Alan Dawley, College of New Jersey. In U.S. history, three elements that have brought U.S. imperial wars to an end (short of annihilation of the "natives"); none of these factors have been sufficient to end wars, but all three taken together have ended our imperial adventures. They are:
Magnus Bernhardsson, Williams College. After 2000 years, the U.S. invasion may have managed to kill off Iraqi Christianity. One of the oldest Christianities on earth, the faith community had survived isolation from both Rome and Constantinople (Eastern Orthodoxy), Islamic rule, the Ottoman empire, European colonialism, Ba'ath rule, and the xenophobia that the Israeli-Palestinian war has excited in the Arab world. But since the Bush administration's incursion, the Christian community is simply fleeing the insecurity that is contemporary Iraq.
Rahul Mahajan, New York University. In the 1980s the US stopped cementing its domination of weaker countries by imposing plutocratic dictators and turned instead to imposing "democracy." This democracy is a debased polity named by the scholar William Robinson "poliarchy." In poliarchy, democratic forms become a sort of play acting rather than an exercise of political power. Elites rule, enlisting the masses of people only as extras in their dramas. The U.S. is rapidly being reduced to a poliarchy itself. Because the people responsible for Bush's policies really believe they can (and should) implant this debased "democracy," they are genuinely surprised when its forms yield unexpected results such as an Islamic fundamentalist government in Iraq and a Hamas majority in Palestine.
Nada Shabout, an art historian, explored how "liberation" by the U.S. occupation is disconnecting Iraqis from their historical experiences. Though an exile herself from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, she is worried and angered that the ongoing project to destroy all monuments from the Ba'ath leader's era is tearing up vital historical memories for many families who lost children in the conscript armies that fought the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars. She speaks up for preserving some of the many cast bronze heads of Saddam that were such a feature of pre-invasion Iraq; "after all the Roman emperors were tyrants, but we are glad to have sculptures of their heads."
Walter Hixson, University of Akron. "There is no United States. Over and over the country has had to have its identity reaffirmed and recreated by wars. The U.S. historically has affirmed itself by naming some people the Other and killing them. Without our wars, we have no history." Within the country, war creates and maintains hierarchies; successive wars preclude reforms. "The nation state has got to go. The nation state is incompatible with a future."
I guess that's progress, 2300 dead U.S. troops, about 200 dead other "coalition" troops, and uncounted -- maybe 100,000 or more -- dead Iraqis later.A 55% majority say the war in Iraq was a mistake. Just 31%, a record low since the question has been asked, say the United States and its allies are winning there.
Army recruiters had enough sense to hightail it for greener pastures when about 200 determined women showed up on their doorstep."...we are demonstrating our love for this country and its young people by enlisting in the U.S. military....This is not a show of support for our military action in Iraq....Rather, it is a Valentine's Day gift to our children and grandchildren.
"We grandmothers have had long, full lives. Our young men and women deserve the same. We are prepared to take their place and by that action to help bring an end to this destructive occupation. We want our brave young people home -- alive and whole."
The Immigrant Rights Action Pledge (IRAP) was a response to the passage by California voters of Proposition 187 in 1994. That measure, never put into effect because of a series of legal challenges, would have required educators, doctors and social service workers deny help to undocumented persons. That's right: the people who work with them were supposed to rat on kids, sick patients, and desperate people.I pledge to uphold my professional principles and the right to privacy. I will continue to provide services to all who request them; I will refuse to verify immigration status. ... I will support others who refuse to cooperate and I will urge others to do the same.
Follow the link and join up now.Torture violates the basic dignity of the human person that all religions hold dear. It degrades everyone involved --policy-makers, perpetrators and victims. ...
The President's signing statement, which he issued when he signed the McCain Amendment into law, implies that the President does not believe he is bound by the amendment in his role as commander in chief. ...
Furthermore, in a troubling development, for the first time in our nation's history, legislation has now been signed into law that effectively permits evidence obtained by torture to be used in a court of law. The military tribunals that are trying some terrorist suspects are now expressly permitted to consider information obtained under coercive interrogation techniques, including degrading and inhumane techniques and torture. ...
Nothing less is at stake in the torture abuse crisis than the soul of our nation. What does it signify if torture is condemned in word but allowed in deed?
