The Oscars are on tonight. This year I haven't seen anything that is nominated.
The only movies that looked remotely interesting to me were Revolutionary Road, and Milk.
Slumdog Millionaire I will check out once it comes out on DVD, to see what all the buzz is about, but I fully intend on watching it with the remote handy, because Asian music grates on my last nerve, this still cracks me up three years later.
Seth Grogan
Who's fucking dope dealer is he? To say that his work is underappreciated by me is too kind. He gives me the heebee jeebees, and so does Ben Stiller.
Update 9:41 PM 2/22/2009 Ok. They're over. Slumdog Millionaire swept them. It looks a little more interesting to me than it did before, knowing the whole thing isn't some Bollywood romance dance film.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
American East
Hmm. How do I describe this film?
It's about Arab Americans trying not to end up in Gitmo after 9/11, and live out the American Dream. It's more brave than most of the absolute crap that comes out of Hollywood. Still, I'm so jaded that the lovey-dovey stuff is a hard sell for me, but then again my friend is still schooling me on life in Los Angeles. I lived there as a kid, but I was a kid. San Diego has it's quirks but believe me, they are different than LA. I recognized Sarah Shahi from other stuff I've seen her in, but never read the bio on IMDB about her before. I remember cringing at her Mexican accent, but the fact that one of her parents is Spanish just blew me away. Really? I can tell the difference between a Spanish and Mexican accent and frankly hers is neither, and it's Gawd-awful. Not surprisingly she's related to some Shah in Iran. Ahhhhhh, Grasshopper, the accent suffer from snobbery. I'm betting Egyptians aren't buying the accent in this movie either, but she is a decent actress and quite beautiful.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
PBS NOW covers sexual harrassment of teens on part-time jobs
Week of 2.20.09
Is Your Daughter Safe at Work?
A shocking statistic—teenagers are in more danger from sexual predators at their part time jobs than through the Internet. According to one estimate, 200,000 teenagers are assaulted at the workplace each year. It's a vastly underreported phenomenon, but some brave young women are stepping up publicly to tell their stories.
Am I surprised that part of this story was filmed in San Diego?
Dude, this is a military town. I was born and raised here, nothing surprises me. Probably 90% of the cops here have military experience It's why some kids join the military, so they can get MP (military police) experience and then go back to their hometown and got to the police academy there. Does this particular case involve any ex-military personnell? I don't know. I'm just saying I know what I know and I've seen what I've seen and it ain't "all good."
Is Your Daughter Safe at Work?
A shocking statistic—teenagers are in more danger from sexual predators at their part time jobs than through the Internet. According to one estimate, 200,000 teenagers are assaulted at the workplace each year. It's a vastly underreported phenomenon, but some brave young women are stepping up publicly to tell their stories.
Am I surprised that part of this story was filmed in San Diego?
Dude, this is a military town. I was born and raised here, nothing surprises me. Probably 90% of the cops here have military experience It's why some kids join the military, so they can get MP (military police) experience and then go back to their hometown and got to the police academy there. Does this particular case involve any ex-military personnell? I don't know. I'm just saying I know what I know and I've seen what I've seen and it ain't "all good."
Friday, February 20, 2009
Rachel Maddow explains my nickname for Alberto Gonzales
My nickname for Alberto Gonzales is "No Se Nada Torquemada."
"No Se Nada" ( pronounced 'no say nahdah') means "I don't know nothing." And Torquemada rhymes so well, I couldn't resist.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
"No Se Nada" ( pronounced 'no say nahdah') means "I don't know nothing." And Torquemada rhymes so well, I couldn't resist.
Friday squirrel blogging
This bank is usually just dry and dusty. That's how I spot the critters. They kick up dust. It's been raining in San Diego, so it's temporarily green.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Sacred Rage by Robin Wright
I'm almost done with the original 1986 version. Click on the book for an article the author co-wrote in 1997. I hope Hillary Clinton has read it.
What I find so distressing is that the reasons for the pull to embrace Islamic fundamentalist militancy have not been ameliorated. The grinding poverty and low literacy rates, the high unemployment,the westernized leadership's disparity of wealth in majority Islamic countries are still there. The push for independence from the globalized world-wide economy is something that leaders in majority Muslim countries must deal with.
So the cheapest short-term strategies for the US and Saudi Arabia have not worked is what I'm trying to say. It didn't work in Iran in 1953, either, and guess what? It still ain't working.
And if you read any of the links so far, this is not some right-wing hate spew blaming the religion of Islam. Yeah, I personally believe that some of the problems lie in the way that fundamentalist whack-jobs interpret the Q'uran and the same goes for the Torah and the Bible. (See my religion sucks posts, they're some of my most popular.) Western countries histories of colonization are coming home to roost.
A great lady used to tell me "Nothing changes if nothing changes." Well duh.
Hassan al-Turabi in Sudan, is covered in the book.
Sheikh Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd Allah ibn Baaz is in the book.
And 30 years later here: "Though Bin Baz is now dead, his fanatical fatwas continue to be treated as authoritative by the Saudi government." (literally, here in San Diego mosques)
The Saudi hate spew disseminated in the US and UK has only been adressed in Saudi Arabia in the last month.
A woman appointed to the head of girls education, and some variety in your Sunni Islam indoctrination. Guess they exported enough hatred of non-Wahhabis that the birds came home to roost. They have, however had years to spread the Wahhabi love all over the world.
The Egyptian blind sheikh has been fomenting Islamic fundamentalist hatred since the 70's. He's in jail in S. Carolina after being convicted in the 1993 WTC bombing. He's in the book. So is Hosni Mubarak.
Jew hatred looks like it's still alive and well in Iran today as Kerry visits Gaza. That's a pretty good indication to me that support for (terrorists or) the oppressed Shia's is still strong in Iran. I don't see it written that leaders in the Muslim world use the suffering of the Palestinians to divert attention from their own failures, but I've wondered about it. It's a theory of mine.
We in America voted for hope and change. People are people. My guess is that people in the majority Muslim nations would too, if given the opportunity. How about we quit bombing the shit out of them, And listen to their greivances .
I didn't say self- flagellate, I said listen.
California legislature approves budget bill
By JUDY LIN – 42 minutes ago
Gee, it only took 106 days.
