Greetings all ..
Welcome to the Baja Arizona Kos Open Thread for Sunday, July 17, 2016. Click through for news, views and items of interest from Tucson and Greater Baja Arizona.
What happened to our Monsoon ?
We had record rainfall in June, the second wettest ever, then nuthin’. What gives ?
140 Years Ago Today …
From George S. Hand’s Saloon Diary, June 17, 1876:
Warm. Flies made me get up early. Had breakfast at 6:30 o’clock. 8 a.m. -- hot. A telegram reports the nomination of Hayes and Wheeler by the Republican convention in Cincinnati. Mercury at 1 p.m. --109 degrees. Nothing more new. Went to bed early.
Turkish coup, local angle …
So there was an attempted coup in Turkey. The president of Turkey blames this guy Fethullah Gulen and demands that the US arrest him since he lives in a gated compound in Pennsylvania. Gulen claims that Erdogan staged the coup himself in order to justify a clampdown on civil rights in Turkey. Whatever, Gulen runs a chain of charter schools in the US, including Arizona, where they go by the name of Sonoran Science Academy. The Star’s Tim Steller began a series of reports on Sonoran Science Academy back in April of 2010. His first report, on April 25 of that year, is no longer in the paper’s data base but here's one from May, 2010. The schools seem to do OK on the all-important test scores, and every now and then one of their students wins a science prize, but there are questions about their contracting and the fact that they bring in low-wage "teachers" from Turkey on H1-B visas. Are gullible Tucson families funding civil unrest in Turkey ? Probably, to some extent. I say, let’s not privatize education. Charter schools are a bad idea, no matter who profits from them.
In other news …
The water in Lake Mead is at historic low levels, but a water war with L.A. has been averted, at least for now. Work is under way to restore a second pond at Agua Caliente Park. Like the main pond, it will have to be filled artificially since the park’s spring, the original source of the agua caliente, no longer has enough flow to fill the ponds. The effort to block SB 1516, the dark money bill, has failed, not enough petition passers. Phil Lopes and Jenise Porter at the Tucson Chapter of PDA have announced their primary endorsements. They like Bill Mundell and Tom Chabin for Corporation Commission, Joel Feinman for Pima County Attorney and Victoria Steele for Congress in CD-2.
Tinfoil hat time ?
I don’t know, you be the judge. So, remember those black POW-MIA flags ? I always thought the folks flying those were deluded and that there were no POWs left behind in ‘Nam and that the MIAs were actually KIAs whose bodies were never recovered. But wait, maybe that’s exactly what Henry Kissinger wanted us to think, maybe there actually were guys left behind just like in the Rambo movies. I got this from Ron Unz, former publisher of The American Conservative and Republican candidate for the Senate from California. He had a piece at his Unz Review titled American Pravda where he reviews the work of recently deceased reporter Sydney Schanberg. Here’s Unz:
The basic outline of events he described was a simple one. During the Paris Peace Talks that ended the Vietnam War, the U.S. government had committed to pay its Hanoi adversaries $3.25 billion in war reparations, and in exchange would receive back the American POWs held by the Vietnamese. The agreement was signed and the war officially ended, but the Vietnamese, suspecting a possible financial double-cross, kept back many hundreds of the imprisoned Americans until they received the promised payment.
For domestic political reasons, the Nixon Administration had characterized the billions of dollars pledged as “humanitarian assistance” and Congress balked at appropriating such a large sum for a hated Communist regime. Desperate for “peace with honor” and already suffering under the growing Watergate Scandal, Nixon and his aides could not admit that many hundreds of the POWs remained in enemy hands, and so declared them all returned, probably hoping to quietly arrange a trade of money for prisoners once the dust had settled. Similarly, Hanoi’s leaders falsely claimed that all the captives had been released, while they waited for their money to be paid. As a result, the two governments had jointly created a Big Lie, one which has largely maintained itself right down to the present day.
But there’s more. In that first piece, Unz links to a second article of his, from 2015, called John McCain: When "Tokyo Rose" Ran for President where he claims that Johnny Mac helped cover up the POW-MIA story and not only that:
He also had some very interesting things to say about John McCain’s wartime record. According to him, it was hardly a secret in veterans’ circles that McCain had spent much of the war producing Communist propaganda broadcasts since these had regularly been played in the prisoner camps as a means of breaking the spirits of those American POWs who resisted collaboration. Indeed, he and some of his friends had speculated about who currently possessed copies of McCain’s damning audio and video tapes and wondered whether they might come out during the course of the presidential campaign. Over the years, other Vietnam veterans have publicly leveled similar charges, and Schanberg had speculated that McCain’s leading role in the POW cover up might have been connected with the pressure he faced due to his notorious wartime broadcasts.
There’s a lot more than that even, claims that McCain was never actually tortured and that he gave the North Vietnamese information. If you’re interested, read the two pieces I’ve linked from The Unz Review and this, from Counterpunch: McNasty. There’s lot there and it’s a bit CT-ish but Schanberg’s byline lends some credibility and, well, who knows ?
And finally …
Here’s Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert talking with John Ackerman about Mexico and walls and stuff:
OK …
That’s all I got for this edition. What’s up with y’all ? Talk to me.