An off hand comment, intended as infantile bathroom humor by a male coworker:
“Ah, man. My coat’s going to smell like a sewer. Luis is in the bathroom taking a dump, and he always stinks it up.”
I cringed a little, grossed out, but keeping my work game face on said, “Luis partied last night, maybe too much tipping..” making the universal glass tipping motion toward him.
“No,” he said straight faced. “Too much beans and salsa, you know all that Mexican food.”
I gave him that sidelong look, you know the one I mean, that long suffering look of Mothers everywhere for when their kids say really stupid shit. Not irritated so much as tired.
“Luis isn’t Mexican. He is Venezuelan.”
He grinned his goofy apologetic grin, shrugged and smiled at his own stupidity, “Venezuela, Mexico, like I would know the difference, they’re all the same to me. They all speak Spanish.”
He walked away too quickly in his lolling gate, almost bouncing like a cartoon character, for me to point out the very obvious. More on that later.
Jesus, it almost tied together my two separate essays I have on hold.
The lack of cultural and geographic understanding and why tribal pure states will no longer work. Sounds strange but the source is the same. Intentional ignorance.
McClatchy reports a federal judge has concluded that the U.S. hid witness’ mental illness in Guantanamo cases. Federal Judge Judge Emmet Sullivan found the “Justice Department improperly withheld important psychiatric records of a government witness who was used in a ‘significant’ number of Guantanamo cases”.
The government censored parts of the records, but enough has been made public that it’s clear that the witness, a fellow detainee, was being treated weekly for a serious psychological problem and was questioned about whether he had any suicidal thoughts. The witness provided information in the government’s case for detaining Aymen Saeed Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor who the government announced last week it would no longer seek to detain…
“To hide relevant and exculpatory evidence from counsel and from the court under any circumstances, particularly here where there is no other means to discover this information and where the stakes are so very high . . . is fundamentally unjust, outrageous and will not be tolerated,” Sullivan said, according to a transcript of the hearing.
“How can this court have any confidence whatsoever in the United States government to comply with its obligations and to be truthful to the court?”
Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program “inhuman.”
Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency said in the 2007 report, a copy of which was posted on a magazine Web site yesterday. The report quoted one medical official as telling a detainee: “I look after your body only because we need you for information.”
The Dog wants to start this by saying that he is not looking for any sympathy on this issue. He is only writing this to get it out of his head and maybe shed some light on the other side of employee layoffs. Sympathy, if there is any, should be reserved for the 140 workers and their families that started the day with jobs, and ended it without them.
As we fight the Battle of the Memos, the outcome of which will be the latest sign post of Obama’s intentions re the Bush Torture Program….
And thus affect how the new petition as well as the Pressure the Press segment of our two pronged program is waged…
I wish to offer a few thoughts on the zeitgeist, the chaos, and the general rancor of this particular period.
We are in…..transition.
Transition form a hated President to, despite whatever specific differences you may have with him, a much more benign, beloved….and certainly wildly popular President.
For those of us who have been hard core Lefties all of our life, it is habit, quest, and lifelong campaign to attack the American government for its many excesses and egregious acts and policies. The American government has done some truly nasty things in our lifetimes and before. Ever since I, for instance, as a young lad, learned of the My Lai Masscre (thanks to Sy Hersh and in spite of Colin Powell) I have been DEEPLY distrustful and full of animosity towards the American government. Watergate of course, merely gave evidence to my belief that our government is deeply corrupt, and subsequent decades have done little to dispel that feeling.
And then came Bush. (nuff said?)
Now Obama has come.
Obama is now the face of that same government. I share the deep hopes of millions if not billions around the world that he will be the one to turn American government around. But he is one man against the huge machinery of that government. One man with a few allies in government and billions rooting for him and wanting to help. Including me.
So on one hand, there is Hope.
On the other is a lifetime of distrust in the Machine he now heads.
How do we resolve that fundamental conflict?
How do we approach and deal with and comment on this unique situation?
How do we oppose the actions of the government, while supporting Obama’s efforts to lead that government in a new direction?
This is a very tough transition for all of us, both those who need to criticize the government, and those whose support Obama to the extent that it feels to them that that criticism is a personal criticism of Obama or somehow undermines his efforts to turn the US around.
Critics of the government frame every criticism as a criticism of Obama, not the government or his policies. This exasperates and incenses those who correctly realize that he will need all of the support we can give him to do what he…and we….want him to do.
Separation between criticizing the US, the policies of the US that Obama is to some extent duty bound, as the face of and as chief officer of that government, to defend….. and criticizing Obama personally has become very thin.
Criticism and activism is being, as is the wont in the blogosphere, reduced to the lowest common denominator….Black and White, defend or attack, for or against.
I urge folks on both sides of this semi-manufactured divide, this echo of the partisanship of the last decade, to step back for a moment and reconsider their rhetoric, framing, and above all….their instincts to either attack or defend…. on such a ridiculously simplistic level.
Simplification makes argument easier, not better. The subtlety and nuance required to actually address the real, existential complexities of our world are lost.
