knew that too, so I went here:

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My brother Craig, a lifelong Republican, joined me as I waited in line.  That line kept getting longer, and longer, and longer . . .

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17,000 Americans came from small towns all across North Dakota and Minnesota to see the next President of the United States.  They came from farms throughout the Red River Valley, they came from the colleges and universities of the Upper Midwest, they came from Native American reservations, from the Grand Forks Air Force Base, from the VA Hospital in Fargo, from homes and schools and churches in this country’s heartland, where Americans still believe in decency and justice and democracy.  

These men and women and children who came to see and hear Barack Obama, who stood in line for hours on this spring day in this eighth year of BushCo fascism don’t want to see less jobs and more wars.  They’re sick and tired of less jobs and more wars, of lies and torture and Katrinas, of Enrons and Bear Stearns and Deciders, of endless coverups and endless betrayal.  They want to believe in America again, they want to be heard in Washington D.C. again, they want their country back, and it looked to me like they are damn well ready to take it back.        

         

Apr 06 2008

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

Four Star Final

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 22 killed in Sadr City clashes

By SLOBODAN LEKIC, Associated Press Writer

1 hour, 23 minutes ago

BAGHDAD – Iraqi troops backed by U.S. forces battled Shiite fighters in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood in clashes that killed 22 people and wounded dozens despite a cease-fire between the government and the militia, officials said Sunday.

To the north, police said gunmen seized 42 students off a bus near the city of Mosul – al-Qaida’s last major urban stronghold – but later released them unharmed.

The U.S. military said that fighting broke out overnight in Sadr City, a stronghold of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s militants. Officials at two local hospitals said 22 people were killed and 92 wounded. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, did not say whether the casualties were civilians or fighters. U.S. and Iraqi forces released no information about the casualties.

A police officer said that a U.S. Stryker armored personnel carrier was damaged in the fighting, which continued with sporadic exchanges of fire through Sunday morning.

Two armored Humvee vehicles and two trucks belonging to the Iraqi army were also destroyed, said the officer, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

How about that “Surge Success” Betrayus?

Apr 06 2008

Somehow This Madness Must End

I was born at the tail end of 1951.  My father was a soldier who served in WWII and Korea.  His brother came back from Korea so psychologically devastated that he never recovered.  He lived nearly fifty of his seventy years haunted by the horror of what he witnessed in the Korean War.  He was not alone.  Every war produces more casualties than are accounted for in the body counts.  My uncle died just a few years ago but it was the Korean War that killed him.  

This-madness-must-end

Apr 06 2008

Café Discovery

Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better to have done worse in school.  If I had had some of my work rejected, maybe it wouldn’t have affected me the way it has as an adult.

But it never was rejected, all the way through college.  Whenever I tried, I did well.  Flunking out of Penn wasn’t the result of not doing good work.  It was the result of not working because I had already given up…on life.

So anyway, as I mentioned in Friday’s MitM, my birthday was followed the next day by a rejection form letter from Calyx press.  That was a downer.  They didn’t apparently think any of my six poems were suitable for their Journal.  They assured me it wasn’t just one person who thought so, but at least two readers thought they were not worthy.

That made me feel better, do you think?

Apr 06 2008

News Of A Kidnapping

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

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Ingrid Betancourt In Captivity (11/30/07)

Ingrid Betancourt, while campaigning for the presidency of Colombia, was kidnapped by FARC on February 23, 2002.  More than six years later, she remains a hostage somewhere in Colombia.  She suffers from hepatitis B and leishmaniasis, a skin disease caused by insect bites.  She is also rumored to be losing the will to live. She is the public face of kidnapping in Colombia.  She is the most famous of hundreds of hostages.  Unlike most of the hostages, she has ties outside the country.

Please join me in the selva.

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