Update 3:42 PM 2/19/2009
JOEL MATHIS: California's story is an old one: People want all the services that government provides. They just don't want to pay for it.
The Golden State hobbled itself in 1978 when voters passed Proposition 13, putting a hard cap on property taxes, a significant source of government revenue in most states. Which would've been fine, except that demand for government services kept growing by leaps and bounds.
Gee, it only took 106 days.
Update 3:42 PM 2/19/2009
JOEL MATHIS: California's story is an old one: People want all the services that government provides. They just don't want to pay for it.
The Golden State hobbled itself in 1978 when voters passed Proposition 13, putting a hard cap on property taxes, a significant source of government revenue in most states. Which would've been fine, except that demand for government services kept growing by leaps and bounds.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
CA GOP
stands for California's
Goddamned
Obstructionist
Pricks
and oh look, they replaced one whiny titty babies leaderwith another.
Fuck these RepugnanThuglican assholes, as a California voter I don't WANT open primaries.
Ornery Bastard has an inspiring post over at his place on the National Goddamned Obstructionist Pricks...
Goddamned
Obstructionist
Pricks
and oh look, they replaced one whiny titty babies leaderwith another.
Fuck these RepugnanThuglican assholes, as a California voter I don't WANT open primaries.
Ornery Bastard has an inspiring post over at his place on the National Goddamned Obstructionist Pricks...
Avoiding Another Cold War
Posted on Feb 17, 2009
By Scott Ritter
...Eliminating missile defense would make the talk of strategic nuclear reductions more realistic...
...The real danger from Russia lies not in any genuine expansionistic tendency, but rather its reactions to perceived provocation on the part of the U.S. and NATO...(title link)
Russia and Ukraine pipeline politics.
By Scott Ritter
...Eliminating missile defense would make the talk of strategic nuclear reductions more realistic...
...The real danger from Russia lies not in any genuine expansionistic tendency, but rather its reactions to perceived provocation on the part of the U.S. and NATO...(title link)
Russia and Ukraine pipeline politics.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Davos Debt & Denial
In an age of illusion, the guise of truth is often heresy
By Darryl Schoon
February 15, 2009
Antal E. Fekete
No Credit for Bankers
Inside the Meltdown
Tonight at ten on PBS. Update 3:35 PM 2/18/2009 I learned nothing from this show.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned
Heh, got his, the arrogant dickhead. Rich guys. Huh.
U.S. Intel Chief's Shocking Warning: Wall Street's Disaster Has Spawned Our Greatest Terrorist Threat
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted February 17, 2009.
The Director of National Intelligence argued that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists.
Well, as long as they can scrounge up the $ to keep birth control clinics open it might not get really bad here. World wide:
...some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year.
Is another story altogether. The author of this story wrote another one over at Truthdig. I think he likes scaring the shit out of people.
Update 3:46 PM 2/18/2009 Embedded Business Press Misses Story of the Century
Rory O'Connor, Danny Schechter's colleague and business partner at the Globalvision has a great post on the financial press.
By Darryl Schoon
February 15, 2009
Antal E. Fekete
No Credit for Bankers
Inside the Meltdown
Tonight at ten on PBS. Update 3:35 PM 2/18/2009 I learned nothing from this show.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned
Heh, got his, the arrogant dickhead. Rich guys. Huh.
U.S. Intel Chief's Shocking Warning: Wall Street's Disaster Has Spawned Our Greatest Terrorist Threat
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted February 17, 2009.
The Director of National Intelligence argued that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists.
Well, as long as they can scrounge up the $ to keep birth control clinics open it might not get really bad here. World wide:
...some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year.
Is another story altogether. The author of this story wrote another one over at Truthdig. I think he likes scaring the shit out of people.
Update 3:46 PM 2/18/2009 Embedded Business Press Misses Story of the Century
Rory O'Connor, Danny Schechter's colleague and business partner at the Globalvision has a great post on the financial press.
Monday, February 16, 2009
WTF Chuck
WTF? Everybody's posting this silly thing, gotta go, I'm off to watch Chuck.
My Liberal Identity:
You are a Peace Patroller, also known as an anti-war liberal or neo-hippie. You believe in putting an end to American imperial conquest, stopping wars that have already been lost, and supporting our troops by bringing them home.
California's GOP lawmakers should do the budget math
George Skelton:
Capitol Journal
To avoid raising taxes and still balance the books in Sacramento, you'd have to virtually shut down state government.
George Skelton, Capitol Journal
February 16, 2009
From Sacramento -- The math seems pretty simple. But apparently it's too rigorous for many Republican politicians.
To avoid raising taxes and still balance the books in Sacramento, you'd have to virtually shut down state government.
In order to pass a state budget we need 2/3 of the legislators to vote for it. According to a head count, one more Republican is needed to vote for it in order to get it passed, so that's holding up the vote
I wonder if any of these idiot Republicans wants a foster child, but no money to take care of the child? The obstructionist assholes make enough to do it without compensation, fuck 'em.
Capitol Journal
To avoid raising taxes and still balance the books in Sacramento, you'd have to virtually shut down state government.
George Skelton, Capitol Journal
February 16, 2009
From Sacramento -- The math seems pretty simple. But apparently it's too rigorous for many Republican politicians.
To avoid raising taxes and still balance the books in Sacramento, you'd have to virtually shut down state government.
In order to pass a state budget we need 2/3 of the legislators to vote for it. According to a head count, one more Republican is needed to vote for it in order to get it passed, so that's holding up the vote
I wonder if any of these idiot Republicans wants a foster child, but no money to take care of the child? The obstructionist assholes make enough to do it without compensation, fuck 'em.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Cut the military budget I & II
Cut the Military Budget--I
By Christopher Hayes
This article appeared in the March 2, 2009 edition of The Nation.
February 11, 2009
The cardinal rule of bargaining is that the first number you propose should never be the number you actually think you can get, and nobody knows this better than the Defense Department. In September the Army Times reported that the Pentagon was preparing to box the new president in to a major increase in military spending by drawing up a budget before the election had been decided. The number it eventually leaked was $584 billion, a whopping increase of $68.6 billion over last year. It was kind of like telling the new boss that your old boss had already agreed to give you a $100,000 raise. In any other context, the sheer hubris would get you fired or laughed out of the room.
