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May 26 2010
Blast-Induced Brain Injuries from Iraq and Afghanistan
What has been called the “signature wound” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan- the mild brain damage troops suffer from a roadside bomb – might be so unique in its destruction that it could be a newly discovered disease, scientists say.
Army field studies have shown that more than 10% of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered at least one concussion or brain injury, the vast majority of those from exposure to a homemade bomb or improvised explosive device. Five percent to 15% of mild TBI patients develop lasting problems with concentration, short-term memory, fatigue and chronic headaches.
One of those is former Army Spec. Michael Cain, who lost his right leg below the knee in a roadside explosion in Iraq in 2003. Today, he is still plagued with short-term memory loss, difficulty concentrating and irritability.
“If they tell me some important stuff, like appointments, if I don’t write it down or put it in my BlackBerry right away, I’m not going to remember,” Cain says.
Unemployed and living on a medical retirement income, Cain says he is uncertain about his future.
“I really wish that they’d go away,” he says of symptoms such as short-term memory loss and his tendency to startle easily. “I didn’t want them to tell me I had a brain problem, because I was a pretty smart person before. I had straight A’s. … It really frustrates me.”
May 25 2010
US Soldiers Killed in Action Since Obama’s Inauguration
And on the previous page were the names of Pvt. Grant A. Cotting and Spc. Matthew M. Pollini, the first and second American soldiers killed in action after the inauguration of Barack Obama.
Twenty-one-year-old Spc. Matthew Pollini was serving with the 772nd Military Police Company, an Army National Guard unit from Taunton. Flags flew at half-staff in Rockland and the town posted a memorial notice.
Erica Pollini told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy her brother “was a talented, loyal person” who joined the National Guard two or three years ago. She said his unit was activated last fall and he was due home in October. Joseph Pollini told WBZ-TV his older brother “was a hero, a hands-down hero,” and said he followed his brother into the same Guard unit, a dream of service they shared.
Pollini’s 20-year-old wife Sarah, whom he married Dec. 22, told The Patriot Ledger, “we had lots of plans.”
May 24 2010
Cheney Personally Issued Visas to 9/11 Terrorists!
Although Mohamed Atta and his crew of suicide bombers had been identified as al Qaeda terrorists and barred from entering the United States before 9/11, Richard B. Cheney personally issued all of them “special student visas” without further investigation.
And wouldn’t the Democrats be screaming bloody murder if George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had personally intervened to make 9/11 possible!
But after Ken Salazar personally intervened in federal court to overturn an injunction against offshore drilling, specifically for the catastrophic well at Mississippi Canyon Block 252…
Democrats just grinned their usual shit-eating grins, and blamed everybody else except Barack Obama.
And that’s the real story.
Obama/Salazar intervened last year to allow BP to drill at Mississippi Canyon Block 252, where tens of millions of gallons of oil are now polluting the Gulf of Mexico.
The actual exploratory drilling was approved by the Obama administration on April 6, 2009.
Within days of the 2009 approval, the Center for Biological Diversity and its allies won a court order vacating the Bush Five-Year Offshore Drilling Plan. Rather than use the court order as a timeout on new offshore oil drilling to develop a new plan, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar filed a special motion with the court to exempt approved oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He specifically identified BP’s operation as one that should be released from the vacature.
So the system actually worked, and offshore drilling had been shut down around Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, but then…
Obama/Salazar intervened in court to start drilling again, in April 2009, without further evironmental review, exactly where Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank.
And just because this is exactly the aspect of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that so many Democrats want to forget, I’ll connect those two dots one more time.
1. The federal courts shut down offshore drilling in April 2009.
2. Obama/Salazar intervened to get BP a permit to drill its famous goddamned well.
So why aren’t the Democrats outraged about Obama’s catastrophic irresponsibility?
Let’s ask the most famous Democrat of them all, who once explained a similar conundrum.
“Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.“
May 23 2010
Why Is This Man Smiling?
Barack Obama, May 22, 2010
Today in the New York Times…
President Obama previewed a new national security strategy rooted in diplomatic engagement and international alliances on Saturday as he essentially repudiated his predecessor’s emphasis on unilateral American power and the right to wage preemptive war.
May 21 2010
Redistributing Wealth: How much would YOU get?
Suppose your household sits exactly in the middle of net worth in the United States, meaning that 50% of households are worth more and 50% less, exactly at the median of net worth. What is YOUR net worth?
According to the most recent (2007) Survey of Consumer Finances from the Federal Reserve, YOUR net worth is…
$120,300.
Now suppose that all the wealth in the United States were distributed equally among all the households, so that everybody had exactly the average (mean) amount of wealth.
What would YOU get?
$556,300.
YOU would gain $436,000!
It might also surprise middle-class Americans to learn that the middle class is not in the middle.
