Shut Up and Sing!

Listening to NPR this morning, I heard the favored and familiar Dixie Chicks song, Not Ready to Make Nice. The story explained that a documentary, Shut Up and Sing, about the fallout that ensued Chick Natalie Maines' statement that she was embarrassed to be from the same state as George W. Bush, is due for release this month--hatching scheduled for the Toronto Film Fest. Nice, thought I.

Wrong. The "promotion" for the documentary described the Chicks in fairly negative, unsympathetic terms, as hostile toward and having disowned their Country Music fans. Nothing I've ever seen from the Chicks or their representatives. And on NPR? It felt like Willy Wonka was serving imitation chocolate. The "piece" noted the fact that radio stations haven't been willing to play the Chicks' music despite positive reviews, and the resulting meager record sales. Clearly, the Chicks got their just desserts, the story implied.

Adding to the original "fallout" itself, the slant chafes. Well, media can be bought, and "news" can be spun, but I'm still mad as hell, and I've got a tiny purchase to make today...

What ARE the GOP Interests?

Under GOP Rule, Conflicts are a Dime a Dozen

Over the past six years, the list of conflicting GOP and Public interests has grown long, indeed. A tiny, sampling:

Voting, Media, Oil, More Oil, Energy Policy, Avian Flu Vaccine, Hospitals and Health Care, Government Contracts, Contract Accounting, The Supreme Court, and this list goes on and on...

This week, Alternet's Sarah Anderson focuses of Blatantly Boasting War Profiteers:

"Obviously, we got a pop during the Iraq and Afghani thing," CEO Gerald Potthoff of Engineered Support Systems International candidly if indelicately told an investment publication last year. A big pop indeed. A series of war-related contracts for logistical services, some awarded on a no-bid basis, drove company earnings to record levels and set up executives for a lucrative sale of the company to another defense contractor, DRS Technologies, earlier this year. Among the beneficiaries of that sale: President George W. Bush's uncle, William H. T. Bush, an ESSI director, who cleared $2.7 million in cash and stock. Known to the president as "Uncle Bucky," he claims he had nothing to do with the company's landing lucrative defense contracts.

In last night's"Rumsfeld is a fascist" commentary, Keith Olbermann begged the question, What really are the GOP's interests?

From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages, to the entire "Fog of Fear" which continues to envelope this nation - he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have – inadvertently or intentionally - profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

Anderson, for her part, dared to question the billing name on the record of purchase for the emperor's new clothes, still not having seen the receipt: "Why should we let our tax dollars subsidize war profiteering?"

Early this year James Cavuoto, editor and publisher of Neurotech Business Report, warned colleagues about the dangers of conflict of interest delivered by the GOP Department of Defense:

However, we must avoid the danger that the potential profit that the defense economy stands to deliver to our industry will suck us into passive acceptance of the civilian mismanagement that has misused and maltreated the precious resource represented by our military personnel. The fact that we do business with the government does not relieve us of our sacred responsibility in a democracy to hold our elected officials accountable for the policies they have pursued. Moreover, the fact we cherish and admire our returning servicepeople does not mean that we cannot question the wisdom of the war in Iraq or the moral fiber of the Washington elite who started it.

Rumsfeld, his militarization of disaster relief, health care, and all the rest, should take note.

War for Brains

Bush's $2-trillion misadventure in Iraq. In an article published early this summer, The Harvard Magazine reviews cost estimates of Bush's Iraq war. Bilmes, a public-finance specialist, provides context:

“We are not only saddling our young people with this burden,” she adds, “but we are sweeping it under the carpet and not noticing that there’s a big bump. These costs are locked in. The reality is that the government is very, very bad at budgeting for long-term costs...How big is big? The highest-grossing movie ever, Titanic, took in $1.8 billion. We spend that in Iraq in one week.”

Long-term medical costs is another legacy of the Iraq war. Coagulants, armour, and triage practices are saving lives, yet serious injuries multiply. To date, there have been 2,638 deaths, and nearly 20,000 wounded. The injured mortality rate is the lowest in any U.S. war, 10%, but the rate of amputations, a marker for serious injury, has nearly doubled to 6%. Thousands of U.S. servicemen and women are returning home with brain injuries, amputations, blindness, and other neurological conditions, with ongoing costs that have yet to be realized.

