Love Nina Persson, love the Cardigans, and love this video. Stick around for the very end.
Blowin’ in the wind
This post by Siun at Firedoglake links to a number of articles about toxic fallout from U.S. attacks in Iraq, and by our Israeli chums in Gaza. As the Guardian reports in this heartbreaking image gallery (also, here), the incidence of birth defects and early life cancers has skyrocketed in Fallujah, Basra, Baghdad and Al – Najaf, all areas that fell under heavy bombardment by the U.S.
It’s one thing to hope, however vainly, that the U.S. government sees the light and pulls its military back from its murderous assaults against Iraq and Afghanistan, quite another to think we will ever do anything about the long-term environmental consequences.
The Guardian report is careful to note that it’s too early to draw definite conclusions about what caused this 15-fold rise in many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers. Depleted uranium? White phosphorus? Well, maybe. And it will ever be so. The procedure is clear. Deny and obfuscate until it’s too late to do anything about it.
The dust that Pancho bit
Just stumbled across this footage of Townes Van Zandt And Guy Clark, when they were just kids. Described as “1970’s film clips which were part of a motion picture homage to West Texas troubadours titled ‘Heartworn Highways.'”
Loved the old guy’s tears during ‘Waitin’ around to die.’
Also available on the Internets from the same film, Van Zandt performing his scary great Pancho and Lefty and a sloppy session with Rodney Crowell and a skinny Steve Earle from Christmas Eve, 1975.
The Avett Brothers – Die Die Die
Love these guys. Great mix of deadpan lyrics and heartfelt ones, nice tunes, and amazing harmonies.
A Congress of Nancys
Oh, how I miss Weeds. The disappointing season finale of Mad Men* put me in mind of a show that did it right: with a jaw-dropping surprise that leaves the viewer, at least this viewer, gasping in anticipation of what will happen next season.
Nancy Botwin is ever on my mind, I guess, but more so in the wake of the Health Reform Bill from Hell that passed through the House this weekend. I know: Nancy Pelosi and Steyne Hoyer do not totter around on stiletto heels in body-conscious apparel, sucking down prodigious quantities of designer coffees. (In fact, allow me to pause while I try to erase such ghastly images from my memory.) But Nancy and our esteemed representatives in Congress have one very major thing in common. They have a job that is a front for a business.
In Nancy’s case, the job has been most recently managing a maternity boutique in a sleepy mall. Her business, however, was all about the drug- and human-trafficking tunnel to Mexico beneath the shop. She spends her day pretending to do her innocent little job, when in reality she is involved in a much more lucrative, and sinister, business.
Same with congressmen and senators. Their job is to APPEAR to represent the people and to protect them from the predations of the wealthy and powerful, but their BUSINESS is to enable the wealthy and powerful to extract every last ounce of flesh and blood from the people. If they do their job well, they are praised effusively by their victims.
_______
* I am aware that I’m in the minority on this.
On that “historic” health reform bill (from hell)
Chris Floyd, who declares that HR3962 will kill real health reform for a generation:
Of course, the House bill, bad as it is, will be mangled beyond all recognition in that elitist abattoir known as the Senate, where no doubt even the few milder-than-milquetoast ameliorations that survived the corporate bludgeoning in the House will be cast aside. But for now, this is how, in the words of Barack Obama, our Democratic solons “answered the call of history”: with a bill that places an onerous financial burden and threat of punishment on those least able to bear it, while stripping millions of the most vulnerable women in society from access to completely legal medical procedures easily available to the middle-class and the rich, and delivering to the corrupt, cruel and price-gouging insurance companies “50 million new consumers, many of them subsidized by the taxpayers,” in the gushing words of Nancy Pelosi, who shepherded the bill through the House — and who was responsible for stripping abortion coverage from poor women by greenlighting the single allowed amendment to the bill.
David Swanson on the “well, at least it’s something” school of thought:
And why is a bill better than no bill? Why is a bill that funds absolutely useless parasites like health insurance companies at the expense of our grandchildren’s unearned pay better than nothing? Why — when blocking a bill would almost guarantee a better debate in round 2 — is it more important to pass the bill and close off the opportunity for valuable reform?
