February 2009 archive

1. The Hill reports Some Democrats question need for 50,000 troops in Iraq. President “Obama is expected to announce a 19-month plan for withdrawing American soldiers that would leave up to 50,000 troops in the country to advise Iraqi security forces and protect the embassy and other strategic interests.” Obama will also “ask Congress for an additional $75.5 billion this year to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

   Speaking on the redeployment, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said, “It has to be done responsibly, we all agree… But 50,000 is more than I would have thought. We await the justification for why that many are needed.”

2. The LA Times reports President Obama unveils $3.55 trillion budget plan for for fiscal 2010. “We need to be honest with ourselves about what costs are being racked up, because that’s how we’ll come to grips with the hard choices that lie ahead,” Obama said.

   Obama is asking for a $250 billion contingency reserve for the financial black hole. “Budget director Peter Orszag insisted that the ‘place holder’ was only a contingency in case economic conditions worsen further.”

   The Pentagon is asking for $663.7 billion, up from $654.4 billion in this fiscal year, including $130 billion in war funding. What a waste of this nation’s money.

   The NY Times adds the White House budget deficit forecast is optimistic.

   The forecasts are also founded on optimistic assumptions that the recession will end by next year and quickly produce stronger growth than was seen in the last decade. After the economy shrinks this year, the Obama team assumes that the gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, will increase by 3.2 percent next year and then 4 percent or more the following three years, a rate nearly twice the average of the Bush years.

Four at Four continues with the biggest threats to the United States and business, and Bill Holm.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

The New York Times reports that finally Britain, despite five years of denials, now admits that it was involved in illegal renditions extraditions kidnappings.  That’s not much of a surprise.  Britain is fessing up to two of these.  Nobody really thinks that is all there were.

Britain’s defense minister made an unusual public apology on Thursday, admitting Britain had taken part in the “rendition” of suspects detained in Iraq after denying it for years.

In a lengthy statement to parliament, Defense Secretary John Hutton confirmed that Britain handed over two suspects captured in Iraq in 2004 to U.S. custody and that they were subsequently transferred to Afghanistan, breaching U.S.-British agreements.

The Ministry of Defense has been repeatedly asked over the past five years about its involvement in rendition, the unlawful transfer of suspects to a third country, and consistently denied it played any role in the U.S.-administered program.

“I regret that it is now clear that inaccurate information on this particular issue has been given to the House by my department on a small number of occasions,” Hutton said. “I want to apologize to the House for these errors.”

“Inaccurate information” is diplomatic speak for lies.  “These errors” is diplomatic speak for five years of continuous lies.

According to the Times, the two men were captured by British troops in Iraq in February 2004 and were flown to Afghanistan, where they remain in U.S. custody.  And where, parenthetically, the Obama Administration says that they are not permitted to have access to the US Courts to contest the legality of their detention by filing habeas corpus.

Reprieve says about all of this:

“For years now the British government has been tossing us miserable scraps of information about its involvement in illegal renditions in Pakistan, Diego Garcia and now Afghanistan,” said Clara Gutteridge, an investigator with Reprieve, a charity that campaigns for the release of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

“Enough is enough. The British government must come clean and reveal exactly who it has captured, what has been done to them and where they are now,” she said. “I’m afraid this is only the tip of the renditions iceberg.”

Enough really is enough.  The US too needs to come clean.  And having a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which those who have committed these illegal acts, tell their stories and eventually receive immunity is just unacceptable.  It is not how the US should tell the story of its extensive human rights violations.  There need to be a criminal investigations.  And there need to be prosecutions.  And there needs to be an end of secrecy about crimes.

Anything less, after all of the lying and all of the illegal acts, and all of the contorted, disingenuous legal mumbo jumbo, falls far, far short.

Oh, it exists, all right.  It is very, very real.  But it is the exact opposite of what the whining republicans and their enablers claim.  The bias actually works in favor of Republicans.

That is the finding of two Indiana University professors who analyzed network coverage of the 1992-2004 presidential campaigns.  

Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Erik Bucy, both associate professors in the Department of Telecommunications of IU’s College of Arts and Sciences, report their findings in their book, Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections (Oxford University Press).

“We don’t think this is journalists conspiring to favor Republicans. We think they’re just so beat up and tired of being accused of a liberal bias that they unknowingly give Republicans the benefit in coverage,” said Grabe, who also is a research associate in political science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. “It’s self-censorship that journalists might be imposing on themselves.”

Wow.  Lenin and Goebbels were right.  Lies are mighty powerful things, and if you repeat them often enough they become true, or at least are accepted as so – with the added benefit of making those who don’t believe the CW suspect.  

Those are some damned fine role models you have decided to emulate, GOP.  Fine roll models indeed.

Bobby Jindal

And The

Sheriff He Never Met

So How About Those Boats

In President’s Budget Plan, Broad Agenda and a Few Gaps



By Lori Montgomery

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, February 26, 2009; Page A01

President Obama’s spending plan is built on the assumption that lawmakers can resolve some hugely contentious issues — and it relies on a few well-worn budget tricks.