Combat veterans object to GOP policy. According to the Navy Times, congress is drawing the ire of the the largest organization of combat veterans, the Veterans of Foreign Wars. VFW chief, Jim Mueller, asserted that a proposal in congress to cut funding for research and treatment of traumatic brain injury in half, “clearly indicates that the Congress is out of touch with the realities and consequences of war.”

DOD budget shows GOP's true colors. According to USA Today, George Zitnay, co-founder of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, “testified before a Senate subcommittee in May that body armor saves troops caught in blasts but leaves many with brain damage...Zitnay asked for $19 million, and 34 Democratic and six Republican members of Congress signed a letter endorsing the budget request.” The News & Observer reports:

Brain injuries are so common among U.S. troops that they're called the signature injury of the Iraq war, but Congress is poised to cut military spending on researching and treating them...The Pentagon asked only for $7 million and didn't respond properly when congressional staffers tried to find out whether it needed more money for the program, said Jenny Manley, a spokeswoman for the Senate appropriations committee.

New patterns of morbidity and mortality change the costs of war. For a variety of reasons, the morbidity/mortality landscape has changed. Given the rising incidence of long-term traumatic injury, I suspect the new landscape presents a deceptive and incomplete picture of the current and future costs of making war. Earlier this year, James Cavuoto, Editor and Publisher of Neurotech Business Report, mused:

The injured soldiers returning from Iraq deserve our support and all the medical technology we can possibly provide. The question that remains is whether we, in the end, are deserving of their service.

I'm not holding my breath for that answer.

Sometimes It's a Matter of Perspective

Perspectives across the gulf of the Middle Eastern Desert, diverge...

Across states of Red and Blue, diverge.

Across the Progressive Left, diverge.

How can a single thing seem so many ways?

How can the Middle East choose Peace?

Portrait of War Crimes

Pablo Picasso's famous antiwar painting, Guernica, commemorates the small Basque village in Northern Spain that was bombed by Hitler's German forces in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, marking the first time civilians had been targeted on such large and effective scale. According to Russell Martin, Author of Picasso's War, "Guernica has become for people around the world visceral, visual evidence of the true nature of war, a perspective very unlike the heroic and optimistic one so often presented by politicians who have never seen war close at hand." A third of the villagers were either killed or wounded during the three hours of bombing and machine gun fire.

We know that since the inception of the Iraq war, the Bush administration has been uncomfortable with Guernica's ability to inspire parallels between the Bush and Hitler regimes, evoking poetic response. I note the parallel one can also draw to Israel's bombing of civilians in Southern Lebanon. And as we teeter on the verge of "action" in Iran, and depending on how we act, we may, indeed, strike a stunning parallel to the fascist friends of Franco. If we are willing to justify the slaughter of civilians because of "terrorists", haven't "the terrorists won?"

Another Cat Against Bush

FRIDAY NIGHT CAT BLOGGING.
Meow.

Thursday Open Thread

Sometimes it's not about perspective.
Sometimes it's just wrong...

LIKE NOW.

Have at...

We are the Web!

I confess, I laughed out loud. A lot.

My recent FreePress update reported that tens of thousands of bloggers and MySpace users have included links to SavetheInternet.com, many in efforts to counter the multi-million-dollar misinformation campaign launched by fake grassroot groups (i.e., "astroturf") like Hands Off the Internet. Here are some videos submitted to SavetheInternet.com by net neutrality supporters - check them out!

From FreePress:

A bad telecom bill passed the House in June. But the Senate is split over Net Neutrality - as seen in the 11-11 tie vote in the Senate committee that oversees the Internet. The phone and cable lobbyists don't yet have the votes to move their bill forward - and chatter in Washington says it may not be voted on until after the November elections. If we can keep the pressure up, it is believed that Net Neutrality could derail the entire bill and force Congress to start from scratch from next year.

If this topic is dear to your heart, visit the new Net Neutrality Channel.

