Part of an article from Politico.com

At the polls, it has been a massacre. In recent weeks, Republicans have lost a Louisiana House seat they had held for more than two decades and an Illinois House seat they had held for more than three. Internal polls show that next week they could lose a Mississippi House seat that they have held for 13 years.

In the polls, they are setting records (and not the good kind). The most recent Gallup Poll has 67 percent of voters disapproving of President Bush; those numbers are worse than Richard Nixon’s on the eve of his resignation. A CBS News poll taken at the end of April found only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the GOP — the lowest since CBS started asking the question more than two decades ago. By comparison, 52 percent of the public has a favorable view of the Democratic Party.

Things are so bad that many people don’t even want to call themselves Republicans. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has found the lowest percentage of self-described Republicans in 16 years of polling.

"The anti-Republican mood is fairly big, and it has been overwhelming," said Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis.

Diarist's note: This diary attempts to factually (yet emotionally) describe a massacre. The pictures and words contained below may disgust you. If images of death and violence disturb you or anyone who might happen upon them (such as a child or co-worker), do not click on the asterisked links.

My Lai: 7:30 a.m. March 16, 1968.
Children slaughtered. Senselessly. Needlessly. Coldly.

Women raped and killed. Disgusting? Inhumane. Unfathomable. Unforgivable.

Some come forward to surrender. They surrender not their freedom but their lives. Take no prisoners.

Bodies lie in piles. Strewn in ditches. Huddled behind bunkers. Clustered in tiny huts.

One American stands responsible for shooting and killing 60 innocent Vietnamese citizens -- because another American refused.

Beyond those 60 are too many others. Three hundred eight-five in all? Five hundred four? Five hundred eighty-three? Nobody knows.

Vietnamese citizens lie dead on the ground, dead because one man ordered it and other men obeyed.

Today is December 10, 2007, nearly 26 years ago on December 10, 1981, a massacre occured in the small El Salvadoran hamlet of El Mozote.  Its inhabitants were systematically exterminated by the Atlacatl battalion, a U.S. trained counterinsurgency force. From the beginning, Monterrosa, their U.S. Special Forces trained commander, worked to give his new force a mística -- a mystique.

According to Mark Danner of the New Yorker, the men of the Atlacatl

celebrated their graduation from training by collecting all the dead animals they could find off the roads -- dogs, vultures, anything – and boiled them together into a bloody soup. They chugged it down. Then they stood at rigid attention and sang, full-throated, the unit's theme song, "Somos Guerreros":
We are warriors!
Warriors all!
We are going forth to kill
A mountain of terrorists

Only, they mistook at least 733 civilians as ‘terrorists’ on
December 10, 1981. And they  slaughtered them all.

A lawsuit against Blackwater claims that Blackwater is looking the other way about the use of illegal steroids by its employees/mercenaries.  From CNN

A quarter of Blackwater security guards in Iraq use steroids and other "judgment-altering substances," according to a lawsuit filed by the families of several Iraqis killed or wounded in a Baghdad shooting in September.

More after the Jump

Via Yahoo! comes news of a horrendous, blatant disregard for life and of cruelty so debasing that it can only be human in origin -- no other creature on the planet could be so callous.

Pet massacres carried out in Puerto Rico
By YAISHA VARGAS and ANDREW O. SELSKY, Associated Press Writers Wed Nov 14, 6:24 PM ET

TRUJILLO ALTO, Puerto Rico - Back roads, gorges and garbage dumps on this tropical island are littered with the decaying carcasses of dogs and cats. An Associated Press investigation reveals why: possibly thousands of unwanted animals have been tossed off bridges, buried alive and otherwise inhumanely disposed of by taxpayer-financed animal control programs.

[...]

I couldn't believe I hadn't seen this noted anywhere before. Due to the graphic and upsetting nature of the information in the article, I will provide the link to the original article at the end of this piece. Be forewarned -- it isn't an easy read.

One of the snipers charged with placing "bait" out to draw Iraqis into their killzone is quoted as saying

"If you've never been outside the wire, you really have no basis -- you don't have a basis to judge what I do or what I don't do. You've never been in a life-or-death situation, where you've had to count on the guy to your left and right,"Hand said.

"People who stay back here, in my opinion, are not mentally in the game. They've never been out there."

The problem is what happens "outside the wire" has become a freezone. Free from accountability for anything a Soldier does. We have seen over and over when brought up on charges for things like murder and rape, the punishment is a slap on the wrist if that. There is too pat a pattern not to believe the same thing that is happening in Washington, is happening in Iraq.

The Native Artist didn't choose to share secrets of his spirituality or ceremonies and I didn't ask, but he told me there was a large book of newspaper articles about the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 over on the table, "Read it all," he said. Then, he explained some things to me after I asked the right questions.

First however, I want to repost most of an earlier dairy to put the new information into historical context, then we will proceed.

Crossposted at Progressive Historians

I made a comment in "We Will Never Sell (Our Sacred Black Hills),"
and I want to share it with everyone.

