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Longwood Gardens. (Photo by joanneleon. October 16, 2012)
“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
― Albert Einstein
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News and Opinion
It's interesting that this happened on Saturday but it looks like the news did not come out until Tuesday.
NATO kills four children in Afghan East: Karzai
(Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday condemned a NATO operation that he said killed four children in the country's east, a claim the coalition said was possible.
The operation took place in the Baraki Barak district of Logar province on Saturday, a statement released by Karzai's office said, adding: "It resulted in the killing of four innocent children" who were tending to livestock.
Civilian casualties have been a major source of friction between Karzai's government and the U.S.-led NATO forces in Afghanistan.
"Despite repeated pledges by NATO to avoid civilian casualties, innocent lives, including children, are still being lost," Karzai said in the statement.
A spokeswoman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said it was aware of possible ISAF-related civilian casualties from the October 20 operation.
No words.
Morning Joe's Drone Debate: Whose Four-Year-Old Girls Should Be Killed?
MSNBC's Morning Joe had a remarkable discussion of U.S. drone attacks today (10/23/12). Here's a clip of the most intense moments of the exchange between the conservative-leaning Joe Scarborough and Time columnist Joe Klein, who is occasionally mistaken for a liberal:
Scarborough went on to declare:
Listen, I hate to sound like a Code Pink guy here, I'm telling you this is causing, this collateral damage that seems so clean with a joystick from California, this is going to cause the U.S. problems in the future.
Klein's retort is remarkable:
The bottom line, in the end, is: Whose four-year-old gets killed? What we're doing is limiting the possibility that four-year-olds here are going to get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.
Joe Klein: We have to kill their kids with drones to protect ours
On MSNBC's Morning Joe program this morning, which focused on Monday's night presidential debate, the former right-wing Congressman and current host Joe Scarborough voiced an eloquent and impassioned critique of President Obama's ongoing killing of innocent people in the Muslim world using drones. In response, Time Magazine's Joe Klein, a stalwart Obama supporter, offered one of the most nakedly sociopathic defenses yet heard of these killings. This exchange, which begins at roughly the 7:00 minute mark on the video embedded below, is quite revealing in several respects.
[...]
This exchange is a perfectly vivid expression of the Obama legacy. Here we have a standard Democratic/progressive pundit who is one of the media's most stalwart Obama fanatics defending indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim children. Meanwhile, it's left to a former right-wing, Gingrich-era congressman to raise objections, call for more public scrutiny, and cite the moral and strategic dangers, one of the very few commentators on MSNBC - the progressive network - who has ever voiced such passionate criticism of Obama's ongoing killings.
Obama has led all sorts of progressives and other Democrats to be the most vocal supporters of unrestrained aggression, secret assassinations, and "crippling" the Iranian people with sanctions. It is completely unsurprising that the most sociopathic defense of drones comes from one of the most committed Obama supporters, and that it's now left to a former GOP Congressman to raise objections. As much as anything, that is the Obama legacy.
Obama Top Adviser Robert Gibbs Justifies Murder of 16 Year Old American Citizen
Luke Rudkowski attempts to question Obama's Senior Campaign Adviser, Robert Gibbs on the Obama administration's appeal to keep the indefinite detention provision of the NDAA. With no response about the NDAA, Luke later asks Robert Gibbs on how President Obama will defend having a secret kill list in the debates. Gibbs gives a standard response on the administration doing what it has to do to handle the threat of Alqaeda. Sierra Adamson then follows up by questioning if there is justification for killings such as Anwar al-Awlaki's 16 year old son who was an American citizen, to which Gibbs lays the blame of his death on Anwar al-Awlaki not being a responsible father.
The "disposition matrix".
Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists
This project, based on interviews with dozens of current and former national security officials, intelligence analysts and others, examines evolving U.S. counterterrorism policies and the practice of targeted killing. This is the first of three stories.
Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”
The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.
Climate Silence: It’s the Right, Stupid
http://www.commondreams.org/...
This is from 1988 — 24 years ago. The questioner doesn’t mamby-pamby around with he-said she-said, he states flatly that “most scientists” agree and that future generations are at risk.
And neither candidate bothers with dissembling or dodging. Both acknowledge the problem and promise to address it.
In 1988! In the ensuing 24 years, U.S. politics has moved backward on this issue.
There’s lots being written these days about “climate silence.” There’s a grassroots protest underway. Coral Davenport has a piece on it at National Journal. Mike Grunwald touches on it at Time. Eugene Robinson has editorialized on it at The Washington Post. Tom Zeller Jr. has covered it, and so have ClimateWire and the L.A. Times. But by far the smartest take I’ve seen yet is from the only person in the cable news universe who takes this issue seriously, Chris Hayes:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
We heard a lot about drilling though. Drill baby drill.
Climate Change Not Mentioned In Presidential Debates For First Time In A Generation
History was made at the third and final presidential debate at Lynn University on Monday night. President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, sparred over American policy in Libya and Iran. They traded generalities on trade with China and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and made brief mentions of renewable technology and "energy independence."
But as noted by several debate watchers, climate change was never mentioned -- not by the candidates, and not by the debate moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS News. Given the absence of the topic at the two preceding meetings between Obama and Romney, the close of Monday night's event marked the first time in roughly a generation that climate change has failed to receive an airing at any of the presidential debates.