Craig Newmark, founder and customer service representative of craigslist.org, recently presented his rationale in support of Net Neutrality in his CNN commentary: Keep the Internet neutral, fair and free:

Telecommunication companies...want control which sites you visit and how you experience them. They would provide privileged access for themselves and their preferred partners while charging other businesses for varying levels of service. (More...)

Mike McCurry, co-chairman of Hands off the Internet, a coalition of telecommunication-related businesses and former press secretary under President Bill Clinton, presents the issue differently in his counter-commentary. His basic argument is that the internet is "creaky" and will soon become congested; therefore, internet providers should charge a premium and manage bandwidth content differently to recoup their investments. Oh, and this will ensure protection from online discrimination. (*sigh*)

The punchline:

Regulating Internet neutrality may a great idea in Amazon's corporate boardroom. But for ordinary consumers, it's a sure ticket to higher prices and fewer choices.

Now, who's ready for another slice of upside-down cake?

Hiroshima, Hibakusha, and History

[Click photo for close-up. ]

National Geographic's Photo of the Day:

Hiroshima, Japan, 1994
Photograph by Jodi Cobb

A couple walks through a Hiroshima cemetery for victims of the world's first atom bomb attack. Detonated by the United States on August 6, 1945, the A-bomb fulfilled its promise of hastening the end of World War II when Japan surrendered nine days later. Today Hiroshima is an ultra-modern city with few battle scars, except for those in the memories of the hibakusha—bomb survivors.

(Text adapted from and photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Hiroshima: Up from Ground Zero," August 1995, National Geographic magazine)

This photograph evokes a flood of thoughts, fears, and questions in my mind, and its application in the world today is more than mildly unsettling. More about the hibakusha here. We are not done suffering.

WATCH THE SPIN!

Our BLUE-HOT planet... Lovely portrait, huh? Looks professional. Except, it’s getting kind of hot here under the lights...

“Global warming isn’t real,” they say. “Just something the Left invented to help them get their way...!”

“They are suppressing information that confirms global warming,” the Left says. “Just look at who is financing the global warming denial squad...!”

Whom to believe? I ask these questions: If global warming is a lie, exactly how does the Left benefit by promoting its existence? And, if global warming is real, just how does the Right benefit by denying its truth?

It can be argued that the Right is happy when big energy is happy because, well, politicians on the Right are either in bed with big energy or they are big energy. And if there is no groundwork and infrastructure in place when we reach peak oil, basically, big energy can set all the prices, call all the shots, and buy the means of production for just about everything. Or so Marx might say. Assuming there still is production.

Let’s consider the Left. If the Left is fabricating the global warming phenomenon, they benefit...how? (Pause here and think hard.) The Right, i.e., G(lobal) W(arming) Bush, says the Left invented the “myth” of global warming to gain power by spreading panic. Moreover, if suddenly t

Constitutional Devolution

So, how do we feel about Bush's plans for labeling U.S. citizens as “enemy combatants” and their consequent loss of legal rights and protections...? There's a nice opinion piece in the ContraCosta Times today. Simply stated and on the money:

“FROM TIME TO TIME in our history, our leaders have allowed, even manipulated, a reasonable concern about a real threat to escalate into an excessive fear that dangerously undermined our liberties. The Red Scare of the McCarthy era was one example. Today, it is fear of terrorists.”

Aziz Huq, author of the soon to be released book, Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in Times of Terror (New Press, 2007) warns, we're all enemy combatants now:

“The power to label individuals as 'enemy combatant'—and detain them indefinitely—presents one of the most basic threats not only to elemental human liberties, but also to the democratic order. Why? Because a government that can simply banish its foes—and those it erroneously seizes—from public sight simply by labeling them as beyond the pale is not a government that labors under the rule of law.”

Even top military leaders oppose Bush's plan for special courts. And although an early draft of the plan, leaked to the courts last week, has been softened, the new plan still allows the Secretary of Defense “to add crimes at will to those under the military court's jurisdiction...[and] would be likely to put more individuals than previously expected before military juries.” CSM posted a good description of how the proposal would dramatically expand military court powers today.

Damn lamenting, liberty-loving liberals!