But the Pentagon budget is ruled by the appropriations equivalent of quantum physics, in which the normal rules of constraint do not apply. We still don't know how much the Obama administration is planning to give the Pentagon--the announcement of the number has been postponed--but reports indicate the number will likely be $527 billion, around an 8 percent increase instead of the 12 percent the Pentagon requested.
Despite that fact, propagandists like neoconservative Robert Kagan are already crying foul, arguing that the increase is insufficient and--more insidious--will cost jobs at a time when we're losing half a million a month. Military spending "is exactly the kind of expenditure that can have an immediate impact on the economy," Kagan recently wrote in the Washington Post, and any cuts would be a sign to the world that "the American retreat has begun."
"It seems like kind of the game they play every year," Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, told me when I asked her about the rumored budget numbers. "The Pentagon puts out this hugely inflated number, and then it turns out that the 'cut' is from that hugely inflated number, so the Pentagon still wins. The number is $40 billion more than we spent last year."
You may think Barack Obama has the toughest job in Washington, but for my money it's Pemberton. Since 1989, when she left academia with a PhD in English, she's worked as an advocate for reining in the military-industrial complex in favor of a broader, less militarized approach to international security. Each year she and former Reagan Pentagon official and Center for American Progress senior fellow Lawrence Korb write an alternate Unified Security Budget. Their 2009 version identified $61 billion in cuts to military programs that could be made "with no sacrifice to our security."
Cutting the military budget has been a staple of the progressive agenda for decades, of course, but it's worth putting the budget numbers in context to highlight how out of control things have gotten across the Potomac in Arlington. Everybody knows that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been mind-bogglingly expensive--about a trillion-dollar bonfire. Less noticed has been the skyrocketing of non-war-specific Pentagon funding. Since 2001 the regular Pentagon budget has increased by 77 percent, while cost overruns in weapons systems have ballooned to $300 billion. "We've never been perfect there," says Korb. "But it has really gotten out of hand in the last eight years."
And those numbers don't fully capture the explosion in security spending because they don't capture security spending outside the Defense Department budget, in the departments of Justice, Energy, Homeland Security or the NSA and the CIA.
"Congress is not set up to consider the overall balance of what we're spending our money on," says Pemberton, who notes that the ratio of military to nonmilitary foreign engagement spending is eighteen to one. "Even the secretary of defense says this imbalance is not good for our security."
Indeed, over the past year Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made a series of speeches about shifting resources toward nonmilitary international engagement, as well as reducing spending on outdated weapons systems. "The spigot of defense spending that opened on 9/11 is closing," he told senators on the Armed Services Committee in January. "The economic crisis and resulting budget pressures," he said, would provide "one of those rare chances...to critically and ruthlessly separate appetites from real requirements, those things that are desirable in a perfect world from those things that are truly needed in light of the threats America faces and the missions we are likely to undertake in the years ahead."
Obama expressed similar sentiments on the campaign trail: "I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending," he said in a campaign video. "I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems."
Most recently, Rahm Emanuel hinted on Meet the Press that the administration might have the Pentagon in its sights as part of its promise to trim fat from the budget. "We have about $300 billion in cost overruns," he said. "That must be addressed, and we will be addressing it."
Sensing that the Obama administration has laid the rhetorical groundwork for a significant reduction of the inflated military budget, the military lobby has already launched a pre-emptive strike, pooling resources to fund a $2 million PR campaign arguing against cuts.
When in October Congressman Barney Frank called for a 25 percent reduction in the Pentagon's budget [see Frank's Comment on this page], GOP lawmakers went apoplectic, issuing a string of hysterical press releases attacking Frank as "reckless" and the proposed cuts as a "grossly irresponsible," "draconian" attempt to "gut national security."
The first concrete test of the strength of the military lobby and its allies in Congress is the battle over the fate of the F-22 Raptor fighter jet. Military experts agree that the F-22 is outdated and unnecessary. As Gates has noted, not a single F-22 mission had been flown in either of the current wars.
Production of the last Raptor is scheduled for 2011, but Congress has pressured the Pentagon (amazingly, against its will) to order more in this year's budget. Lockheed Martin, which stands to lose billions should the F-22 be discontinued, has launched an all-out PR war, leveraging the recession to argue that cutting the jet would mean the loss of 95,000 jobs. (It has even set up an online petition at preserveraptorjobs.com.) Most economists agree, however, that military spending is one of the least efficient ways of creating jobs per dollar of government spending.
That doesn't seem to bother members of Congress who represent districts where the F-22 is produced (a surprisingly high number, since the makers intentionally spread out production to maximize Congressional influence). When Obama took questions from Democratic House members at their annual retreat, the second question came from Georgia Representative David Scott, who pleaded to keep the F-22 going. Obama was evasive: "We also have to deal with the debt, and it is unsustainable. We have to make tough decisions."
Despite the encouraging rhetoric from the administration, Lockheed Martin won the first round in December, when Gates included funding for four additional F-22s in a draft of the upcoming war supplemental. Defense lobbyists scored another victory in the appointment of Bill Lynn as deputy defense secretary. A longtime lobbyist for Raytheon, Lynn was the first recipient of a waiver from the stringent new White House rules against hiring lobbyists. Says Pemberton of Lynn, "He never met a weapons system he didn't like."
The path of least resistance for the Obama administration, legendarily parsimonious with its political capital, will be to continue on the path and avoid what will unquestionably be a vicious and hard-fought battle to impose some kind of rational boundary on the security budget. The fight for a sane rebalancing of our security budget will be led by members of the House.
Earlier in the year, Pemberton met with one of the Obama transition teams to discuss the Pentagon budget. She wouldn't tell me what they discussed, but when I asked her whether she thought they were committed to reining in the Pentagon, the weary look her in eyes made me think it's going to be, in the words of a former defense secretary, a long, hard slog.
(Strange, a word search of this article didn't bring up oil , gas , or fuel .)
And fuck Lockheed Martin.
Cut the Military Budget--II
By Barney Frank
This article appeared in the March 2, 2009 edition of The Nation.
I am a great believer in freedom of expression and am proud of those times when I have been one of a few members of Congress to oppose censorship. I still hold close to an absolutist position, but I have been tempted recently to make an exception, not by banning speech but by requiring it. I would be very happy if there was some way to make it a misdemeanor for people to talk about reducing the budget deficit without including a recommendation that we substantially cut military spending.