We live in an incredibly complex world, and are dealing with incredibly complex problems. The urge to simplify that complexity into a for or against Obama referendum and argument is destructive to ALL of us, to the world, and to rationality and critical thought in general. I urge us ALL not to fall into that trap.
All those who attack the policies of the United States Government are not personally attacking Obama.
All those who defend Obama are not defending the United States Government.
It is NOT simple. Please resist the urge to laziness that makes it seem as if it is.
The banking system is rubble. The economy’s imploding. How did it come to this? Why didn’t our “representatives” in Washington D.C. see this crisis coming? Because they were too busy kissing Wall Street’s ass and K Street’s ass and Bush’s ass and the ass of every CEO in sight, that’s why they didn’t see this coming.
We saw it coming. We’re progressives. We don’t need a fucking weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
We told America a hard rain’s gonna fall. But America wouldn’t listen.
We saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
We saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
We saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin,
We saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin,
We saw a white ladder all covered with water,
We saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
We saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.
For those who don’t know what a Friedman Unit is, here’s the Wikipedia definition:
The Friedman, or Friedman Unit (F.U.), is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) on May 21, 2006.[1]
A Friedman is a unit of time equal to six months in the future.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] The Huffington Post cited it as the “Best New Phrase” of 2006.[9]
The term is in reference to a May 16, 2006 article by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) detailing journalist Thomas Friedman’s repeated use[10] of “the next six months” as the period in which, according to Friedman, “we’re going to find out…whether a decent outcome is possible” in the Iraq War. As documented by FAIR, Friedman had been making such six-month predictions for a period of two and a half years, on at least fourteen different occasions, starting with a column in the November 30, 2003 edition of The New York Times, in which he stated: “The next six months in Iraq-which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there-are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time.”[11]
The term has been used in general to describe any pronouncement of a critical period for the U.S. occupation of Iraq.[12][7] Such pronouncements have been made by numerous politicians and military officials involved in the war.[13][14][15]
Now let’s hear from Obama, the candidate who promised to end the war in Iraq:
Obama-next 18 months critical for Iraq
07 Apr 2009 15:33:51 GMT
Source: Reuters
BAGHDAD, April 7 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama, visiting U.S. troops in Iraq, told them on Tuesday that the next 18 months would be critical for their mission in the country.
“This is going to be a critical period, these next 18 months,” Obama said, referring to the Aug 2010 deadline for the withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops from Iraq.
“You will be critical in terms of us being able to make sure Iraq is stable, that it is not a safe haven for terrorists, and we can start bringing our folks home,” Obama told troops at Camp Victory, the sprawling U.S. military base on the outskirts of Baghdad.
They’re coming. They’re coming to take our guns and our freedoms and our way of life. The Government. The government is the enemy. And if we don’t destroy it then it’s going to destroy us.
Italy earthquake survivors face up to aftermath as death toll rises to 179
Deadliest earthquake for almost 30 years leaves 1,500 injured and thousands homeless
John Hooper in Onna, Abruzzo
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 April 2009 07.41 BST
There were 12 of them. Four of the bodies were in shiny new coffins. The rest were still in their improvised shrouds – quilts, sheets and even a gaily coloured curtain.
All round the paddock in which the dead had been laid out under a line of trees, there were other signs of the unbearable lightness of modern disaster: a woman in a blush-pink dressing gown who stood at the end of the line of coffins making the sign of the cross as the tears gushed down her cheeks; a man in a souvenir cap advertising Radio 101 who sat on a rock with his head bowed, just a yard or two from the grimly swathed bodies of his neighbours; the woman in the spangled Playboy bunny top who was pleading with her half-delirious, tear-stained friend not to go back into the centre of the village where rescue workers were burrowing in the ruins of what until 3.30am yesterday had been a pretty little village under the snow-capped Apennines.
A missile launch for dummies
By Donald Kirk
SEOUL – Call it a success or failure, North Korea’s launch on Sunday of a long-range missile, supposedly carrying a satellite that failed to go into orbit, demonstrates conclusively Pyongyang’s ability to deliver a warhead to a distant target.
In that sense, the latest version of the Taepodong-2 accomplished what North Korea had wanted – and also bore out United States, Japanese and South Korean charges of violating United Nations resolutions adopted in 2006 when the North entered the ranks of the nuclear powers by testing a small warhead.
The UN Security Council this time is not about to enforce the previous resolutions, much less adopt a meaningless statement of “condemnation”. The council, after three hours of closed-door palaver on Sunday, failed to agree to anything after calls for restraint by both China and Russia, North Korea’s only friends and one-time Korean War allies.
USA
Report Calls CIA Detainee Treatment ‘Inhuman’
By Joby Warrick and Julie Tate
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 7, 2009; Page A06
Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program “inhuman.”
Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency said in the 2007 report, a copy of which was posted on a magazine Web site yesterday. The report quoted one medical official as telling a detainee: “I look after your body only because we need you for information.”
Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program “inhuman.”
Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency said in the 2007 report, a copy of which was posted on a magazine Web site yesterday. The report quoted one medical official as telling a detainee: “I look after your body only because we need you for information.”
