Some of you may remember Tennessee Ernie Ford’s old song. I do. When I was a kid we spent summers in eastern Kentucky with my Aunt and grandparents, Dad sometimes took us out to an old strip mine to shoot tin cans with his pearl-handled six shooters, and learn some history while we were at it. Back in the day, he told us, the coal barons had a clever scheme to enslave the local populations who worked to dig out the coal from its natural habitat.
May 2009 archive
May 23 2009
Obama Reduced To Demonizing His Critics
Crossposted from Antemedius
The other day, after Barack Obama’s speech at the National Archives Building in Washington, the New York Times printed a “news analysis” piece that was one of the most offensive pieces of manipulation I think I’ve ever read, in it’s oh so reasonable sounding efforts (probably successful with the vast majority who read it) to marginalize and equate with neanderthals and the far right wing anyone who is not interested in becoming terrorists to fight invented terrorism, with it’s interpretation of Obama’s statements in his speech:
He must convince the country that it is in safe hands despite warnings to the contrary from the right, and at the same time persuade the skeptical left that it is enough to amend his predecessor’s approach rather than abandon it.
In the reductionist debate in Washington, either any sacrifice must be made to win a pitiless war against radicals, or terrorism does not justify any compromise with cherished American values.
Unfortunately, Barack Obama seems to be in complete agreement with the NYT’s manipulations of public opinion:
“Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right,” Mr. Obama said. “The American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems. They know that we need not sacrifice our security for our values, nor sacrifice our values for our security, so long as we approach difficult questions with honesty and care and a dose of common sense.”
Today, Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, talks with Real News Network CEO Paul Jay with his own analysis of Obama’s speech and his determination to “legalize” the Military Commissions set up under George Bush with the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA).
May 23 2009
Single Payer Health Insurance: My Japanese Experience
As the debate about Health Care continues to heat up with the usual suspects from the Health Insurance industry begining their campaign to convince Americans that Universal Health insurance is against their best interests, would decrease quality of care, limit options, increase wait time (as if those under the current system don`t have similar issues)and all the other usual lies they spout hoping to scare a large enough portion of the electorate to dash the hopes of us who want Health Care reform.
I would like to share with you MY experience under a single payer system which we have here in Japan. It is called National Health Care Service or for those of you who can read Japanese: (grrrr..why cant I post Japanese characters? Every time I try here I get this error message:java.sql.SQLException: Incorrect string value: ‘xE5x9BxBDxE6xB0x91…’ for column ‘mainText’ at row 1)
Of course first I should tell you how it`s paid for before I go into the details of how it works.
Every month a certain percentage is deducted from my pay check which includes both my National Health Care and my National Pension. This amount is matched by my employer. While I don`t wish to discuss my finances in detail, I can tell you every month they deduct roughly 40,000 yen (around $385 dollars) by comparison my wife who is a stay at home mom pays roughly 7000 yen (around $65) for her coverage. All children under 15 are covered for free.
May 23 2009
Docudharma Times Saturday May 23
Newt And Dick Race
To The Past 2012
Yea! Pass The Champagne
Definitive Account Of Briefings Still Elusive
Lawmakers Divided After Reviewing CIA’s Notes on Pelosi Session
By Paul Kane and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Sequestered in rooms buried deep within the Capitol and requiring top-secret clearances to enter, members of the House and Senate intelligence committees have spent the past week leafing through documents at the heart of Washington’s latest who-knew-what-and-when saga.But rather than emerging with clear agreement on what the memos reveal about the CIA briefing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi received in 2002, and whether she was aware that aggressive interrogation methods were being used on terrorism suspects, lawmakers remain as divided as ever about the story they tell.
In Germany, widespread spying is back, this time by corporations
Hundreds of thousands of employees have had their cellphone, e-mail and computer records secretly searched. Companies say they did it to expose misconduct.
By Henry Chu
May 23, 2009
Reporting from Berlin — Growing up in West Germany, Lothar Schroeder never knew that terrible sense of violation suffered by people in the communist East at the hands of the secret police who tailed them, bugged their homes and recruited neighbors and even family members to snitch on them.Now he knows.
But it’s not a totalitarian state doing the snooping this time; it’s some of the country’s largest corporations — big names in telecommunications, transportation and retail.Last year, authorities informed Schroeder that Deutsche Telekom had secretly combed through his cellphone records, apparently to root out the source of leaks to the news media. Schroeder, a union representative on the company’s board of supervisors, was stunned.
“I never could believe that Deutsche Telekom would use their data in this way, never,” he said, adding ruefully, “Perhaps I’m a little bit naive.”
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany is being rocked by a string of spying scandals that have staggered residents with their scale and brought back painful memories of the prying eyes of Big Brother during the Cold War.
USA
President’s Detention Plan Tests American Legal Tradition
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: May 22, 2009President Obama’s proposal for a new legal system in which terrorism suspects could be held in “prolonged detention” inside the United States without trial would be a departure from the way this country sees itself, as a place where people in the grip of the government either face criminal charges or walk free.