Sadly, self-described centrist and even liberal organizations often talk about the need to curtail deficits by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs that have a benign social purpose, but they fail to talk about one area where substantial budget reductions would have the doubly beneficial effect of cutting the deficit and diminishing expenditures that often do more harm than good. Obviously people should be concerned about the $700 billion Congress voted for this past fall to deal with the credit crisis. But even if none of that money were to be paid back--and most of it will be--it would involve a smaller drain on taxpayer dollars than the Iraq War will have cost us by the time it is concluded, and it is roughly equivalent to the $651 billion we will spend on all defense in this fiscal year.
When I am challenged by people--not all of them conservative--who tell me that they agree, for example, that we should enact comprehensive universal healthcare but wonder how to pay for it, my answer is that I do not know immediately where to get the funding but I know whom I should ask. I was in Congress on September 10, 2001, and I know there was no money in the budget at that time for a war in Iraq. So my answer is that I will go to the people who found the money for that war and ask them if they could find some for healthcare.
It is particularly inexplicable that so many self-styled moderates ignore the extraordinary increase in military spending. After all, George W. Bush himself has acknowledged its importance. As the December 20 Wall Street Journal notes, "The president remains adamant his budget troubles were the result of a ramp-up in defense spending." Bush then ends this rare burst of intellectual honesty by blaming all this "ramp-up" on the need to fight the war in Iraq.
Current plans call for us not only to spend hundreds of billions more in Iraq but to continue to spend even more over the next few years producing new weapons that might have been useful against the Soviet Union. Many of these weapons are technological marvels, but they have a central flaw: no conceivable enemy. It ought to be a requirement in spending all this money for a weapon that there be some need for it. In some cases we are developing weapons--in part because of nothing more than momentum--that lack not only a current military need but even a plausible use in any foreseeable future.
It is possible to debate how strong America should be militarily in relation to the rest of the world. But that is not a debate that needs to be entered into to reduce the military budget by a large amount. If, beginning one year from now, we were to cut military spending by 25 percent from its projected levels, we would still be immeasurably stronger than any combination of nations with whom we might be engaged.
Implicitly, some advocates of continued largesse for the Pentagon concede that the case cannot be made fully in terms of our need to be safe from physical attack. Ironically--even hypocritically, since many of those who make the case are in other contexts anti-government spending conservatives--they argue for a kind of weaponized Keynesianism that says military spending is important because it provides jobs and boosts the economy. Spending on military hardware does produce some jobs, but it is one of the most inefficient ways to deploy public funds to stimulate the economy. When I asked him years ago what he thought about military spending as stimulus, Alan Greenspan, to his credit, noted that from an economic standpoint military spending was like insurance: if necessary to meet its primary need, it had to be done, but it was not good for the economy; and to the extent that it could be reduced, the economy would benefit.
The math is compelling: if we do not make reductions approximating 25 percent of the military budget starting fairly soon, it will be impossible to continue to fund an adequate level of domestic activity even with a repeal of Bush's tax cuts for the very wealthy.
I am working with a variety of thoughtful analysts to show how we can make very substantial cuts in the military budget without in any way diminishing the security we need. I do not think it will be hard to make it clear to Americans that their well-being is far more endangered by a proposal for substantial reductions in Medicare, Social Security or other important domestic areas than it would be by canceling weapons systems that have no justification from any threat we are likely to face.
So those organizations, editorial boards and individuals who talk about the need for fiscal responsibility should be challenged to begin with the area where our spending has been the most irresponsible and has produced the least good for the dollars expended--our military budget. Both parties have for too long indulged the implicit notion that military spending is somehow irrelevant to reducing the deficit and have resisted applying to military spending the standards of efficiency that are applied to other programs. If we do not reduce the military budget, either we accustom ourselves to unending and increasing budget deficits, or we do severe harm to our ability to improve the quality of our lives through sensible public policy.
The only reason I put these articles up in full is because I'm pissed off at this publication. Every time I turn around I'm having to shred a bunch of junk mail begging me for $ to pay for the mail delivery of it. I specifically subscribed to this publication so I could read it online and avoid the build up of paper in the house because at that time there was no recycling pick up here. Not that any of my fucktard neighbors can separate the recyclables from the trash anyway.
By Christopher Hayes
This article appeared in the March 2, 2009 edition of The Nation.
February 11, 2009
The cardinal rule of bargaining is that the first number you propose should never be the number you actually think you can get, and nobody knows this better than the Defense Department. In September the Army Times reported that the Pentagon was preparing to box the new president in to a major increase in military spending by drawing up a budget before the election had been decided. The number it eventually leaked was $584 billion, a whopping increase of $68.6 billion over last year. It was kind of like telling the new boss that your old boss had already agreed to give you a $100,000 raise. In any other context, the sheer hubris would get you fired or laughed out of the room.
But the Pentagon budget is ruled by the appropriations equivalent of quantum physics, in which the normal rules of constraint do not apply. We still don't know how much the Obama administration is planning to give the Pentagon--the announcement of the number has been postponed--but reports indicate the number will likely be $527 billion, around an 8 percent increase instead of the 12 percent the Pentagon requested.
Despite that fact, propagandists like neoconservative Robert Kagan are already crying foul, arguing that the increase is insufficient and--more insidious--will cost jobs at a time when we're losing half a million a month. Military spending "is exactly the kind of expenditure that can have an immediate impact on the economy," Kagan recently wrote in the Washington Post, and any cuts would be a sign to the world that "the American retreat has begun."
"It seems like kind of the game they play every year," Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, told me when I asked her about the rumored budget numbers. "The Pentagon puts out this hugely inflated number, and then it turns out that the 'cut' is from that hugely inflated number, so the Pentagon still wins. The number is $40 billion more than we spent last year."
You may think Barack Obama has the toughest job in Washington, but for my money it's Pemberton. Since 1989, when she left academia with a PhD in English, she's worked as an advocate for reining in the military-industrial complex in favor of a broader, less militarized approach to international security. Each year she and former Reagan Pentagon official and Center for American Progress senior fellow Lawrence Korb write an alternate Unified Security Budget. Their 2009 version identified $61 billion in cuts to military programs that could be made "with no sacrifice to our security."
