May 20, 2009 archive

Lindsey Graham Debates Himself On Torture

ANP: Senator Lindsey Graham was a passionate critic of the Bush Justice attorneys during this past summer’s Armed Services Committee hearings on interrogation.

Lately, however, Graham seems to have had second thoughts on the matter. At a recent Judiciary subcommittee hearing investigating the torture memos, Graham mounted a feisty defense of Jay Bybee, John Yoo and the lawyers who provided legal cover for detainee abuse.

This performance sent ANP producer Mike Fritz back to the ANP archives to confirm that this was indeed the same Lindsey Graham we remembered from the summer, and sure enough, it was. As this video reveals, same tie – different message.



ANP/Real News Network – May 20, 2009

Lindsey Graham debates himself on detainee torture

Sen. Graham: “The Geneva Convention did not apply until 2006

Show The Dog Some Love

… and you don’t even have to open your wallet. Just a little blog love.

Just go show your support for The Dog for a NN09 Scholarship

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Something The Dog Said

has submitted for a

Netroots Nation ’09 Scholarship

and hopes to go to Pittsburgh

for the Conference this summer.

He could really use some “public support”

in the way of votes

to help get him there.

It’s so easy.

Dick Cheney in Hell




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Hot, Hot, Hot…

Racism and Railroads–The US Experience and Israel’s

It’s difficult to track the crimes of the Israeli state and Zionism against the Palestinian people. I don’t mean hard to keep count of, true though that may be, but painful. It hurts to keep focusing on them, because they are so unrelenting–another olive grove bulldozed, another protester shot in the head with a tear gas canister, another bombing raid on Gaza, another house demolished.

Sometimes, though, a small outrage jumps out at me and I feel I have to do something, even if it’s just share my anger.

The trigger for this piece is a new policy initiated by Israel Railways. In March, 2009, management moved to lay off 150 Israeli Arabs who worked as guards, monitoring and maintaining railroad crossings. A new policy was put in place–only those with permits to carry weapons could hold the job.

And only veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces, in which few Arabs serve. get these permits. In fact, management stated explicitly that the program is designed to give employment to young veterans in Israel’s shaky economy. The workers have a case before the Labor Board there, but Israel Railways has already started hiring for their positions.

I realized immediately why I grew so angry. This is a direct parallel to what happened to Black railroad workers again and again in the years from the civil war to the victory of the modern civil rights movement.

The issue was the fireman’s job, the backbreaking and filthy job of shoveling coal into the engines of old steam locomotives. Think of Blind Willie McTell, “Statesboro Blues”:

Big Eighty left Savannah, Lord, and did not stop

You ought to saw that colored fireman when he got that boiler hot.

Or the old country tune “Wreck of the Old 97”:

So he turned and he said to his Black greasy fireman

“Shovel on a little more coal…”

But when the economy got real bad, suddenly the “Black man’s jobs” started looking pretty good to Southern whites. In 1911, for instance, 10 Black railroad workers were shot on the New Orleans & Texas Pacific line because the railroad gave them equal seniority with whites. Climbing on the locomotives to pull the spout down from the water tower and position it to refill the boiler, they were sitting ducks for snipers.

In the Great Depression of the ’30s, the same thing happened again. A deadly one-sided war took place, with the all-white unions of the Railroad Brotherhoods complicit in the terror when they weren’t actually organizing it. On the Mississippi division of the Illinois Central from 1932 to 1933, Frank Kincaid, Ed Cole, Aaron Williams, Wilburn Anderson, Frank Johnson and Will Harvey were shotgunned to death. Elsewhere, mob action by “concerned citizens” living along the railroad lines stopped trains and savaged Black firemen and the few white railroad workers who took their backs. The companies filled these sudden “vacancies” with white workers.

Israel’s crimes draw a lot of comparisons. We talk about the “apartheid wall.” David Rovics, in an essay reprinted at Fire on the Mountain, drew a very careful but pointed set of connections with the Nazi regime in Germany. Well, by me, these folks are today’s segregationists, white supremacists, KKK, and they should be understood and dealt with as such.

Reposted from Fire on the Mountain.

Wednesday Morning Science Supplement

Wednesday Morning Science Supplement is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Science

1 Turkey blamed for looming crop ‘disaster’ in Iraq

by Jacques Clement, AFP

Wed May 20, 2:45 am ET

BAGHDAD (AFP) – Iraq faces an agricultural “disaster” this summer if Turkey continues to retain waters from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which have sustained Iraqi agriculture for millennia, experts say.

The controversy over the sharing of the mighty rivers at the root of Iraq’s ancient name of Mesopotamia — meaning “between the rivers” in Greek — is almost as old as the country itself.

But for Baghdad, the current shortage demands an urgent response from Turkey.

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

The comprehension of self, that is the Beyond of all dharmas.

