June 10, 2010 archive

Among many other recent innovations, including a “featured advertiser,” Pheedo, which showed up like news on their RSS feed today, the Washington Post has been calling the war in Afghanistan “Obama’s War” for the past few months, and in case you wonder what that never-ending mess is all about, they add a helpful sub-title…  

Combating Extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan

So we were apparently “combatting extremism” in Marjah when we reduced that primitive hamlet to rubble, and the very bad new news on top of all the other very bad old news about that brutal operation is that it was…

A total honking failure!

Residents of this onetime Taliban sanctuary see signs that the insurgents have regained momentum in recent weeks, despite early claims of success by U.S. Marines.

Firefights between insurgents and security forces occur daily, resulting in more Marine fatalities and casualties over the past month than in the first month of the operation, which began in mid-February.

Firefights every day! More and more US casualties!

It’s like some kind of nightmare joke! A Marine blogger at Military Times calls Marjah a petting zoo in Hell!

And that’s a scene from Marjah! Look at it! One shack, one Marine, and one crazy dog!

So this total honking failure has finally inspired General Stanley A. McChrystal with some second thoughts about running the same kind of operation in Kandahar.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is finding himself squeezed between a ticking clock and an enemy that won’t go away.

On Thursday, during a visit to NATO headquarters here, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal admitted that preparations for perhaps the most critical operation of the war — the campaign to take control of Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace — weren’t going as planned. He said winning support from local leaders, some of whom see the Taliban fighters not as oppressors but as their Muslim brothers, was proving tougher than expected. The military side of the campaign, originally scheduled to surge in June and finish by August, is now likely to extend into the fall.

And meanwhile Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was extending another deadline…

“All of us, for our publics, are going to have to show by the end of the year that our strategy is on the right track and making some headway,” Gates said Wednesday during a visit to London to meet with British leaders.

Is our strategy “on the right track?”

We won’t “know” until the end of the year!

Harharharhar!!!

Humans only change through crisis and tragedy.

And boy do humans need to change.

It is inconceivable but true that the current tragedy, as immense as it is, is NOT changing the politics of Climate and Energy. The only change it has really wrought politically is to answer the question: What will it take. Unfortunately the answer is…..nothing. Nothing, no event, no force, no reality can change the artificial world of politics in a crumbling empire. In a crumbling paradigm, in what is perhaps a crumbling civilization. At the very least, the model of civilization as we have known it is crumbling, as that model proves inadequate to deal with the change that is occurring.

A change which cannot be stopped by men because it is not of man. It is of the world, of the planet, of the universe.  

Although no crime was committed, Minnesotans and other people across America are being locked up because they owe money to some corporation. This is another example of our emerging corporatocracy — Where the power of the state is just another tool for business.

The Star Tribune has published an investigative piece about the return of debtors’ prisons, “In jail for being in debt“.

It’s not a crime to owe money, and debtors’ prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.

Here is what is happening now to people who fall behind in paying their bills. Joy Uhlmeyer, for example, is a 57-year-old patient care advocate. She was arrested by a sheriff’s deputy and no one would tell her why, despite her pleas.

Uhlmeyer spent a sleepless night in a frigid Anoka County holding cell, her hands tucked under her armpits for warmth. Then, handcuffed in a squad car, she was taken to downtown Minneapolis for booking. Finally, after 16 hours in limbo, jail officials fingerprinted Uhlmeyer and explained her offense — missing a court hearing over an unpaid debt.

“They have no right to do this to me… Not for a stupid credit card.”

Uhlmeyer ‘crime?’ She “defaulted on a $6,200 Chase credit card after a costly divorce in 2006.” She ignored the collection agency because she “didn’t recognize the name”.

The other day we saw in Beyond Paradox & Look, We’re Dealing With Criminals Attorney Mike Papantonio talking with Randi Rhodes explaining the basics of his class action suit against BP after Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he would be launching a criminal investigation into the activities of BP.

As oil continues to gush from the BP site in the Gulf of Mexico, so do the lies coming from the BP spin machine.

Mike Papantonio is working to hold British Petroleum accountable for the damage that they are causing the environment, and working on a class action suit against BP on behalf of families suing BP, as well as to expose the lies that BP continues to feed the news media.

Here’s Mike’s latest appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews…

BP shares plunge as U.S. threatens new penalties

by Tom Bergin and Anna Driver

June 10, 2010