Cutting the military budget has been a staple of the progressive agenda for decades, of course, but it's worth putting the budget numbers in context to highlight how out of control things have gotten across the Potomac in Arlington. Everybody knows that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been mind-bogglingly expensive--about a trillion-dollar bonfire. Less noticed has been the skyrocketing of non-war-specific Pentagon funding. Since 2001 the regular Pentagon budget has increased by 77 percent, while cost overruns in weapons systems have ballooned to $300 billion. "We've never been perfect there," says Korb. "But it has really gotten out of hand in the last eight years."
And those numbers don't fully capture the explosion in security spending because they don't capture security spending outside the Defense Department budget, in the departments of Justice, Energy, Homeland Security or the NSA and the CIA.
"Congress is not set up to consider the overall balance of what we're spending our money on," says Pemberton, who notes that the ratio of military to nonmilitary foreign engagement spending is eighteen to one. "Even the secretary of defense says this imbalance is not good for our security."
Indeed, over the past year Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made a series of speeches about shifting resources toward nonmilitary international engagement, as well as reducing spending on outdated weapons systems. "The spigot of defense spending that opened on 9/11 is closing," he told senators on the Armed Services Committee in January. "The economic crisis and resulting budget pressures," he said, would provide "one of those rare chances...to critically and ruthlessly separate appetites from real requirements, those things that are desirable in a perfect world from those things that are truly needed in light of the threats America faces and the missions we are likely to undertake in the years ahead."
Obama expressed similar sentiments on the campaign trail: "I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending," he said in a campaign video. "I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems."
Most recently, Rahm Emanuel hinted on Meet the Press that the administration might have the Pentagon in its sights as part of its promise to trim fat from the budget. "We have about $300 billion in cost overruns," he said. "That must be addressed, and we will be addressing it."
Sensing that the Obama administration has laid the rhetorical groundwork for a significant reduction of the inflated military budget, the military lobby has already launched a pre-emptive strike, pooling resources to fund a $2 million PR campaign arguing against cuts.
When in October Congressman Barney Frank called for a 25 percent reduction in the Pentagon's budget [see Frank's Comment on this page], GOP lawmakers went apoplectic, issuing a string of hysterical press releases attacking Frank as "reckless" and the proposed cuts as a "grossly irresponsible," "draconian" attempt to "gut national security."
The first concrete test of the strength of the military lobby and its allies in Congress is the battle over the fate of the F-22 Raptor fighter jet. Military experts agree that the F-22 is outdated and unnecessary. As Gates has noted, not a single F-22 mission had been flown in either of the current wars.
Production of the last Raptor is scheduled for 2011, but Congress has pressured the Pentagon (amazingly, against its will) to order more in this year's budget. Lockheed Martin, which stands to lose billions should the F-22 be discontinued, has launched an all-out PR war, leveraging the recession to argue that cutting the jet would mean the loss of 95,000 jobs. (It has even set up an online petition at preserveraptorjobs.com.) Most economists agree, however, that military spending is one of the least efficient ways of creating jobs per dollar of government spending.
That doesn't seem to bother members of Congress who represent districts where the F-22 is produced (a surprisingly high number, since the makers intentionally spread out production to maximize Congressional influence). When Obama took questions from Democratic House members at their annual retreat, the second question came from Georgia Representative David Scott, who pleaded to keep the F-22 going. Obama was evasive: "We also have to deal with the debt, and it is unsustainable. We have to make tough decisions."
Despite the encouraging rhetoric from the administration, Lockheed Martin won the first round in December, when Gates included funding for four additional F-22s in a draft of the upcoming war supplemental. Defense lobbyists scored another victory in the appointment of Bill Lynn as deputy defense secretary. A longtime lobbyist for Raytheon, Lynn was the first recipient of a waiver from the stringent new White House rules against hiring lobbyists. Says Pemberton of Lynn, "He never met a weapons system he didn't like."
The path of least resistance for the Obama administration, legendarily parsimonious with its political capital, will be to continue on the path and avoid what will unquestionably be a vicious and hard-fought battle to impose some kind of rational boundary on the security budget. The fight for a sane rebalancing of our security budget will be led by members of the House.
Earlier in the year, Pemberton met with one of the Obama transition teams to discuss the Pentagon budget. She wouldn't tell me what they discussed, but when I asked her whether she thought they were committed to reining in the Pentagon, the weary look her in eyes made me think it's going to be, in the words of a former defense secretary, a long, hard slog.
(Strange, a word search of this article didn't bring up oil , gas , or fuel .)
And fuck Lockheed Martin.
Cut the Military Budget--II
By Barney Frank
This article appeared in the March 2, 2009 edition of The Nation.
I am a great believer in freedom of expression and am proud of those times when I have been one of a few members of Congress to oppose censorship. I still hold close to an absolutist position, but I have been tempted recently to make an exception, not by banning speech but by requiring it. I would be very happy if there was some way to make it a misdemeanor for people to talk about reducing the budget deficit without including a recommendation that we substantially cut military spending.
Sadly, self-described centrist and even liberal organizations often talk about the need to curtail deficits by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs that have a benign social purpose, but they fail to talk about one area where substantial budget reductions would have the doubly beneficial effect of cutting the deficit and diminishing expenditures that often do more harm than good. Obviously people should be concerned about the $700 billion Congress voted for this past fall to deal with the credit crisis. But even if none of that money were to be paid back--and most of it will be--it would involve a smaller drain on taxpayer dollars than the Iraq War will have cost us by the time it is concluded, and it is roughly equivalent to the $651 billion we will spend on all defense in this fiscal year.
When I am challenged by people--not all of them conservative--who tell me that they agree, for example, that we should enact comprehensive universal healthcare but wonder how to pay for it, my answer is that I do not know immediately where to get the funding but I know whom I should ask. I was in Congress on September 10, 2001, and I know there was no money in the budget at that time for a war in Iraq. So my answer is that I will go to the people who found the money for that war and ask them if they could find some for healthcare.
