Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, news, etc.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Good Morning!
Rose garden at Longwood Gardens (Photo by joanneleon. July, 2012)
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
Help on the Way, 2/26/77 ☮ Grateful Dead
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News and Opinion
Who Are The Others? It Is Long Past Time We Met the Victims of the Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama
According to that story, which is sourced by McClatchy to an anonymous "intelligence official," there were five Others. The stories also calls them "Islamist insurgents," but they have no names that are important enough for the intelligence official to leak, so there is no good reason for a properly skeptical citizen of a self-governing republic to believe that part of the story. They remain The Others.
What if the anonymous official is lying? What if the anonymous official is just, you know, wrong? What if one of the Others was a date farmer, or a cab driver, or someone on his way to prayer? Then we must ask ourselves questions about these Others on whom we are making war, even if we are making war on them accidentally, as if that matters when you've been roasted alive by modern ordinance dropped on you by a flying robot. Do the Others have parents? Do they have grandparents? Do the Others have siblings, who now watch the clear blue skies in terror every day, the way New Yorkers did for a few months after 9/11? Do the Others have spouses who miss them? Do the Others have children who wonder why the Others haven't come home from work yet? Do the Others have circles of friends who talk about the hole that is left in their daily lives, who talk about corny old jokes the Others used to tell, or stories about when one of the Others tripped on a rock or fell in a creek, or offer prayers for the souls of the Others every day? The bell, one presumes, tolls for the Others as much as it tolls for me, or thee, or anybody else anywhere.
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On Tuesday, a brilliant report, about the effect of the war that we are waging purely at the behest of the president, was released the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School and the Global Justice Clinic at the New York University School of Law. You should download it and read it. It is the testimony of the people on whom we are currently waging a war, a war of choice, as much as the war in Iraq was, and a war as unilateral as any we have ever fought, and a war that is more the result of one man's decisions than any other in our history. It doesn't matter a damn what we say we're doing. If we're firing modern ordinance from robot vehicles into villages, it doesn't matter how good we say our targeting is — and history tells us there's always reason to take boasts about that with a couple of tons of salt — because we are still blowing up villages, and the people in them. We are making war on those people because we are firing weapons of war into their midst. We are destroying their local economies, unravelling the fabric of their local societies, engendering existential dread until it becomes a fact of daily living. We are making war upon them because, as the report makes clear, they think we're making war on them, and that makes all the difference:
Study Finds U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan Miss Militant Targets and "Terrorize" Civilians
Chart (from late August) intends to illustrate the increase in deaths due to IEDs but it more effectively illustrates the dramatic increase in deaths since 2009.
2,003 Deaths in Afghanistan The chart shows deaths of identified United States service members directly involved in the war in Afghanistan. Rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire took the largest number of American lives earlier in the war. In 2008, deaths from improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, began to make up a larger share of combat deaths.
Russia is apparently bringing the issue of the war in Afghanistan to the forefront this week at the UN.
Why Does NATO Need Bases In Afghanistan? – OpEd
“We are concerned about the character of international military presence in Afghanistan after 2014 and we are worried by the information that at present new bases are being built there that can deploy tens of thousands of servicemen. All this is superfluous if we only mean stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan. We proceed from the assumption that no superfluous military presence in Afghanistan is required.”
Alexander Grushko added that Russia understands the need to leave foreign military instructors in Afghanistan to train personnel for the Afghan army and security service. If any other plans are implemented there, it will further complicate Moscow’s relations with NATO.
Russia is also planning to ask the US to provide a report on the Afghan campaign at the UN General Assembly session. This could give rise to a contradictory situation. It is common knowledge that no special progress has been achieved there. Neither terrorism nor huge economic and social problems have been solved in Afghanistan since NATO’s arrival. The admission of a failure is unlikely to impel the UN Security Council to prolong the mandate. Moreover, it will be a good reason not to provide similar mandates in Syria and Iran. On the other hand, if Americans prove their success, there should logically be no bases left in Afghanistan and all the troops have to be withdrawn. Political scientist Pavel Zolotaryov has shared his opinion with The Voice of Russia.