And Arthur Silber, in a piece with the to-the-point title The Fuck You Act:
Given the nature of the corporatist system that now throttles every aspect of life in the U.S., that is how the system works. That’s how it’s set up, and that’s its purpose. The fact that insurance companies will reap huge rewards on the backs of “ordinary” taxpaying Americans is not a regrettable byproduct of an allegedly good but imperfect effort at reform, or a flaw that will be fixed at some unspecified future date. And as already powerful and wealthy interests become more powerful and wealthy, the State will also increase its already massive power over all our lives still more. None of that is incidental: it’s the point.
Earlier this summer Matt Taibbi called it pretty much exactly, and explained why thusly:
Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing….
This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a political majority in congress and a popular president armed with oodles of political capital and backed by the overwhelming sentiment of perhaps 150 million Americans, and this government could not bring itself to offend ten thousand insurance men in order to pass a bill that addresses an urgent emergency. What’s left? Third-party politics?
Uh, yeah.
Gaza: “Amal, two and a half years old. All her insides were outside…”
Congress votes (334-36, with 22 “present” and 30 “not voting”) to condemn the Goldstone report. It’s nonbinding, but “[calls] on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ in multilateral fora.”
Amal, two and a half years old. All her insides were outside… and she was giving her last breath and she said, ‘I love you and I want sweets.’ Can you imagine, the last thing she said was, ‘I love you mom.’
Play this video from beginning to end. How can anyone oppose an investigation into how the bodies of little children came to be riddled with bullets? How can anyone oppose an investigation into a campaign in which Amnesty International states “1,400 Palestinians were killed, including some 300 children, and hundreds of other unarmed civilians, including more than 115 women and some 85 men aged over 50”?
Well, most of your Congressfolk oppose any “further consideration” of the topic. Maybe you should ask them why.
This video was even more heartbreaking. And you can read the transcript of the Bill Moyers video with Goldstone here.
The Israeli government, for its part, is indeed taking action. According to this AFP report, “The prime minister instructed the relevant government bodies to examine a worldwide campaign to amend the international laws of war to adapt them to the spread of global terrorism, his office said in a statement.”
In other words, change the rules of engagement to allow the firing of machine guns into the stomachs of three-year-old girls.
Remember These Children memorializes both Israeli and Palestinian children killed since 2000.
“Debris” by Ronnie Lane
Best song about a dad ever* by one of my heroes.
—————-
*although some days I can be persuaded by Ian Dury’s “My Old Man”–both can bring me to tears…
“all the historical foresight of Dred Scott”
Scott Horton, on the absolutely shameful, contemptible, disgraceful decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals stating that Maher Arar, a Canadian software engineer, had no right to sue U.S. government officials for HAVING BEEN TORTURED FOR A YEAR, for eighteen hours a day, for no reason, in Syria, after having been sent there by American officials who knew what they were doing to him.
The Canadian government admitted to their role in the episode and awarded Arar $11.5 million (Canadian) in compensation and reimbursement of legal costs. “And the United States?
The United States tenaciously refused to acknowledge ever having made any mistakes—even after its own sources did so. It stonewalled Congressional probes and issued a travel ban to stop Arar from testifying before Congress. The Bush Justice Department made aggressive representations to the courts in response to Arar’s suit that strained credulity at almost every step. As in other cases, their trump card was simple: when caught with pants down, shout “state secrets!”….
[Dissenting judge Guido] Calabresi generously accepts the suggestion that the Second Circuit acted out of concern for national security. Still, he delivers an appropriate lashing. The majority, Calabresi charges, “engaged in extraordinary judicial activism.” Its activism was aimed at extricating political actors from a precarious predicament and keeping the door firmly shut on what may well be the darkest chapter in the entire history of the Justice Department. In so doing, the court’s majority delivered an example of timidity in the face of government misconduct the likes of which have not been seen since the darkest days of the Cold War. When the history of the Second Circuit is written, the Arar decision will have a prominent place. It offers all the historical foresight of Dred Scott, in which the Court rallied to the cause of slavery, and all the commitment to constitutional principle of the Slaughter-House Cases, in which the Fourteenth Amendment was eviscerated. The Court that once affirmed that those who torture are the “enemies of all mankind” now tells us that U.S. government officials can torture without worry, because the security of our state might some day depend upon it.
Crawling toward the light?