It is particularly inexplicable that so many self-styled moderates ignore the extraordinary increase in military spending. After all, George W. Bush himself has acknowledged its importance. As the December 20 Wall Street Journal notes, "The president remains adamant his budget troubles were the result of a ramp-up in defense spending." Bush then ends this rare burst of intellectual honesty by blaming all this "ramp-up" on the need to fight the war in Iraq.
Current plans call for us not only to spend hundreds of billions more in Iraq but to continue to spend even more over the next few years producing new weapons that might have been useful against the Soviet Union. Many of these weapons are technological marvels, but they have a central flaw: no conceivable enemy. It ought to be a requirement in spending all this money for a weapon that there be some need for it. In some cases we are developing weapons--in part because of nothing more than momentum--that lack not only a current military need but even a plausible use in any foreseeable future.
It is possible to debate how strong America should be militarily in relation to the rest of the world. But that is not a debate that needs to be entered into to reduce the military budget by a large amount. If, beginning one year from now, we were to cut military spending by 25 percent from its projected levels, we would still be immeasurably stronger than any combination of nations with whom we might be engaged.
Implicitly, some advocates of continued largesse for the Pentagon concede that the case cannot be made fully in terms of our need to be safe from physical attack. Ironically--even hypocritically, since many of those who make the case are in other contexts anti-government spending conservatives--they argue for a kind of weaponized Keynesianism that says military spending is important because it provides jobs and boosts the economy. Spending on military hardware does produce some jobs, but it is one of the most inefficient ways to deploy public funds to stimulate the economy. When I asked him years ago what he thought about military spending as stimulus, Alan Greenspan, to his credit, noted that from an economic standpoint military spending was like insurance: if necessary to meet its primary need, it had to be done, but it was not good for the economy; and to the extent that it could be reduced, the economy would benefit.
The math is compelling: if we do not make reductions approximating 25 percent of the military budget starting fairly soon, it will be impossible to continue to fund an adequate level of domestic activity even with a repeal of Bush's tax cuts for the very wealthy.
I am working with a variety of thoughtful analysts to show how we can make very substantial cuts in the military budget without in any way diminishing the security we need. I do not think it will be hard to make it clear to Americans that their well-being is far more endangered by a proposal for substantial reductions in Medicare, Social Security or other important domestic areas than it would be by canceling weapons systems that have no justification from any threat we are likely to face.
So those organizations, editorial boards and individuals who talk about the need for fiscal responsibility should be challenged to begin with the area where our spending has been the most irresponsible and has produced the least good for the dollars expended--our military budget. Both parties have for too long indulged the implicit notion that military spending is somehow irrelevant to reducing the deficit and have resisted applying to military spending the standards of efficiency that are applied to other programs. If we do not reduce the military budget, either we accustom ourselves to unending and increasing budget deficits, or we do severe harm to our ability to improve the quality of our lives through sensible public policy.
The only reason I put these articles up in full is because I'm pissed off at this publication. Every time I turn around I'm having to shred a bunch of junk mail begging me for $ to pay for the mail delivery of it. I specifically subscribed to this publication so I could read it online and avoid the build up of paper in the house because at that time there was no recycling pick up here. Not that any of my fucktard neighbors can separate the recyclables from the trash anyway.
US-Iran Wall of Mistrust
wait wait wait, before we start I'm going to insert something from a recent post --an opinion of mine that hasn't changed in the last 25 years--
"I remember thinking that Khomeini was an asshole. I also remember thinking that Reagan was an asshole. "
ok, carry on
Middle East (Asia Times)
Feb 12, 2009
US-IRAN WALL OF MISTRUST, Part 1
Obama's Persian double
By Pepe Escobar
Khatami...
... he is a reformist able to reach out to conservatives and wildly popular among women, the young and progressives of all stripes....
...He was also the man who called for a "dialogue of civilizations". The Bush administration snubbed him - as it was entangled in the failed, Huntingtonian thesis of the "clash of civilizations"....
...Years later, Ahmadinejad's definitely non-reformist economic policies proved themselves to be an absolute disaster. Official inflation stands at 24% - and rising...
... On top of it, Ahmadinejad is an apocalyptical Mahdist - believing from the bottom of his heart in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi, the "occult" Twelfth Imam. Most Iranian Shi'ites are not Mahdist...
... Khatami for his part remains very popular in Iran. His views are eminently moderate...
...And as for the Khomeinist credo of an exportable revolutionary idea, it seems to remain more alive than ever: "The popularity of the message of the revolution can be clearly witnessed in what happened in Gaza and before that in the 33-day war in Lebanon. The well-equipped Israeli army backed by the US was incapable of defeating a handful of besieged youth [Hamas and Hezbollah] and who had nothing but their faith in God."
Fasten your seat belts; it's gonna be a bumpy ride.
Middle East (Asia Times)
Feb 13, 2009
US-IRAN WALL OF MISTRUST, Part 2
Will Obama say 'we're sorry'?
By Pepe Escobar
If United States President Barack Obama is really serious about "unclenched fists" in a new US-Iran relationship, he's got to take a serious, unbiased look at the US record.
Former US secretary of state Cordell Hull's classic comment about Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo - "He's a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch" - has been the norm for decades. From the Somozas in Nicaragua to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, from Indonesia's Suharto to the shah of Iran, US foreign policy over the past decades has enshrined a hefty SOB gallery...
...During the Cold War, stressing how easily the Soviet Union had occupied Iran earlier, the CIA trained the Savak, the shah's secret police. Being Muslim but not an Arab, Mohammad Reza also rendered a great service to the US: he did not share Arab hatred of Israel. He even sold oil to Israel (one of the reasons that later fomented ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's popularity). In sum, the shah was the perfect gatekeeper of US political and economic interests in the Persian Gulf...
...A case can be made that the whole shah/Kissinger racket inevitably led to the fall of the shah. The shah - like Somoza, Suharto or an array of Latin American dictators - never understood that he was no more than a puppet.
He spent tens of billions of dollars on American weapons. His multinational model fit the obvious pattern seen all over the developing world: a minority swimming in gold and conspicuous consumption while the absolute majority faced dire poverty. The shah pushed for cash crops instead of conducting a real agrarian reform that would guarantee the subsistence of millions of Iranian peasants - all of them diehard Shi'ites and most of them illiterate.