You know,

When I listened to the radio show on Native American Calling that discussed "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" before it was on HBO, a question was asked, "Are they ready to hear the truth about Native American History?"

My first thought was & is yes.

 

Your comments and all the others here are just proof that that is in fact so.

Thankyou from the bottom of my heart.  

Here is the radio show I was referring to, that was on Native American Calling.

Source
Tuesday, May 22, 2007 – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:

HBO Films presents the epic film adaptation of Dee Brown's seminal nonfiction book "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee."

Crossposted at Progressive Historians

Thank you to Nimbus for posting this diary, about a subject which I, a Chicagoan, had never learned.

In 1936, "Big Steel" (the United States Steel Corporation) recognized the SWOC, or Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and signed a contract allowing for wages of five dollars a day, with 40-hour weeks and time-and-a-half for overtime.  110 firms were under this contract by May, 1937.

The SWOC called for a strike against Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation - within 36 hours, the corporation agreed to a Labor Board Election, which was won by the union, 17,028 to 7,207.

Learn how this affected Chicago, on the flip.

I've worked for newspapers for all my adult life, so I take a personal interest in these things.

Yesterday another poster correctly pointed out that most U.S. news providers were ignoring a Marine sergeant's admission that he urinated on the head of one of the Iraqi civilians killed in the Haditha massacre. But at least the New York Times told the disturbing truth.

I went to Google News to check the latest on the case of the Marines accused of murdering two dozen Iraqi civilians in Haditha. Today in court one of the Marines admitted to urinating on a dead civilian after the massacre.

Going down Google's list of search results, I noticed that only foreign news outlets -- which of course do not rely on the Associated Press -- mentioned the urination incident in the headline.

My curiosity piqued as to why only international outlets mentioned the urination while no American ones did, I soon found out why: The Associated Press account -- the report of record for the vast majority of American news outlets -- doesn't mention the urination incident at all, which was admitted to by USMC Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz in his sworn testimony.

More on the jump:

Of all the tropes trotted out in the wake of the murders at Virginia Tech, perhaps the most grating is the one about how tragedy shouldn't be politicized.  The tragedy is already political.  It results from the murderous choice of one man.  But only some murderous plans are realized.  And only some murderous potentials flourish.  To honor the dead by eschewing public policy discussions about how to reduce the likelihood of a disturbed student getting a gun and killing dozens of classmates and faculty is a cruel joke.

Liberals and others make a mistake when they excoriate the right-wingers proposing sex-segregated housing or mandatory monotheism or concealed weapons for everyone as solutions to this tragedy for "politicizing" the deaths.  Instead, let's excoriate them for offering really, really bad ideas, and for blaming the wrong people for something terrible that transpired.

Why shouldn't people contending to run the country tell us - as they did with this week's Supreme Court outrage - what it has to do with their plans for our country?  We can mourn together with people we disagree with without pretending that those disagreements have no consequences.

Josh

Im just done.

Sick of the media. NBC has just crossed the line with me. I have sat though Columbine and Conifer in my backyard. I have seen a downgrading in the ethics throughout the media. NBC's decision has finally crossed the line for me.

Why does he stubbornly insist that the prosecutor purge had to do with performance, not politics?  Do these guys really believe their own bullshit?  Then again, it's hard to know what he really believes since he could not recall and could not remember most substantive things.  What really made me mad was when he criticized David Iglesias for not reporting that a Congressman had tried to interfere with a case.  I'm sick of this Administration blaming the victim.

"I believe that I can [continue to be effective] as leader of this Department. The moment I believe I am not effective, I will resign."  Ok, Gonzo, sign on the dotted line, as you forced me and so many others to do.  See http://patriotictruthteller.net

I've heard a lot of media labels for this man, a monster, a nutball, etc. And each label is further reinforced by the people who knew him who call him "weird," an "oddity," someone with a "mean streak." Each of these labels serves to further distance us from the psyche of the disturbed person, to emphasize how inhuman he seemed to us humans in the first place. I'm cringing now everytime I hear him described in this way.

I am totally flabbergasted at what I am seeing on the cable news networks: a constant dissection of the motives of Seung-Hui Cho for his massacre earlier this week, accompanied by still photos of Cho-with-hammer, Cho-with-handgun, and intermittent broadcasts of Cho fulminating against an unknown "you" in his signature low and monotone voice.

And yet, as a historian, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.

Senator McCain speaking to a crowd of 400 supporters in South Carolina yesterday


Summerville, SC (Rotters) - Fox news this morning reported that its New York studios overnight received an exclusive "manifesto" FedExd overnight from Republican presidential candidate Arizona Senator John McCain. The rambling and almost histrionic 24 page document was apparently mailed as the senator was making a "straight shooting" campaign speech aimed at over 400 supporters in the small town of Summerville, S.C.

Nothing at least right now.  Better to carefully analyze the whole incident, determine what things went wrong, and then do something no one ever does--figure out if this was an extremely rare event not likely to happen ever again, or something that was the harbinger of a TREND.  Like 19 guys commandeering three jets and. . well, you know.