Simpson and Bowles have been touring colleges scaring the youth and trying to create a divide.
Simpson, Bowles renew push for U.S. to tackle debt
In a more bitingly sarcastic speech, Simpson decried special interest groups such as the AARP that make changing entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid a political liability. He also criticized political parties that will push a politician out in primary for seeking bipartisanship.
“There is an absence of trust in Washington today,” he said. “You really have an absence of people in the sensible center.”
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/...
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Bloomberg reported last week that a small group of senators, both Democrats and Republicans, seek to bring back the Bowles-Simpson plan in the lame-duck session of Congress next month. Bowles said Tuesday that he and Simpson have 40 senators and 150 House members on board with a version of their plan.
This is obviously a very complicated story that I will try to cover in more depth in future posts. For now, I am just focusing on the parliament protests and just barely touching on other aspects.
The shape of modern Spain is being questioned
Violence in Madrid captured headlines but the post-Franco democratic settlement was crumbling in Catalonia
As work crews on Wednesday cleared the debris left behind by violent clashes between police and protesters outside las Cortes, the parliament building in Madrid, Spain's long-running crisis had definitively spilled beyond everyday politics and economics.
Tuesday night's violence reflected a first radicalisation of protest in a country whose peaceful and plentiful indignados were the inspiration for Occupy movements from Wall Street to the City of London. Key indignado groups, indeed, had refused to back the demonstration.
But the violence, which saw 64 people injured, also showed a hardening of government policy towards protest since the election of a conservative, reformist party headed by prime minister Mariano Rajoy at the end of last year.
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In Barcelona it was legislators, not demonstrators, who were challenging the post-Franco settlement. Artur Mas, leader of the Catalan regional government called early elections for 25 November as politicians of all colours adapted to a game-changing demonstration for independence that brought hundreds of thousands of Catalans onto the city's streets earlier this month.
Thousands Surround Spanish Parliament in Bid to "Occupy Congress" & Stop Austerity. 2 of 2
Striking Greeks Retake Streets: 'No to Troika's Austerity!'
As a general strike took hold across Greece on Wednesday, tens of thousands gathered in central Athens and marched on parliament as the conservative-led coalition government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras receives its first taste of large-scale popular unrest in response to its push for deeper austerity cuts designed to satisfy EU and IMF lenders.
The people, mostly union workers, shouted "We won't submit to the troika!" and "EU, IMF Out!" ...
U.S. income gap between rich, poor hits new high
The U.S. poverty rate leveled off last year for the first time since the Great Recession, but the halting recovery deepened the financial pain for middle-class families and pushed to a new high the income gap between the country's richest and poorest citizens.
The number and share of people living in poverty was essentially unchanged from 2010 levels. That ended four straight years of increases, though not in California, where the rate rose to a 16-year high, the Census Bureau said Wednesday.
There was no relief for the average American: The median household income, after adjusting for inflation, dropped 1.5% in 2011 from the previous year to $50,054. That is now 8.1% lower than in 2007, when the recession began late that year.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
The Evening Blues - 9-26-12
Practice What You Preach: Obama Preaches Free Speech to the UN by Jesselyn Radack
This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close - by Matt Taibbi
Disharmonic Convergence of Free Speech Free Fall by Jesselyn Radack
UC Davis Settles Pepper Spray Lawsuit with Personal Apology From Katehi... and $1,000,000. by jpmassar
Beat up the protesters on Tuesday? Get an even bigger crowd of protesters on Wednesday.
Grateful Dead - Shakedown Street
We are ready for some serious change. We are ready to take up the tools of a free and analytic press to peacefully undermine the stranglehold of the kleptocrats on our battered democracy. We are ready to expose and publicize their greed, lies and illegal machinations and hold their enablers in government and the media to account. Are you in?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead
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