May 3, 2010 archive

A guy walks into a bar with a handful of shit,

This was so totally fitting for today, as the President gave a short on details and lackluster speech down in Louisiana, during day 12 of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill blowout.  

SIX ARRESTED AT WHITE HOUSE PROTEST  5/2/2010 The Advocate

http://www.advocate.com/News/D…

Choi, who has twice been arrested after handcuffing himself to the White House gates and has now been court ordered not to enter a certain perimeter around the White House, was joined by a handful of other speakers, including former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, Servicemembers United executive director Alex Nicholson, and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network executive director Aubrey Sarvis.

The protest came on the heels of a letter leaked late Friday afternoon in which Department of Defense secretary Robert Gates urged House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton “in the strongest possible terms” to delay legislative action on repeal until the Pentagon completes its assessment of how to implement repeal.

The New York Times ran this story in two slightly different versions, on March 26, 2010…

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year.

And then on April 12, 2010…

“However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.”

I don’t know exactly what to think about General McChrystal’s amazing confession, and it quickly disappeared in the usual hurricane of media noise about nothing…

But it somehow reminded me of another summation which was almost entirely overlooked by American media.

US forces were reported to have killed 106 Afghan civilians when they dropped bombs on the village of Qalaye Naizi, in eastern Afghanistan.

And of course…

Military authorities denied having mistakenly bombed a village, and said the warplanes had targeted a compound used by al-Qaeda.

And it would have been just another story like so many others, except that was the day when…

The number of Afghan civilians killed by US bombs has surpassed the death toll of the 11 September attacks.

We passed that milestone on January 2, 2002.

A student with one of the trees

Never underestimate the power of a small but committed group of people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead

This is another update of a the original piece Save the Trees.  The first update was DK Greenroots:  Saving the trees…and maybe the bats.

Here in West Orange, NJ, past home of Thomas Alva Edison and present home of Whoopi Goldberg, a small but committed group of people is fighting the powers that be…in this case the West Orange Zoning Commission and Seton Hall Prep (and through it, the Archdiocese of Newark) in order to prevent the demolition of McClellan Old-Growth Forest in order to build sports fields.

I’m posting tonight in order to provide a conduit between those local voices and a larger community of activists.  At least I hope so.