There are, to be sure, already some legal tools that allow for the detention of those who pose danger: quarantine laws as well as court precedents permitting the confinement of sexual predators and the dangerous mentally ill. Every day in America, people are denied bail and locked up because they are found to be a hazard to their communities, though they have yet to be convicted of anything.
May 23 2009
Tax cheats KBR made $150 million + building Guantanamo bay, Cheney smirks at justice
According to DoD records made over $150 million dollars building Guantanamo bay’s detainee holding facilities, or, as other’s have come to call them, torture chambers.
KBR, of course is one of Dick Cheney’s special interests friends.
Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.
~snip~
With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor.
The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with President Bush in 2000.
May 23 2009
FUCK BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA!!!!!!!
President Obama’s proposal for a new legal system in which terrorism suspects could be held in “prolonged detention” inside the United States without trial would be a departure from the way this country sees itself, as a place where people in the grip of the government either face criminal charges or walk free.
There are, to be sure, already some legal tools that allow for the detention of those who pose danger: quarantine laws as well as court precedents permitting the confinement of sexual predators and the dangerous mentally ill. Every day in America, people are denied bail and locked up because they are found to be a hazard to their communities, though they have yet to be convicted of anything.
Still, the concept of preventive detention is at the very boundary of American law, and legal experts say any new plan for the imprisonment of terrorism suspects without trial would seem inevitably bound for the Supreme Court.
Mr. Obama has so far provided few details of his proposed system beyond saying it would be subject to oversight by Congress and the courts. Whether it would be constitutional, several of the legal experts said in interviews, would most likely depend on the fairness of any such review procedures.
Ultimately, they suggested, the question of constitutionality would involve a national look in the mirror: Is this what America does?
“We have these limited exceptions to the principle that we only hold people after conviction,” said Michael C. Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell. “But they are narrow exceptions, and we don’t want to expand them because they make us uncomfortable.”
In his speech on antiterrorism policy Thursday, Mr. Obama, emphasizing that he wanted fair procedures, sought to distance himself from what critics of the Bush administration saw as its system of arbitrary detention.
“In our constitutional system,” Mr. Obama said, “prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man.”
May 23 2009
Neocons want to start killing journalists through military attacks
JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, recently published a report written by a retired American Army Colonel who says:
“Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts, and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.“The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win.
The article from which I am getting this information, here, at Anti-War.com, written by Jeremy Scahill, says the following about JINSA:
The organization has long boasted an all-star cast of criminal “advisers,” among them Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, John Bolton, and Douglas Feith. JINSA, along with the Project for a New American Century, was one of the premiere groups in shaping U.S. policy during the Bush years and remains a formidable force with Obama in the White House.
May 23 2009
Bill Maher says no to superheroes and no to normal people, so what does he want?
I usually really like Bill Maher, but today I think he is confused. Tonight on the “New Rules” feature of Real Time, he started off his final new rule by saying that we can’t solve our problems by electing superheroes. Spiderman, he said, punches bank robbers in the balls, while Obama just writes them a check. And he went on to give a really terrible rant about governmental reform that was just dead wrong.
Crossposted at Dailykos.com
May 23 2009
Random Japan
Foreigners and other animals
A sea otter named Ku-chan who has been hanging out on a stretch of river in Kushiro, Hokkaido, was granted special residency status by the city. It’s said that Ku-chan attracts ¥50 million a month in tourism to the area.A pair of political activists from Myanmar who had been living illegally in Japan for a decade were finally granted refugee status late last month. The men are reportedly ruing their decision to struggle for human rights and freedom, instead of becoming revenue-generating sea otters.
The foreign ministry announced that it would slash the housing allowance it provides refugees while their applications for asylum are being processed. The goal is to halve the number of asylum seekers as soon as possible.
Headline of the Week: “Paranoid Hospitals Turning away Those with Fever, or with a Foreign Friend” (via the Mainichi Daily News).
May 23 2009
Welcome New Users
I’d like to extend a genuine welcome to people who are joining the site out of a desire to find a spot that is a little port of orange. When I joined dK it was to find a place where I could express myself without the fear that I might expose myself as a (shudder) Democrat.
And have no doubt about it, I am a yellow dog Democrat who stopped voting Republican even for dog catcher many years ago.
Equally I am interested in Democratic electoral victory since I understand that only with overwhelming majorities will our supposed Representatives overcome their craven, cowardly instincts and occasionally be persuaded to do the right thing. Indeed I think the emergence of a Democratic Democratic Party can only occur after the Republican Party, the party of thieves, murderers, despots, and liars, is as dead as the Whigs so our Representatives can no longer threaten us like gangsters to choose the lesser of two evils.
Nice little country you’ve got here, shame if anything happened to it. Vote for me.
I understand the mission of dK and agree with it, but I don’t agree with them on all things. To choose a trivial but early example, I think the 0ne Diary A Day policy is stultifying and unnecessary and I have expressed that sentiment on numerous occasions.
When buhdy provided me the opportunity to be a Contributing Editor and later Admin here I was grateful for the opportunity to help shape a system that addressed some of the flaws I perceived.
Which is not to say that there aren’t rules and procedures.