June 26, 2008 archive

CALL TO ACTION: Veterans vs Country They Serve

Veterans vs Veterans Administration Case UpDate 6-25-08


Yesterday, the 25th, a ruling came down from the judge hearing the case, in San Francisco, 82 pages long, and not a surprise to this Vet. In the ruling the judge sided with the Veterans but had to push it to where it belongs, In Congress. Only Congress and the Excutive Branch, of the Peoples Government, can bring about the way to long overhall of the Veterans Administration. Everything that is being reported about the care to the returning Veterans, of the Wars and Occupations of Choice, is actually Old News, just ask the thousands of my brother, and sister, Veterans of Korea and Vietnam, and it’s happening once again while these conflicts rage as it did back than. We call the present Military the Professional Military yet we continue the foulups that take place within the Government Agencies, Veterans Administration and DoD Health, that are charged with it’s care, especially the Mental Trauma War brings on in the Soldiers and the Civilians in these Theaters of Occupation.

Misogynistic bastards-Day Two

Yup, that makes it two days in a row. WBZ channel 4 Boston had some discussion just this morning about pink Red Sox hats.

https://www.docudharma.com/show…

Weather, sports, a local story, a national story and a “human interest” about how to subliminally imbed one of the isms.

Not only lamestream press, ministry of propaganda press.

Boston is after all also known as the people’s republic of Cambridge.

Docudharma Times Thursday June 26



Shrub Love

No What It Use To Be




Thursday’s Headlines:

 75% blame Bush’s policies for deteriorating economy

Dig shows Paris is 3,000 years older than first thought

EU leaders sent to Siberia for talks that symbolise shifting power

Bangladeshi woman wins rights for garment workers

Taleban ‘siege’ of Peshawar threatens Pakistan’s grip

Can Lebanon douse political fires?

For Iraqi Christians, money bought survival

Ghana: MPs Call for Military Intervention in Zimbabwe

 Leak reveals ruthless strategy to bomb and murder until election

In El Salvador, journalist may lead leftists to center stage

A £160m apology to the Maoris for shameful history of injustice

A tragic failure of leadership: Mandela’s verdict on Mugabe

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor

The Guardian,

Thursday June 26, 2008


Nelson Mandela last night broke his silence on the political and humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe, saying the country was suffering due to “a tragic failure of leadership”.

The former South African president and political icon made the remarks at a dinner in London last night attended by Gordon Brown and Bill Clinton. Mandela is reported to be deeply troubled by events in Zimbabwe which have sent thousands of refugees into South Africa, but he has been careful not to create a rift with his successor as president, Thabo Mbeki, who has emerged as Robert Mugabe’s most important protector on the African continent.

“We watch with sadness the continuing tragedy in Darfur. Nearer to home we had seen the outbreak of violence against fellow Africans in our own country and the tragic failure of leadership in our neighbouring Zimbabwe,” Mandela said.

U.S. border agents copying contents of travelers’ laptops

By Federica Narancio | McClatchy Newspapers  

WASHINGTON – U.S. border agents are copying and seizing the contents of laptops, cell phones and digital cameras from U.S. and foreign travelers entering the United States, witnesses told a Senate subcommittee Wednesday.

The extent of this practice is unknown despite requests to the Department of Homeland Security from the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution and several nonprofit agencies.

The department also declined to send a representative to the hearing. Subcommittee Chairman Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said Homeland Security had told him that its “preferred” witness was unavailable Wednesday.

Feingold added that he’d submitted written questions about the seizures of electronic data – and of some devices – to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in April. To date, Feingold said, he’s gotten no reply.

USA

Senator Stalls Housing Relief With Call for Energy Credits

Ensign’s Demand Spurs Showdown as Foreclosures Keep Mounting


  By Lori Montgomery

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, June 26, 2008; Page D01


A Republican senator from Nevada, home to the highest foreclosure rate in the nation, yesterday blocked an ambitious plan to help troubled borrowers save their homes, saying he will not permit the measure to go forward unless the Senate adds tax breaks to encourage the production of renewable energy.

The demand by Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) stalled a massive housing package with broad bipartisan support even as a report showed that new-home sales continued to tumble, underscoring the severity of the nation’s housing slump

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

State of the Onion XVI

In the end, it is really all about the ways we can be divided and the people who benefit when that happens, rather than the ways we can celebrate or similarities together, in spite of our differences.  And celebrate those differences as well.

Art Link
Inside

Slices

Each time

a class of people

is defined

humanity is divided

hewed like an old log

Just like that log

destruction occurs

at the point

where the axe strikes

But the damage done

to the people

in the path of the cut

is much more serious

than the harm done

to some old wood

Race cuts like a saber

through individuals

of mixed ancestry

Can you feel their pain?

