August 2009 archive

1. The Guardian reports Hillary Clinton has hinted the United States may join international war crimes court. The Secretary of State, speaking at a public meeting in Kenya, “expressed regret” that the U.S. has not joined the International Criminal Court.

   “This is a great regret that we are not a signatory. I think we could have worked out some of the challenges that are raised concerning our membership. But that has not yet come to pass,” she said.

   There is division in the Obama White House whether or not the U.S. should join. U.S. “membership would be difficult while the US was still in Iraq and the prison at Guantánamo Bay remained open.”

2. The NY Times reports the U.S. Birth rate has declined as because of the Great Recession. “In 2007, the number of births in the United States broke a 50-year-old record high, set during the baby boom. But last year, births began to decline nationwide, by nearly 2 percent, according to provisional figures released last week” by the National Center for Health Statistics.

   “As more families were feeling the effects of layoffs and economic uncertainty, births decreased even faster… Historically, birth rates have fluctuated with the economy.”

3. The LA Times reports the Death of Pakistan Taliban chief Baitullah Mahsud is confirmed. “Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mahsud, Pakistan’s most wanted terrorist and a staunch Al Qaeda ally, was killed in an American missile strike, a Pakistani government minister confirmed today”.

   “The missile strike came from a U.S. unmanned aircraft that attacked the home of Mahsud’s father-in-law in Pakistan’s South Waziristan tribal region early Wednesday. Pakistani intelligence officials have said that Mahsud’s second wife was among at least two people killed.”

   The NY Times notes it was a Missile strike from a CIA drone that killed Mehsud. “The C.I.A. made killing Mr. Mehsud one of its top priorities this year, partly at the urging of Pakistan’s civilian government.” Which again raises the question, why have we allowed the CIA to get in the business of waging war? Don’t we have a perfectly good military for this purpose?

   The CS Monitor asks Is Pakistan safer now? Maybe. “Many analysts in Pakistan say his death will substantially undermine Taliban operations in the country.” Experts are now expecting the Taliban to splinter into regional factions.

4. The NY Times reports the White House struggles to gauge Afghan war progress. “The Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won.”

   The administration is seeking concrete signs of “success”. “That is especially difficult in a war like the one in Afghanistan, in which eliminating corruption, promoting a working democracy and providing effective aid are as critical as scoring military success against insurgents and terrorists.”

   But, “when President Obama unveiled his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan in March, he emphasized the importance of these measures.”

   “We will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable,” Mr. Obama said. “We’ll consistently assess our efforts to train Afghan security forces and our progress in combating insurgents. We will measure the growth of Afghanistan’s economy and its illicit narcotics production. And we will review whether we are using the right tools and tactics to make progress towards accomplishing our goals.”

   Seems to me goals and benchmarks should have been established before additional troops were committed to the conflict.

This is so worth reading:

http://www.alternet.org/health…

Why? Because the author used to be one of them:

Right-Wing Turncoat Gives the Inside Scoop on Why Conservatives Are Rampaging Town Halls

snip

They are using my old shock troops — given many of these folks were first energized by the Evangelical pro-life movement that my late father and I started in the 1970s. What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.

snip

“How do I know this is the norm? … I know this script. I helped write it.”

He tells it exactly how it is.

There is no daylight between the Republican Party, the health-care insurance industry, far right leaders like Dick Armey, the legion of insurance lobbyists, and now, a small army of  thugs. All we’re missing is actual uniforms, otherwise we now have a full blown American version of the Nazi Brown Shirts.

No, I don’t believe that these people are about to take over the country. No, the sky is not falling. But the Republican Party is. It is now profoundly anti-American.

snip

Here’s the emerging American version of the fascist’s formula: combine millions of dollars of lobbyists’ money with embittered  troublemakers  who have a small army of not terribly bright white angry people (collected over decades through pro-life mass mailing networks) at their beck and call, ever ready to believe any myth or lie circulated by the semi literate and completely and routinely misinformed right wing — Evangelical religious underground. Then put his little mob together with the insurance companies’ big bucks. That’s how it works — American Brown Shirts at the ready.  

What’s the results of the fascist formula for the rest of us? Well, think how this “method” worked against Dr. Tiller’s abortion clinic and how that story ended. In this case a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save our economy from going bankrupt because of spiraling health care costs may be lost, not because of a better argument, but because of lies backed up by anti-democratic embittered thuggery. The motive? Revenge on America by the Old White Guys of the far right, and greed by the insurance industry.  

snip

It’s time to give this garbage in name: insurance industry funded fascism.

Why? Because Obama won:

They can’t compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can’t reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don’t run the country any more — and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the “other” into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court… for them this is the Apocalypse.

Could someone do a diary on Daily Kos on this?  I did one today.  It needs ot be out there.

Diane is on a well-deserved break this week, but Ed Encho and Gottlieb (along with the adult supervision of M_A) persevere through a nutjob nation  gone wild. We’ll tackle:

1: Blackwater’s (Now Xe) Erik Prince and the story in the Nation by Jeremy Scahill and accusations of murder against political enemies. Prince, a nutjob extraordinaire, is not a patriot or interested in our security, but a racist hater and disciple of extreme violence. In other words; another in a long line of impotent cowards.