These peasant masses in the end got the boot from the countryside by American agribusiness; for the Americans, they were nothing but a "superfluous" workforce, non-adaptable to a Western, mechanized, selective model. It was those miserable masses, flooding Tehran and other large Iranian cities in a fight for survival, who composed the mass base of Khomeini's revolution in 1979. The rest is, of course, history....
(Jeezus Christ, I never learned that in American History 101, but I do remember the following)
In 1978, the whole US corporate media were hammering that the shah was invincible; that the Khomeinist mobs were a minority; and that the shah was a "great modernizer" opposed by "Muslim fanatics". Then, after the revolution, American guilt for the life and "work" of the shah was psychologically replaced by hatred of Iran because of the American hostage crisis...
...If Obama really wants to make the effort to understand Iran he could do no worse than read the great Iranian philosopher Daryush Shayegan , a former professor at the University of Tehran. When Khomeini died, Shayegan identified him and the shah as the two juxtaposed Irans: imperial Iran and the painful Iran of the blood of the martyr, "a juxtaposition that symbolizes an unreal dream: as the 12th century mystical poet Ruzbehan from Shiraz would say, this 'dementia of the inaccessible'."
Books by Daryush Shayegan on bookfinder
"I remember thinking that Khomeini was an asshole. I also remember thinking that Reagan was an asshole. "
ok, carry on
Middle East (Asia Times)
Feb 12, 2009
US-IRAN WALL OF MISTRUST, Part 1
Obama's Persian double
By Pepe Escobar
Khatami...
... he is a reformist able to reach out to conservatives and wildly popular among women, the young and progressives of all stripes....
...He was also the man who called for a "dialogue of civilizations". The Bush administration snubbed him - as it was entangled in the failed, Huntingtonian thesis of the "clash of civilizations"....
...Years later, Ahmadinejad's definitely non-reformist economic policies proved themselves to be an absolute disaster. Official inflation stands at 24% - and rising...
... On top of it, Ahmadinejad is an apocalyptical Mahdist - believing from the bottom of his heart in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi, the "occult" Twelfth Imam. Most Iranian Shi'ites are not Mahdist...
... Khatami for his part remains very popular in Iran. His views are eminently moderate...
...And as for the Khomeinist credo of an exportable revolutionary idea, it seems to remain more alive than ever: "The popularity of the message of the revolution can be clearly witnessed in what happened in Gaza and before that in the 33-day war in Lebanon. The well-equipped Israeli army backed by the US was incapable of defeating a handful of besieged youth [Hamas and Hezbollah] and who had nothing but their faith in God."
Fasten your seat belts; it's gonna be a bumpy ride.
Middle East (Asia Times)
Feb 13, 2009
US-IRAN WALL OF MISTRUST, Part 2
Will Obama say 'we're sorry'?
By Pepe Escobar
If United States President Barack Obama is really serious about "unclenched fists" in a new US-Iran relationship, he's got to take a serious, unbiased look at the US record.
Former US secretary of state Cordell Hull's classic comment about Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo - "He's a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch" - has been the norm for decades. From the Somozas in Nicaragua to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, from Indonesia's Suharto to the shah of Iran, US foreign policy over the past decades has enshrined a hefty SOB gallery...
...During the Cold War, stressing how easily the Soviet Union had occupied Iran earlier, the CIA trained the Savak, the shah's secret police. Being Muslim but not an Arab, Mohammad Reza also rendered a great service to the US: he did not share Arab hatred of Israel. He even sold oil to Israel (one of the reasons that later fomented ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's popularity). In sum, the shah was the perfect gatekeeper of US political and economic interests in the Persian Gulf...
...A case can be made that the whole shah/Kissinger racket inevitably led to the fall of the shah. The shah - like Somoza, Suharto or an array of Latin American dictators - never understood that he was no more than a puppet.
He spent tens of billions of dollars on American weapons. His multinational model fit the obvious pattern seen all over the developing world: a minority swimming in gold and conspicuous consumption while the absolute majority faced dire poverty. The shah pushed for cash crops instead of conducting a real agrarian reform that would guarantee the subsistence of millions of Iranian peasants - all of them diehard Shi'ites and most of them illiterate.
These peasant masses in the end got the boot from the countryside by American agribusiness; for the Americans, they were nothing but a "superfluous" workforce, non-adaptable to a Western, mechanized, selective model. It was those miserable masses, flooding Tehran and other large Iranian cities in a fight for survival, who composed the mass base of Khomeini's revolution in 1979. The rest is, of course, history....
(Jeezus Christ, I never learned that in American History 101, but I do remember the following)
In 1978, the whole US corporate media were hammering that the shah was invincible; that the Khomeinist mobs were a minority; and that the shah was a "great modernizer" opposed by "Muslim fanatics". Then, after the revolution, American guilt for the life and "work" of the shah was psychologically replaced by hatred of Iran because of the American hostage crisis...
...If Obama really wants to make the effort to understand Iran he could do no worse than read the great Iranian philosopher Daryush Shayegan , a former professor at the University of Tehran. When Khomeini died, Shayegan identified him and the shah as the two juxtaposed Irans: imperial Iran and the painful Iran of the blood of the martyr, "a juxtaposition that symbolizes an unreal dream: as the 12th century mystical poet Ruzbehan from Shiraz would say, this 'dementia of the inaccessible'."
Books by Daryush Shayegan on bookfinder
Diary of a Pakistani schoolgirl
Page last updated at 11:03 GMT, Monday, 19 January 2009
Diary of a Pakistani schoolgirl
Private schools in Pakistan's troubled north-western Swat district have been ordered to close in a Taleban edict banning girls' education. Militants seeking to impose their austere interpretation of Sharia law have destroyed about 150 schools in the past year. Five more were blown up despite a government pledge to safeguard education, it was reported on Monday. Here a seventh grade schoolgirl from Swat chronicles how the ban has affected her and her classmates. The diary first appeared on BBC Urdu online.
THURSDAY JANUARY 15: NIGHT FILLED WITH ARTILLERY FIRE (click on title link)
"...A Taleban edict banning girls education. Militants seeking to impose their austere interpretation of Sharia law have destroyed 150 schools in the past year..."
Austere-
aus⋅tere /ɔˈstɪər/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [aw-steer] Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective 1. severe in manner or appearance; uncompromising; strict; forbidding: an austere teacher.