How feels the slice

of the katana

of ethnicity

to someone

whose grandparents

hail from four different cultures?

Blood spurts

from the laceration

of the gender scimitar

through those

not exactly

men or women

I live

on the edge

of that blade

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–March 30, 2006

Please join us on the inside to celebrate, venerate, regenerate and/or motivate our muses.

Nuts & Bolts: How U.S. Organized Torture Program

The Armed Services Committee’s hearings last week on interrogation and torture gave us a startling look into how torture was taught at the Naval Prison at Guantanamo Bay. Most articles have not bothered to look deeply into what was discussed in meetings between officials of the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, program and ranking officers and personnel at Guantanamo. This article will look in some detail at what actually occurred. (At the end, I will address an important correction and clarification to an earlier article on SERE.)

As Mark Benjamin writes in his “timeline to Bush government torture”:

Soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon and the CIA began an orchestrated effort to tap expertise from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school, for use in the interrogation of terrorist suspects. The U.S. military’s SERE training is designed to inoculate elite soldiers, sailors and airmen to torture, in the event of their capture, by an enemy that would violate the Geneva Conventions. Those service members are subjected to forced nudity, stress positions, hooding, slapping, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and, yes, in some cases, waterboarding.

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Volume doesn’t work for me, I have to turn it up.  Lyrics below.

Pony Party: Late Edition

Say hello to Chip.  

Your host for tonight’s Open Thread.  

 

Renegade Justice: An Interview With Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias

Photobucket The topic below was originally posted on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

David Iglesias is the prototype twenty first century Republican: charismatic, Hispanic, an evangelical Christian and a captain in the Navy Reserve who served for many years in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps (“JAG”). In  1998, Iglesias campaigned to become Attorney General of New Mexico against the heavily favored Patricia Madrid. He nearly pulled off an upset and the Republican Party took notice. In 2000, Iglesias paid his party dues and worked for George W. Bush’s election.

Meanwhile, back in Iran: Israel Prodding US to Attack Iran

CBS is reporting that Israel is pressuring the Bush administration to attack Iran: (emphasis mine)

“…Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen leaves Tuesday night on an overseas trip that will take him to Israel, reports CBS News national security correspondent David Martin. The trip has been scheduled for some time but U.S. officials say it comes just as the Israelis are mounting a full court press to get the Bush administration to strike Iran’s nuclear complex.

“CBS consultant Michael Oren says Israel doesn’t want to wait for a new administration….

More Below the Fold:

Custer & the Abandonment of Major Elliot

Photobucket

Was losing Major Elliot’s strategic location during the extermination of the Southern Cheyenne Arapaho at Washita by Lieutenant Colonel Custer acceptable by U.S. military standards? Captain Benteen thought not.


Source

“Surely some search will be made for our missing comrades” mocked Benteen’s piece, before concluding, “No, they are forgotten.”

Custer picked the wrong man to threaten horsewhipping.

Moratorium Day vignettes: Shoveling with a teaspoon

Every month’s Iraq Moratorium action in Milwaukee seems to have a special moment. In May it was a thumbs-up from a passing Army recruiter. This month, it was when a woman stopped to tell a leafleter handing out information about the Moratorium that her son is in Iraq. So tearful and emotional she had difficulty speaking, she said he was on his second tour there as a National Guardsman. “Thank you for what you’re doing,” she said. “I just want him home.”

MD#10--Cornwall, CT--combo

Cornwall, Connecticut held its first outdoor vigil and reported an “overwhelmingly positive response from people driving by, with at least one local resident, Suzanne, who hadn’t heard about the doings on the Green in advance pulling her car over and jumping aboard for the rest of the vigil.”  Maybe it was the horn trio (two trombones and a sax) that got her attention. (Photo above.)

Once again, Washington, DC SDS and a mass of young activists hit the pavement in a “Funk the War 4” action. A major destination for the raucous street action with mobile musical backing was a military Recruiting Center.

You’ll find more reports, still coming in from around the country after Friday’s action, at the Moratorium website.

Does it all matter?

The NY Times asked Pete Seeger, who stands with his banjo, a sign and a small group of antiwar protesters every Saturday in the Hudson Valley:

Asked whether he thought that protesting by the side of the road would help end the war, he said: “I don’t think that big things are as effective as people think they are. The last time there was an antiwar demonstration in New York City I said, ‘Why not have a hundred little ones?’ ”

He said that working for peace was like adding sand to a basket on one side of a large scale, trying to tip it one way despite enormous weight on the opposite side.

“Some of us try to add more sand by teaspoons,” he explained. “It’s leaking out as fast as it goes in and they’re all laughing at us. But we’re still getting people with teaspoons. I get letters from people saying, ‘I’m still on the teaspoon brigade.’ “

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