For more on the pictures go here
Dave Eggers, reviewing a collection of early Kurt Vonnegut stories, offers the obiter dictum that “Vonnegut left the planet just about the time we, as a nation, were crawling toward the light again.” Well, I wonder.
For me, it’s difficult to choose the greater disaster unwinding in this new enlightened phase in our history. Is it the health care debacle? Obama’s ongoing one-upping of Bush era Constitutional transgressions? The fact that our economy has fallen down and can’t get up? Or is it the war that nobody sees or cares about? Every day one of these becomes the leading contender. For today, arbitrarily, I’ll choose Afghanistan, mainly because of this typically insightful Tomdispatch essay, Afghanistan as a bailout state.
The state of affairs, as Englehardt writes, is dire:
Here’s a partial rundown of news from that devolving conflict: In the last week, Nuristan, a province on the Pakistani border, essentially fell to the Taliban after the U.S. withdrew its forces from four key bases. Similarly in Khost, another eastern province bordering Pakistan where U.S. forces once registered much-publicized gains (and which Richard Holbrooke, now President Obama’s special envoy to the region, termed “an American success story”), the Taliban is largely in control. It is, according to Yochi Dreazen and Anand Gopal of the Wall Street Journal, now “one of the most dangerous provinces” in the country. Similarly, the Taliban insurgency, once largely restricted to the Pashtun south, has recently spread fiercely to the west and north. At the same time, neighboring Pakistan is an increasingly destabilized country amid war in its tribal borderlands, a terror campaign spreading throughout the country, escalating American drone attacks, and increasingly testy relations between American officials and the Pakistani government and military.
Meanwhile, the U.S. command in Afghanistan is considering a strategy that involves pulling back from the countryside and focusing on protecting more heavily populated areas (which might be called, with the first U.S. Afghan War of the 1980s in mind, the Soviet strategy). The underpopulated parts of the countryside would then undoubtedly be left to Hellfire missile-armed American drone aircraft. In the last week, three U.S. helicopters — the only practical way to get around a mountainous country with a crude, heavily mined system of roads — went down under questionable circumstances (another potential sign of an impending Soviet-style disaster). Across the country, Taliban attacks are up; deadly roadside bombs or IEDs are fast on the rise (a 350% jump since 2007); U.S. deaths are at a record high and the numbers of wounded are rising rapidly; European allies are ever less willing to send more troops; and Taliban raids in the capital, Kabul, are on the increase. All this despite a theoretical 12-1 edge U.S., NATO, and Afghan troops have over the Taliban insurgents and their allies.
A rational person, or nation, would see such a state of affairs and declare that it’s time to cut one’s losses. But that ain’t gonna happen with a president who only wants to please. As Englehardt has written, the only options he’s contemplating include the word “more.” This invokes comparisons to, er, a previous military engagement that didn’t end well. But even that might not convey the scale of catastrophe we’re courting:
In the Vietnam era, there was a shorthand word for this: “quagmire.” We were, as the antiwar song then went, “waist deep in the Big Muddy” and still wading in. If Vietnam was, in fact, a quagmire, however, it was so only because we made it so. Similarly, in changed circumstances, Afghanistan today has become the AIG of American foreign policy and Obama’s team so many foreign policy equivalents of Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. And as with the economy, so with the expanding Af/Pak war: at the end of the day, it’s the American taxpayer who will be left holding the bag.
Let’s think about what this means for a moment: According to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the cost of keeping a single American soldier in Afghanistan is $1.3 million per year. According to Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, it costs the Pentagon about $1 billion per year to station 1,000 U.S. troops in that country. It’s fair to assume that this estimate doesn’t include, among other things, long-term care for wounded soldiers or the cost of replacing destroyed or overused equipment. Nor do these figures include any civilian funds being spent on the war effort via the State Department, nor undoubtedly the funds being spent by the Pentagon to upgrade bases and facilities throughout the country. In other words, just about any decision by the president, including one simply focused on training Afghan soldiers and police, will involve an outlay of further multi-billions of dollars. Whatever choice the president makes, the U.S. will bleed money.
…..
The United States lived through all the phases of escalation, withdrawal, and defeat in Vietnam without suffering great post-war losses of any sort. This time we may not be so lucky. The United States is itself no longer too big to fail — and if we should do so, remind me: Who exactly will bail us out?
Crawling toward the light? I’ll agree with the crawling part…..