There may be a few benefits to individuals as the empire discovers it is simply another deadbeat debtor in a big world full of a lot of smarter, more realistic players.Canadian pharmacies, which are able to purchase brand-name drugs at low wholesale prices negotiated with the purchasing power of the Canadian government, already had been adapting to increasing political and market pressure.
When major drug makers began curbing sales to Canadian pharmacies that shipped to the U.S., many began ordering in bulk from drug factories in Europe, India and Israel.
The Brazilian government will distribute 25 million free condoms to promote safe sex during the country's Carnival holidays, the Health Ministry said on Monday....
"It's that time of year when we boost distribution because of the increase in demand," an official from the Health Ministry's anti-AIDS program said....
The Roman Catholic Church in Brazil -- the world's largest Catholic country -- routinely denounces such programs as encouraging sex and contravening its stand against contraception.
But our local Muslims aren't part of that nasty stew. Their plaint is that they too are Americans -- why can't the rest of us understand that?People don't normally burn down embassies over a few cartoons in a newspaper they've never even heard of, much less ever read. The widespread hair-trigger outrage, I think, grows out of a sense that the world of Islam has been used and abused for many years by a powerful and evil entity called "the West" -- and that this mistreatment is getting worse, not better.
The whole Ellsberg interview is worth reading -- long and scary. I'll just report that he saysHow reliable is [Bush's] channel to God? A God, by the way, who made George Bush our president. (What would that say, to the rest of us, about God?)
He has said on more than one occasion that God told me to attack Saddam Hussein and I did. And I've said to audiences, he was wrong. He was mistaken. That was not God. I feel very sure about this.
I've discovered that I do have some theological preconceptions, more than I would have thought. That's one of them. When you hear a voice you take to be God that tells you to invade a country that has not attacked and is no threat to us, get a second opinion.
Unfortunately, it doesn't require the experience of an Ellsberg to believe that prediction.I think we'll see from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands - and I mean plural, hundreds of thousands - of Middle Easterners, Muslims and sympathizers, some non-Muslim dissenters but mostly young Muslim males, in camps or deported. And that will happen without a whole lot of resistance by the public after another 9/11.
While San Jose reveals only a few incidents, the SFPD keeps and promotes officers who use force improperly. There can be no other conclusion.San Jose's department, about 60 percent San Francisco's size, studied its citizen-filed force complaints at The Chronicle's request and found that from 1996 through 2003 the officer with the most complaints had four, while nine officers had three. Seventy officers had two complaints, and 566 officers had one.
In San Francisco during the same period, the officer with the most unnecessary-force complaints had 26. Another had 20; one had 18, 4 had 15 and 3 had 13 the Office of Citizen Complaints records show.
A federal judge ordered the government to argue a rationale for its actions on this coming Tuesday. We'll see if they just spirit Omar away in the night. (For what it is worth, this Shawqi Omar has the same name as an individual tied to Zarqawi in a Jordanian court indictment, but presumably someone who moved to the U.S. twenty five years ago, only returning to Iraq after the war, is not the same guy -- and if he were, we'd have given him to the Jordanians by now.)Ned White of the Justice Department sent an e-mail to [Susan] Burke, Omar's [U.S.-based] attorney. "Mr. Omar is currently in the custody of Multinational Force-Iraq and a determination was previously made to refer his case to the Central Criminal Court of Iraq," White wrote. "Please be advised that, whenever scheduled, we would not be able to disclose to you the date of any hearing for security reasons."
Burke asserted in court papers filed this week that the government's actions were intended to subvert Omar's rights and that they placed him -- as a Sunni Muslim in a Shiite-dominated security apparatus -- in clear danger.
"The government's attempt at a middle-of-the-night transfer," the defense wrote, "to a foreign government that the United States has publicly stated engages in torture in an effort to avoid judicial review is conduct that shocks the conscience."
Also on the rule of law front, Christopher Allbritton is back in Baghdad and reporting on his observations as a pool reporter at the Saddam Hussein trial. He is surprisingly impassioned in stating his opinion: Go read all of Allbritton's views and the responses.It’s not right to say the trial is fair; it’s not transparent and the tribunal’s legality is murky, considering the illegal origins of the war that brought the current government to power. ...
[I]n terms of setting up a tribunal and establishing a legal precedent for trying heads of state for alleged war crimes, the legality of the war is very much an issue. Precedent matters in the realm of law, and the institutional structures built by an occupation and its progeny had better be well-constructed indeed.