Suppose you’re exactly in the the middle of the middle class, exactly in the middle of the middle quintile of wealth, which is wealthier than the bottom 40% but poorer than the top 40%.
Then YOUR net worth is only…
$88,100.
But if all the wealth in the United States were distributed exactly equally among all the families…
Then YOU would gain $468,200.
May 20 2010
Friedman v. Obama
Tom Friedman thinks that George W. Bush should have responded to 9/11 by imposing a $1 tax on gasoline at the pump, and the idea of regressive taxes as a tool of environmental policy would obviously appeal to a tool for globalization like Tom, oscillating between his 11,400 square-foot cottage in Bethesda and after-dinner speeches @ $50,000 for his corporate clientele.
Now Friedman has identified the Deepwater Horizon oil-spill as “Obama’s 9/11,” and likewise re-evaluated the rest of recent American history into a never-ending demonstration of…
The genius of Tom Friedman!
President Bush’s greatest failure was not Iraq, Afghanistan or Katrina. It was his failure of imagination after 9/11 to mobilize the country to get behind a really big initiative for nation-building in America.
I suggested a $1-a-gallon “Patriot Tax” on gasoline that could have simultaneously reduced our deficit, funded basic science research, diminished our dependence on oil imported from the very countries whose citizens carried out 9/11, strengthened the dollar, stimulated energy efficiency and renewable power and slowed climate change.
Ethnic cleansing in New Orleans and genocide in Iraq could have been mere footnotes to the brilliant Bush/Friedman gas tax, which would have simultaneously solved almost every problem in America and the world today!
And all for one regressive tax, which millionaire shills for globalization like Tom Friedman wouldn’t even notice at the pump.
Hurrah!
And of course down-playing the invasion of Iraq simultaneously protects Tom Friedman’s reputation as an economic and foreign-policy prophet, because…
If the invasion and occupation of Iraq are recognized as crimes against humanity and in general catastrophic blunders, then cheerleaders for war like Tom Friedman might look like idiots, instead of geniuses.
This war is so unprecedented that it has always been a gut call – and my gut has told me four things. First, this is a war of choice. Saddam Hussein poses no direct threat to us today. But confronting him is a legitimate choice – much more legitimate than knee-jerk liberals and pacifists think. Removing Saddam – with his obsession to obtain weapons of mass destruction – ending his tyranny and helping to nurture a more progressive Iraq that could spur reform across the Arab-Muslim world are the best long-term responses to bin Ladenism.
Harharharhar!!!
What a fucking idiot!
And now the self-proclaimed economic and foreign policy genius Tom Friedman is bashing Barack Obama, and for what?
Sadly, President Obama seems intent on squandering his environmental 9/11 with a Bush-level failure of imagination.
Squandering his environmental 9/11?
But let’s resist the temptation to lose ourselves in admiration of Tom Friedman’s triple-Pulitzer-Prize-winning rhetorical glory, and remember that…
Barack Obama had already squandered the possibility of using Deepwater Horizon as a “teaching moment” by rolling out his vast expansion of offshore drilling only three weeks before Deepwater Horizon exploded.
“Don’t use drugs,” says the teacher, with a needle in his arm!
So what could Obama do now, if he kicked out all his Friedman-lovin’ “centrist” advisors, and devoted the rest of administration to helping ordinary American citizens and protecting the environment?
I personally favor most of the same programs as Dennis Kucinich and Raul Grijalva, which are typical of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but virtually none of those policies is even on the table, and what do we get instead, if we’re lucky?
Nothing but a feeble and indirect version of Tom Friedman’s gas tax, which would add less than $0.25 to the price of a gallon of gas, and won’t that scare all those gas-guzzlers right off the road?
So what’s the point of this apparently aimless little odyssey around the regressive center of American politics?
Figure it out for yourself!
But one possible point is that Obama is now getting bashed from the left, right, and center of the triangular firing squad of American politics, except for his mindless TV cult of personality, and the most significant difference between progressive Obama-bashing and all the rest of it is that progressives aren’t promoting anti-government know-nothingism or out-of-control corporate predation.
May 18 2010
Obama’s Stupid Earth Day Celebration, and “New Physics”
“Well, if there’s any doubt about the leadership that our military is showing, you just need to look at this F-18 fighter and the light-armored vehicle behind me. The Army and Marine Corps have been testing this vehicle on a mixture of biofuels. And this Navy fighter jet — appropriately called the Green Hornet — will be flown for the first time in just a few days, on Earth Day.”
Can anyone imagine a stupider way to celebrate Earth Day than rolling out yet another version of one of the most lethal fighter-bombers ever invented?
May 16 2010
Obama’s Offshore Military “Earth Day”
Basket stars, crinoids, anemone, and crab (NOAA Deepwater Coral Expedition, Gulf of Mexico, 2009)
This is the unseen world imperiled by the uncapped oil well a mile below the surface of the gulf. The millions of gallons of crude, and the introduction of chemicals to disperse it, have thrown this underwater ecosystem into chaos, and scientists have no answer to the question of how this unintended and uncontrolled experiment in marine biology and chemistry will ultimately play out.