The request he will deliver to Congress today proposes to provide what administration officials are calling a “down payment” on a major expansion of health care coverage for the uninsured. It identifies $634 billion in tax increases and spending cuts to cover the cost of part of the program, but does not say how the administration hopes to raise the rest of the money — hundreds of billions of dollars more. “TBD” has been penciled into categories for cost savings and benefit reductions.

Why 88 Arab homes received eviction notices



Israel has plans to demolish Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem to make way for a tourist site. Activists say it’s a demographic play that amounts to ethnic cleansing.

By Ilene R. Prusher | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the February 26, 2009 edition

JERUSALEM – Israel plans to demolish 88 homes in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, to make way for a new archaeological park, adding new fuel the slow-burning dispute over Jerusalem.

A variety of neighborhood activists, Muslim leaders in Jerusalem, and even figures from the Palestinian Authority (PA) held a press conference Wednesday, saying that Israel was trying to minimize the Arab presence in this city claimed by both Palestinians and Jews as their capital. They say such a move amounts to ethnic cleansing.

“They have made a decision to clear out 88 houses, and with about three families living in each of these houses, we’re looking at the eviction of about 1,500 people. But people in Silwan are clinging to their land and will not leave, despite the eviction orders,” says Adnan Husseini, who is PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s adviser on Jerusalem Affairs.

Israel’s Jerusalem municipality, which has been mulling over this plan for four years, says that the homes were built without permits in an area not designated for residential use.

USA

U.S. Is a Vast Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels



By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

Published: February 25, 2009

PHOENIX – The Mexican agents who moved in on a safe house full of drug dealers last May were not prepared for the fire power that greeted them.

When the shooting was over, eight agents were dead. Among the guns the police recovered was an assault rifle traced back across the border to a dingy gun store here called X-Caliber Guns.

Now, the owner, George Iknadosian, will go on trial on charges he sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers, knowing they would send them to a drug cartel in the western state of Sinaloa. The guns helped fuel the gang warfare in which more than 6,000 Mexicans died last year.

Nikai Thursday

When I was younger I used to go to camp in the summer.

It was a sleep over camp and as you got older your living conditions got progressively more primitive.  It’s kind of creepy to think about living in a hut with only 3 walls.  I suppose actually it was so they could keep closer track of us.

There were all kinds of activities you could pick and choose from, like Arts and Crafts (enamel work is kind of fun) and Tennis (I suck).  Being a swimmer of some accomplishment I gravitated toward waterfront activities like Boating (Row Boats), Canoeing, and Sailing (Sunfish).

My first boating experience was not very successful.  I drew the one with open oarlocks and having no clue on how to work them the oars kept popping out.  I’d call it a cruel joke on the counselor’s part except that they were pretty much given out on a first come first served basis.

The most desirable ones in my eyes were the open ones with pins through the oars because I didn’t like bothering with feathering.  As I got into the advanced classes of course I had to demonstrate my mastery of the technique, but to this day I prefer the pinned ones if only for the fact that you don’t have to deal with the locks slipping down to the blade.

Likewise the Sunfish were tricky too.  The lake was pretty much in a bowl and when you got in the lee of the hills and trees there was no telling which direction the wind would come from and you’d usually end up rowing yourself out with the tiller.  One amenity they had that I missed later in life with my family’s own Sailfish was a beach to run the boat up on when you were done so you could stay dry (unless you capsized of course).  We don’t have much of a beach at the Lake House so we have to moor the boat.  You swim or you don’t sail.

I also took some of the advanced swimming courses like snorkeling.  The big payoff for successfully completing that is they had a surface compressor with a face mask and tube that would let you go about as deep as the lake got.  I never really got a chance to use it though, the mask didn’t fit me very well and I couldn’t deal with the water pouring in from the sides.

Another thing I never did was the Gold swim.  If you were a good enough swimmer that they didn’t need to worry about you much you got a green tag to put up on the buddy board, but if you were especially ambitious several times a summer they’d take you out to a big sloping rock at one end of the lake and have you swim behind a Row Boat out to a stripe they had painted on a cliff face about a mile away.  If you made it you got a Gold tag.

Special huh?

Monster swimmers would go for double and triple Gold (not nearly as cool because all you got was a white tag with a 2 or a 3 on it), but I never tried it at all even though I’d do swim practices in the winter that were up to 10 miles long when our coach was feeling particularly sadistic after we lost a meet.

I’ve just never liked swimming in open water that much.  The darkness of it and not being able to see the bottom gives me the sensation of falling and I have terrible acrophobia.  It’s kind of odd than when I was life guarding I’d get assigned to the most dangerous of the two natural water parks in town instead of any of the 5 pools.  Oh well, at least I could shack up with my girl friend after work.

Original article, subheaded Karl Marx developed his ideas in an era of when young people were dedicating their lives to a struggle for new rights and freedoms. Brian Jones examines Marx’s revolutionary ideas in this second of three articles, via socialistworker.org:

HOW DID Karl Marx become a Marxist? Marx developed his idea not just through study–although he was a voracious reader (really, the word “voracious” doesn’t begin to touch it). Marx’s Marxism is really the theoretical product of his practical efforts to build a movement for radical change, and his observations of struggles taking place around him.