–Siddhartha Gautama, The Questions of Suvikrantavikramin

Phenomena III: delving


Film at 11

Froth

Deep down below

past even the words

are ideas and concepts

normally unthought

except by the weird

unkempt minds

of those who dare

to be different

Whipped creaminess

of dangerous notions,

syllables expressed

too rarely

and more seldom heard,

whizzes by faster

than can normally

be sensed

Grabbing on

to a possibility

I was taken downward

further than

imagination

could conceive

There is truth here

There is more

wherever I look

And who wanted

to be normal

anyway

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–December 28, 2007

Late Night Karaoke

Space Shot

Edward Kennedy Should Be Our Senate Majority Leader

With the wonderful news that Senator Kennedy’s cancer is in full remission and with the disgraceful spewing of Republican talking points I think it is time Harry Reid stepped down from Majority Leader (or forced down) and allow our Liberal Lion, my Senator one last roar.

As Majority Leader of the United States Senate.

This is the man who needs to be in the Senate directing the Health Care reform we all need.

This a man not afraid to stand up to Republicans UNLIKE our cowardly lion Senator Reid.

This is a man who was unafraid to stand up to the Clinton “inevitable” machine and endorse what seemed to be a long shot in Barack Obama.

Lets reward that courage and demand Harry Reid step down for his spineless spewing of Republican talking points (over and over again) and it give the man who is a true Champion of the Progressive movement one last moment of glory as we remake America.

Edward M. Kennedy

Promote Dialogue on Healthcare Reform, Now

based on a diary at ProgressiveBlue.com

DonkeyKickingI have to admit to being more than a little disconnected since January; life, a new and hectic job, and so many people putting words and expectations into and onto the new Administration without looking at what was actually said or not during the campaign.  The life and job are all good; for an old political dog like myself, the politics have been a little too deja vu.  After 4 months of increased disinterest, I’m starting to think maybe it’s time to come out of this funk.

So, when Darcy Burner took the Executive Director position at the newly renamed ProgressiveCongress.org, I thought “it’s only a matter of time before she starts connecting people to the folks on the Hill.”  And sure enough, that’s exactly what she has planned.  Follow me below to find out how and when, and why I think this could be the start of something really good.

War torn nation has vastly more mineral wealth than previously thought!!

Wow.  I’m sure this can only be good news for the impoverished, innocent, and war-torn people of Afghanistan.  They are freaking rich, RICH!  While many think they are sleeping on dirt floors (if not already taking “dirt naps,” heh indeedy), they are instead…well let’s hear it straight from Afghanistan’s minister of mines, Mohammad Ibrahim Adel:

“We are a people who don’t have money, food or clothes. But we are sleeping on gold,” he said. The country’s iron deposits were estimated at between five to six billion tons, he added.

That’s not all.  A 2005-06 joint survey by the US Geological Survery (USGS) and NASA showed they also have considerable copper, gold, precious stones, oil, and natural gas.

Based on the USGS survey, he said, Afghanistan’s north is estimated to hold between 600 to 700 billion cubic meters of natural gas and the country has some 25 million tons of oil in four basins.

Oh boy, pass the Bean-O!  That’s a lot of gas!  I think it’s fortunate for the people of Afghanistan that we are liberating them from al Qaeda the Taliban.  For one thing, by already being there, we were in an excellent position to be invited by former UNOCAL executive Hamid Karzai to send in NASA and the USGS to determine just how minerally enhanced ordinary Afghan citizens might be.  

On the Breaking of Promises

The White House has repeatedly pledged that all US combat forces will be out of Iraq’s cities by the end of June, six weeks from now. What’s happening as the deadline approaches?

Well, what’s really happening is that the US military is drawing new maps. Take Forward Operating Base Falcon. 3000 US troops are based at this large facility built inside the city limits of Baghdad in 2003. And they will continue to be.

How can this be? A US military official told a reporter: “We and the Iraqis decided it wasn’t in the city.” (Note who comes first in that sentence.)

Oh, and Falcon will be rebranded from an FOB to a “contingency operating site.”

Reports also indicate that US troops will remain past June 30 elsewhere in Baghdad, in Mosul and in other urban areas, especially in Diyala Province. It is not yet clear whether maps will be redrawn in every case, or other flimsy excuses offered.

Public opinion in Iraq is overwhelmingly in favor of total US withdrawal as soon as possible.

Public opinion in the US is, too.

But politicians and military men, there and here, are not.

Their Parliament responded to public anger by passing a law mandating a national referendum this summer on whether US troops should be withdrawn early. There are no plans to make it happen. Our House of Representatives just voted another $96 billion to keep the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going–by a 368 to 60 margin.

The Iraq Moratorium has had a slogan from the start that cautions about waiting for those in power to do the right thing:

It’s got to stop…We’ve got to stop it.



Crossposted from the Iraq Moratorium website

Jesse Ventura Body Slams Fox & Friends Over Torture

From RawReplay today:

Ventura takes waterboarding ‘school’ to Fox & Friends

A day after talking about waterboarding on ABC’s The View, Jesse Ventura took his case for prosecuting torture to Fox News.



“You are worried about [the terrorists’] welfare,” accused Fox’s Brian Kilmeade.

“No. I’m not worried about their welfare. I’m worried about what our country stands for,” Ventura responded.

This video is from Fox’s Fox & Friends, broadcast May 19, 2009.

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