Nearly 25 years after NASA scientist James Hansen famously told Congress that the science behind the greenhouse effect was clear -- and after similarly long-lived efforts to raise awareness of global warming and to force the topic into the national dialog -- the meaning behind Monday's milestone is likely to be hotly debated. To some, it is a sign that climate change has become a niche issue -- and is now being treated like any other special interest. To others, the candidates are merely playing the political odds in an election in which Americans are highly focused on jobs and other more immediate concerns.
But in the hours immediately following the debate, activists and climate scientists simply expressed a mixture of anger and disillusionment.
The Duopoly Debates Itself
To any objective observer, the consensus that exists between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on the fundamental issues of war and peace, Wall Street’s dominance of American life, and fiscal austerity, has been made crystal clear in the two “debates.” In the absence of effective popular resistance to the duopoly of money, the economic and social crisis fails to create a corresponding politicalcrisis for the rulers. As a result, there is nothing important for them to debate.
The Nation magazine and the campaign to reelect Obama
The Nation speaks for a layer of the upper-middle class that has done quite well under Obama—sections of the trade union bureaucracy, tenured professors at elite universities, well-paid journalists in the orbit of the political establishment and employed by Democratic Party think tanks, better-off sections of minority populations. Obama has offered them “space,” soliciting their services in policing the working class and maintaining the political order.
They are upset at the prospect of a Romney victory, but not because of Romney’s viciously anti-working class agenda, which Obama shares. Rather, they are concerned about their own positions and privileges,
which are linked to the fortunes of the Democratic Party.
In the end, the anti-working class and militarist policies of the Obama administration are not disappointments at all. The writers of the Nation are far more concerned about the danger of an independent movement of the working class than they are about wage cutting, unemployment and attacks on education and health care.
The upper-middle class layers for which the Nation speaks are sensitive to the potential for a movement from below, outside of the Democratic Party, which would threaten their own social and political position. Their social grievances, and their opposition to the Republicans, reflect dissatisfaction with the distribution of wealth within the top 10 percent, not the lowering of the living standards of the bottom 60 percent. They exclude any genuinely popular and democratic alternative to the two-party system—that is, a socialist alternative."
Informant: NYPD paid me to 'bait' Muslims
Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bengali descent who has now denounced his work as an informant, said police told him to embrace a strategy called "create and capture." He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests.
"We need you to pretend to be one of them," Rahman recalled the police telling him. "It's street theater."
[...]
The AP corroborated Rahman's account through arrest records and weeks of text messages between Rahman and his police handler. The AP also reviewed the photos Rahman sent to police. Friends confirmed Rahman was at certain events when he said he was there, and former NYPD officials, while not personally familiar with Rahman, said the tactics he described were used by informants.
Informants like Rahman are a central component of the NYPD's wide-ranging programs to monitor life in Muslim neighborhoods since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Police officers have eavesdropped inside Muslim businesses, trained video cameras on mosques and collected license plates of worshippers. Informants who trawl the mosques — known informally as "mosque crawlers" — tell police what the imam says at sermons and provide police lists of attendees, even when there's no evidence they committed a crime.
The programs were built with unprecedented help from the CIA.
FBI releases documents that confirm they spy on anarchists
Two anarchists remain locked up as prosecutors attempt to coerce the testimonies they’ve been subpoenaed to give about acts of vandalism in the Pacific Northwest. In the meantime, though, the FBI has accidentally blown the cover off its own case. ...
On Thursday, legal documents intended to be cloaked indefinitely were accidently unsealed in US District Court in Seattle for a moment, finally offering a small bit of insight as to why the FBI has been targeting adherents to a specific ideology and intensifying what some have equated to a politically-motivated witch-hunt aimed at anarchists. ...
"Although many anarchists are law abiding, there is a history in the Pacific Northwest of some anarchists participating in property destruction and other criminal activity in support of their philosophy," the affidavit reads, according to the newspaper.
That’s where the Pacific Northwest Three fit in: investigators had hoped that by subpoenaing Plante, Olejnik and Duran to testify, they’d learn more about anarchists in the region who may have been vocal about any attempts to wreak havoc during the May Day protests. ...
"What (prosecutors) decided to do is choose people and punish them for their association," Jenn Kaplan, an attorney for Olejnik, tells the Seattle Times. To the paper, a counsel for Olejnik adds that the grand jury investigation specifically sought answers from the anarchist about someone she knows.
The United States Will Not Go Into A Debt Crisis, Not Now, Not Ever
If there’s one article of faith in Washington (and elsewhere), it’s the idea that the United States might get into a debt crisis if it doesn’t get its fiscal house in order.
This is not true.
The reason why it’s not true is because we live in a fiat currency system, where the United States government can create an infinite number of dollars at no cost to meet its obligations. A Treasury bill is a promise that the government will give you US dollars–something that the United States government can produce infinitely and at no cost. ...
While in theory printing tons of money could create inflation, in practice demand for the dollar is so high–and for structural reasons that have very little to do with how the US economy is doing at a particular point in time–that it’s hard to imagine a circumstance under which the US government would have to print so much that it would cause significant inflation.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
The Evening Blues - 10-23-12
Investigating the size and composition of the LGBT community
War/No More Trouble | Playing for Change | Song Around The World
Remember when progressive debate was about our values and not about a "progressive" candidate? Remember when progressive websites championed progressive values and didn't tell progressives to shut up about values so that "progressive" candidates can get elected?
Come to where the debate is not constrained by oaths of fealty to persons or parties.
Come to where the pie is served in a variety of flavors.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." ~ Noam Chomsky
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