Some of the press may be wondering why we are announcing offshore drilling in a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. Well, if there’s any doubt about the leadership that our military is showing, you just need to look at this F-18 fighter and the light-armored vehicle behind me. The Army and Marine Corps have been testing this vehicle on a mixture of biofuels. And this Navy fighter jet — appropriately called the Green Hornet — will be flown for the first time in just a few days, on Earth Day.
May 16 2010
Neo-Con-Man Obama
When the neo-con-man Barack Obama opens millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere for offshore drilling, he isn’t really an anti-environmental shit-head like George W. Bush.
He’s only appeasing “moderate Republicans,” who may vote for his ridiculously weak climate bill.
And when the neo-con-man Barack Obama intensifies our hopeless war in Afghanistan, he isn’t really a chicken-hawk mass-murderer like George W. Bush.
He’s only making peace by making more war, or withdrawing our brave soldiers from Afghanistan by sending in tens of thousands more of them, or some other self-contradictory bullshit!
And when the Harry-and-Louise-lovin’ con-man Obama takes single-payer off the table before debate about healthcare reform even begins, because it would be impossible to override a filibuster of single-payer, and Democrats would have to resort to passing single-payer by “reconciliation,” and then…
Obama and the Democrats pass their turd of a healthcare reform bill by “reconciliation” anyway…
Democrats aren’t really Republicans Lite who ran an anti-government shithead like George W. Bush for President.
Democrats are defenders of the people, and Obama is our hero!
And even though Obama’s main financial backer for the US Senate and Financial Director of his Presidential campaign is a multi-billionaire banker even crookeder than Kenny Lay…
Obama isn’t really a devious and corrupt corporate flunky like George W. Bush.
Obama is not what he is, and he is what he ain’t!
May 14 2010
Obama/Salazar’s Illegal Offshore Permits Exposed
From the New York Times…
The federal Minerals Management Service gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species – and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the gulf.
Those approvals, federal records show, include one for the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and resulting in thousands of barrels of oil spilling into the gulf each day.
Under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) is required to get permits to allow drilling where it might harm endangered species or marine mammals.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is responsible for protecting endangered species and marine mammals. It has said on repeated occasions that drilling in the gulf affects these animals, but the minerals agency since January 2009 has approved at least three huge lease sales, 103 seismic blasting projects and 346 drilling plans.
Agency records also show that permission for those projects and plans was granted without getting the permits required under federal law.
And it wasn’t exactly a secret in Washington that Obama/Salazar were allowing BP to risk “catastrophic operator errors” in the Gulf of Mexico.
May 13 2010
Four Images of Deepwater Horizon
Volunteers cleaning a beach in Louisiana
Oil slick approaching Channeleur Islands (Mark Ralston, AFP/Getty Images)
White speck upper-right is an oil rig
Shrimp boats pulling booms
May 11 2010
Obama Could Have Prevented the Deepwater Horizon Disaster
Ken Salazar’s first pledge as secretary of the interior was to reform the scandal plagued Mineral Management Service (MMS), which had been found by the U.S. inspector general to have traded sex, drugs, and financial favors with oil-company executives. In a January 29, 2009 press release on the scandal, Salazar stated:
“President Obama’s and my goal is to restore the public’s trust, to enact meaningful reform…to uphold the law, and to ensure that all of us — career public servants and political appointees — do our jobs with the highest level of integrity.”
Yet just three months later, Secretary Salazar allowed the MMS to approve – with no environmental review – the BP drilling operation that exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 workers and pouring millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The disaster will soon be, if it is not already, the worst oil spill in American history.
BP submitted its drilling plan to the MMS on March 10, 2009. Rather than subject the plan to a detailed environmental review before approving it as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the agency declared the plan to be “categorically excluded” from environmental analysis because it posed virtually no chance of harming the environment.
As BP itself pointed out in its April 9, 2010, letter to the Council on Environmental Quality, categorical exclusions are only to be used when a project will have “minimal or nonexistent” environmental impacts.
But how could Obama have known that Ken Salazar is a gung-ho booster of offshore drilling, instead of a responsible guardian of the public interest?
Let’s blame it all on Salazar, and BP, and Halliburton, and… anybody but Obama!
But…
In 2006, while Salazar was in the Colorado Senate, he fought to get increased oil and gas leases in the Gulf Coast region, by sponsoring the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006.
Now some people are calling the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe “Obama’s Katrina,” but that characterization is completely unfair… to George W. Bush.
Because nobody claims that Bush could have prevented Hurricane Katrina, like Obama could have prevented the Deepwater Horizon disaster, by enforcing existing environmental law.