June 2009 archive

John Kilzer

Sorry about the long intro.  This was for a benefit concert.

Marilyn Dean and James Monroe

Red Blue Jeans

Mousavi we will stand beside you – we will die beside you

US urges Iran to end ‘violence’

Iran’s capital is braced for possible fresh protests as the ongoing political struggle sparked by a disputed presidential poll continues.

The BBC  Sunday, 21 June 2009

State media said calm had returned to Tehran’s streets, and quoted police as saying they had restored order.

But eyewitness accounts suggest several people were injured on Saturday after demonstrators defied official demands for them to end street protests.

It is unclear whether the protests will continue on Sunday.

Protest leader and defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has been quoted as saying peaceful protests should continue and that people have a constitutional right to demonstrate.

The BBC and other foreign media are subject to heavy restrictions which have prevented reporters from leaving their offices to confirm many reports.

US President Barack Obama has warned Iran to stop all “violence and unjust action against its own people”.

Foreign workers for U.S. are casualties twice over

Contract employees injured in the conflict zones of Iraq and Afghanistan and families of those killed there are covered by American taxpayer-funded insurance, but it often fails to deliver.

By T. Christian Miller :: reporting from san fernando, philippines

June 21, 2009

Rey Torres dreamed of a better life for his wife and five children when he left a neighborhood of wooden shacks and burning trash piles to drive a bus on a U.S. military base near Baghdad.

He hoped to send his children to college and build a new home with the $16,000 a year he earned in Iraq — four times what he could make in the Philippines.

Then, in April 2005, Torres, 31, was killed in an ambush by Iraqi insurgents. His widow and children were supposed to be protected by a war zone insurance system overseen by the U.S. government. They were eligible for about $300,000 in compensation.

But Gorgonia Torres knew nothing about the death benefit and did not apply. When she did learn about the insurance, two years later, it was from a reporter. She has since turned down an insurance company’s $22,000 settlement offer. Her only hope of receiving full compensation is a legal fight that could drag on for years.

“He knew it was dangerous. . . . He had second thoughts all the time,” she said of her husband. “But he’d say, ‘If I don’t go, there’s no way we’ll be able to survive.’ “

USA

At V.A. Hospital, a Rogue Cancer Unit



New York Times

For patients with prostate cancer, it is a common surgical procedure: a doctor implants dozens of radioactive seeds to attack the disease. But when Dr. Gary D. Kao treated one patient at the veterans’ hospital in Philadelphia, his aim was more than a little off.

Most of the seeds, 40 in all, landed in the patient’s healthy bladder, not the prostate.

It was a serious mistake, and under federal rules, regulators investigated. But Dr. Kao, with their consent, made his mistake all but disappear.

He simply rewrote his surgical plan to match the number of seeds in the prostate, investigators said.

A Lazy Sunday Afternoon

Did you Vote for Change?

for Accountability; for leveling the playing field; for National Health Care?

Well, your vote apparently doesn’t carry as much weight as it use to.

Here’s one of the main reasons why:

U.S. Democracy Under Siege — Senate Debate Excerpts

Excerpts from the Congressional Record of the October 14, 1999 Senate debate.

The following is a tabulation, for clarity, of the figures cited by Mr. Feingold:

–	1980	1992	1996
Total soft money contributions to parties ($millions)	under 20	86	about 250
# of donors giving over $200,000	–	52	219
# of donors giving over $300,000	–	20	120
# of donors giving over $400,000	–	13	79
# of donors giving over $500,000	–	9	50
# of companies giving over $150,000 to each of the political parties (“double givers”)	–	7	43

 (emphasis added)

http://urielw.com/campfin.htm

There has been a tidal wave taking place, that threatens to swamp our fragile system of Democracy.  Indeed it probably already has …

Bill Maher’s ‘New Rules’ June 19, Via RawStory:

In his weekly monologue, New Rules, Bill Maher weighs in on everything from Iran to Twitter, but his primary target Friday night was the Democratic party, which he says has become the new GOP.

Each time President Obama tries to take on a progressive cause, Maher charged that there was “a major political party standing in his way: the Democrats.

But the solution is not a third political party, according to the self-described libertarian pundit: “We don’t need a third party. We have a center right party, and a crazy party. Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital.”

Maher scoffs at the notion that Obama is a socialist: “He’s not even a liberal.”

Hammering in his point, Maher asks, “Shouldn’t there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting military spending? Straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal healthcare, legalizing pot, and steep, direct taxing of polluters?”

“These aren’t radical ideas,” Maher stresses, “The majority of Americans are either already for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended; and what we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats.”

“Because bottom line,” he concludes “Democrats are the new Republicans.”