However, and this is a big “however,”: Saddam absolutely must be tried. He must be tried, judged and sentenced. He was — and likely still is — a horrible man, responsible for the deaths of thousands. If he committed the acts he’s accused of, he deserves the punishment meted out, and whether he was America’s bestest buddy in the region during the 1980s is beside the point.... Which is why he must be tried in an international tribunal.
A few weeks ago I put the "Impeach Bush" banner on this blog. Why? Because impeachment is the remedy provided by the Constitution for unlawful acts by a President. It seems completely clear that the President is asserting a right in his Presidential office to override statutory law in relation to warrantless wiretaps and probably any number of other acts that haven't leaked out yet. And since the problem is the overriding of Constitutional boundaries, the proper appeal is to application of law rather than political containment (though that wouldn't be a bad idea either.) There is definite potential in state campaigns to push Congress."assert that all searches and surveillance of American citizens be conducted according to the rule of law, and we ask you to publicly call on the powers that be in Washington to cease such unconstitutional activity in Vermont at once."
Strong stuff for a business magazine.Putting the president above the Congress is an invitation to tyranny. The president has no powers except those specified in the Constitution and those enacted by law....
Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.
Now there's a reason to support the Steelers.Plenty of NFL careers end because of torn anterior cruciate knee ligaments. Ariko Iso may be the first person to make it to the league because of one.
When she was an aspiring basketball player in Tokyo, a ripped-up knee set back her athletic career but got Iso interested in the field of sports medicine.
Two U.S. college degrees and nine years of athletic training later, the 31-year-old Iso has made the career move that, to the other women in her profession, is the groundbreaking step they often envisioned but feared might never come.
Finally, 82 years after the NFL was founded, the Pittsburgh Steelers have hired Iso as a full-time trainer -- the first woman who will treat the injuries, soothe the nerves and calm the fears of the league's millionaire players.
...
Her parents, who still live in Tokyo, are happy for her success but, she said, "They don't understand this is a fairly big thing for our profession."
It certainly is. Nearly half of the estimated 20,000 registered athletic trainers in the United States are women, and a woman, Julie Max, is president of the National Athletic Trainers Association. But Iso is the only full-time female trainer in the NFL, NHL or major league baseball. The NBA's Houston Rockets have had a female assistant trainer, Michelle Leget, since 1997.
I'm enough of a sentimentalist to give the benefit of the doubt to a football star who credits his mother."My mom is why I'm here today," Ward said Monday, shortly after the Steelers arrived in Detroit. "My mom worked her tail off for me. She taught me how important it is to work hard. I'm not here if it's not for my mom." Even if, Ward said, smiling, "She's a nervous wreck this week."
We asked for prescription drug coverage and our Congresspeople, led by the Republican majority, gave us a bonanza for drug profiteers.
Will these numbers be worse in 2007?The first number is as of Jan. 31, 2005, and the second is as of Jan. 31, 2006:
- U.S. military deaths: 1,415; 2,242
- U.S. military wounded: 10,622; 16,606
- Number of daily insurgent attacks: 61; 75
- Estimated number of insurgents: 18,000; 15,000-20,000
- Crude oil production (millions of barrels per day): 2.1; 1.78
- Estimated unemployment rate: 27-40 percent; 25-40 percent
- Percentage of Iraqis who believe country is headed in right direction (through Dec. 2005): 49 percent; 49 percent
Guy Kawasaki was one of the "evangelists" who sold the creative, antic appeal of the original Macintosh to a world that had believed computers were for geeks or bean counters. He is now a venture capitalist whose blog Let the Good Times Roll serves as an amusing marketing experiment for his current ventures. Recently he put up a post aimed at start-up entrepreneurs about what he calls The Art of Bootstrapping. I find it interesting to think about what Kawasaki's advice to fledgling businesses might mean to outsider advocacy or candidate campaigns. In the following material, Kawasaki's advice is in italics.Folks are going to have to get really used to understanding that we are outsiders. That isn't the end of the world. When the country was founded, a majority were outsiders -- not white, male property owners. The outsiders have progressively forced their way inside. The current Right wants to shove a lot of us back out. So we have to organize like outsiders, expecting very little from the Democrats except when we make them behave.
Sure, it is awful. But there really is no choice.