2: The Brown Shirt model for the Republican operatives disrupting health care Town Halls. Holy Nutjob Batman, are these freaks for real? They make Pavlov’s dogs at dinner time look positively somnambulant. But for the Pavlov’s on the right like Beck, Limbaugh et al and assorted Republican kool-aid-crack-heads exhorting and inciting violent behavior by couch-potato losers these dumb-animals would be scratching their balls, waiting for a Milk Bone and wondering whatever happened to Monty Hall..

3: Right wing racist losers exploding like Fourth of July’s from Hell like the guy who murdered innocents in a Pennsylvania fitness center because he couldn’t get laid and the near daily human time-bombs from the right who light up the fear and loathing meters better than al Qaeda ever could.

4: The march toward American Totalitarianism – the threats pile up: domestic terror (not coincidentally incited by right wing media moguls), foreign terror by ex-CIA operatives, disease pandemics and mass vaccination/quarantine programs, social unrest due to Depression Era stress and any excuse which can be brought to bear to limit freedom and the power of the people to mobilize against oppression.

Join Gottlieb, Ed Encho and M-A tonight at 6pm EDT on Wild Wild Left Radio, via BlogtalkRadio, for an interesting hour of Political Reporting and Commentary.

The call in number is 646-929-1264

The live chat link will go live around 5:30.

CHAT LINK:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/F…

I live in the NC-11 district, which succeeded in finally replacing slumlord Charles Taylor [a.k.a. “Chainsaw Charlie”] with ex-football heartthrob and semi-Democrat Heath Shuler in the ’06 election. I say semi-Democrat because he’s a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, though less of a hypocritical opportunist than most of the others. Thus he does a pretty good job of actually representing his constituency, which in this corner of southern Appalachia is quite conservative. He’s a local boy made good and a source of some pride for all, thus was the perfect candidate to field against Chainsaw Charlie. Largest source of income in this way-back corner of the state is tourism, so our beautiful forests and mountains are worth way more to us intact than as wood chips or parking lots for Charlie’s puppeteers.

Heath easily carried all 15 counties in the district in ’08, including Henderson, a county primarily populated by native apple farmers, wealthy lawyers and retirees from Florida, and New Jersey ex-pats with Italian surnames and bodyguards. Having met Heath several times during his original campaign, he’s a nice kid with a good heart and honest as the day is long, so I like him. He’s frustrating sometimes, but I’m enough of a realist to know most folks here aren’t nearly as leftist as me, and I’m not the only person he was elected to serve. We’re watching closely, and will take him down at primary as soon as he shows signs of selling out the real ag/tourism base as Charlie did.

The demographics are slowly but surely changing by attrition as the old folks die and lots of DFHs [Dirty F’king Hippies] move in to homestead the countryside and participate in A-ville’s growing reputation as “New Age Mecca.” I’ve got my issues with the DFHs too, but when they can be motivated to vote they are strongly progressive. We’ve a number of great colleges and Universities in the district as well, and students are also a reliable bloc for Dems. There is no doubt that one of these days it will be time to move farther toward the progressive end of the spectrum, so Heath may end up in the Senate if we can arrange for him to run against Burr while we replace him here.

Anyway, Heath is surprisingly bright for a jock, so you might be interested in how he’s handling the ugly Teabagger contingent mobilized to disrupt, harrass and incite violence at the town halls congressmembers are holding during this summer recess. There is a rather large and loud Teabagger contingent in this district, as terminally stupid as anyone else’s and nearly as spaced-out as the hard-core guru branches of the DFHs. Shuler has scheduled not one but two town hall meetings this recess, and if he didn’t play it smart things would no doubt get extremely ugly (most of the Teabaggers in this neck of the woods may always be assumed armed and dangerous).

I know I should be mortified by the lobbyist-organized mobs of angry Brooks Brothers mannequins who are now making headlines by shutting down congressional town hall meetings. I know I should be despondent during this, the Khaki Pants Offensive in the Great American Health Care and Tax War. And yet, I’m euphorically repeating one word over and over again with a big grin on my face.

Finally.

Finally, there’s no pretense. Finally, the Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd’s ugliest traits are there for all to behold.

— David Sirota, Friday, August 07, 2009, The Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd

650,000 farm workers face a daily risk of death and illness from toiling in stifling summer heat. Six died last year and fifteen farm workers have died of heat-related complications since July 2004.

The United Farmworkers Unions and ACLU have filed a lawsuit against the state and its Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board (Cal/OSHA) for failing to live up to their constitutional and statutory duties to protect the safety of farm workers.  See NY Times: Farm Workers’ Union Sues California Agency Over Rules on Heat Safety

“If hundreds of thousands of white-collar employees had to work under dangerous and life-threatening conditions, the state would almost certainly take immediate action to protect their health and safety,” said David Blair-Loy, legal director for the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties. “Low-income farm workers, who are overwhelmingly Latino, deserve no less.”

“The people who feed us should not fear death when they go to work”

UFW President Arturo S. Rodriguez

More, after the fold.

(Also on dkos: http://www.dailykos.com/story/… )