2. rigorously self-disciplined and severely moral; ascetic; abstinent: the austere quality of life in the convent.
3. grave; sober; solemn; serious: an austere manner.
4. without excess, luxury, or ease; simple; limited; severe: an austere life.
5. severely simple; without ornament: austere writing.
6. lacking softness; hard: an austere bed of straw.
7. rough to the taste; sour or harsh in flavor.
Zardari: We Underestimated Taliban Threat
Pakistan's President Tells 60 Minutes The Country Is In A Battle To Survive
Pakistan government makes deal with Islamic miitants
Posted on Sunday, February 15, 2009 By Saeed Shah McClatchy Newspapers
Nerve Centre of Islamic Extremism is Saudi Arabia, not Pakistan Freedom House study 2005
Sharia law in UK is 'unavoidable'
Thursday, 7 February 2008, 16:55 GMT
Dr Williams says Muslims should have a choice in legal disputes
The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK "seems unavoidable".
Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4's World at One that the UK has to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.
Laying down the law: ministers cool on archbishop's sharia suggestion· Williams' view out of line with 'British' agenda
Phillips fears giving succour to extremists
Will Woodward and Riazat Butt The Guardian, Friday 8 February 2008
...Umar expressed concerned, however, that Williams had reiterated his support for the Bishop of Rochester and his remarks on there being geographical "no-go" areas for non-Muslims.
In Britain?
Brits can't be in certain areas if they're not Muslim?
What, like in Mecca?
This 2007 study leaves no doubt that the Saudis were still exporting hatred towards non- Wahhabis
Revealed: UK’s first official sharia courts
From The Sunday Times September 14, 2008
Abul Taher
Decapitates Wife Because She Wanted Divorce
Published: February 15, 2009 18:09h
Muzzammil Hassan established his own TV network to show Muslims in a good light. Decapitation charges will not help.
Muzzammil Hassan (44) established Bridges TV network in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York in 2004, with the hope of showing American Muslims in positive way, Buffalo news reports.
However, his idea and reputation were questioned when the police arrested him under suspicion that he decapitated his 37-year-old wife Aasiya.
Hassan turned to a police station and reported his wife`s death. He told the officers that his wife was at his office, thus the police went to the TV network to find the headless body.
The husband was the prime suspect, because Aasiya filed for divorce and she recently requested a restraining order, thus he was not allowed to come home.
- Obviously, this is the worst form of domestic violence possible - the Buffalo district attorney told the media.
The police are still looking for the murder weapon, while Hassan has been detained under second-degree murder.
Muslims in USA
The number of Muslims in the USA amounted to 7 to 8 million last year, which is a significant increase in relation to 2001, where there were only a million Muslims in America.
(same story from raw story )
Allah's ambassadors
Edna Fernandes gains unique access to the ultra-orthodox Deoband madrassa in rural India
Edna Fernandes Articles > Volume 122 Issue 6 November/December 2007 >
...Deobandi Islam is now the dominant force in British Islam, controlling 600 of its 1,350 mosques and 17 of the country’s 26 seminaries. That means 80 per cent of Muslim clerics preaching in Britain are Deobandis....
(author of article tells of visiting the source of Deobandis in India to find out about them)
... Darul Uloom is just five hours’ drive from Delhi and yet on entering the Deoband madrassa it feels like a different country. I arrived at sundown with my Sikh driver Mr Singh, a usually unflappable character who was uncharacteristically anxious as we approached the campus. He was well aware of the madrassa’s reputation. A tight nexus of alleys and a medieval-style bazaar surrounded the school itself. Carts, sorrowful-looking mules and skittish goats thronged the dark walkways as crowds of white-capped and turbaned young men filled lanes lined with Islamic bookshops supplying textbooks, literature and copies of the Koran. No women were on the streets.
I was greeted by the madrassa’s official spokesman, Mr Adil Siddiqui, an austere man sporting a camouflage puffa jacket and regulation-length white beard. His favourite catchphrase when introducing me to people was “This is Mr So-and-So. He is not a terrorist.”
I read these articles and it just seems so weird to me. I worked with a Muslim man from India and he was the nicest guy. My neighbors are Muslim and they are the nicest people. If you believe some of these articles you would think that there is some sort of Islamic doctrine that orders Muslims to spread the faith world wide and treat non-Muslims differently.
Diary of a Pakistani schoolgirl
Private schools in Pakistan's troubled north-western Swat district have been ordered to close in a Taleban edict banning girls' education. Militants seeking to impose their austere interpretation of Sharia law have destroyed about 150 schools in the past year. Five more were blown up despite a government pledge to safeguard education, it was reported on Monday. Here a seventh grade schoolgirl from Swat chronicles how the ban has affected her and her classmates. The diary first appeared on BBC Urdu online.
THURSDAY JANUARY 15: NIGHT FILLED WITH ARTILLERY FIRE (click on title link)
"...A Taleban edict banning girls education. Militants seeking to impose their austere interpretation of Sharia law have destroyed 150 schools in the past year..."
Austere-
aus⋅tere /ɔˈstɪər/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [aw-steer] Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective 1. severe in manner or appearance; uncompromising; strict; forbidding: an austere teacher.
2. rigorously self-disciplined and severely moral; ascetic; abstinent: the austere quality of life in the convent.
3. grave; sober; solemn; serious: an austere manner.
4. without excess, luxury, or ease; simple; limited; severe: an austere life.
5. severely simple; without ornament: austere writing.
6. lacking softness; hard: an austere bed of straw.
7. rough to the taste; sour or harsh in flavor.
Zardari: We Underestimated Taliban Threat
Pakistan's President Tells 60 Minutes The Country Is In A Battle To Survive
Pakistan government makes deal with Islamic miitants
Posted on Sunday, February 15, 2009 By Saeed Shah McClatchy Newspapers
Nerve Centre of Islamic Extremism is Saudi Arabia, not Pakistan Freedom House study 2005
Sharia law in UK is 'unavoidable'
Thursday, 7 February 2008, 16:55 GMT
Dr Williams says Muslims should have a choice in legal disputes
The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK "seems unavoidable".
Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4's World at One that the UK has to "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.
Laying down the law: ministers cool on archbishop's sharia suggestion· Williams' view out of line with 'British' agenda
Phillips fears giving succour to extremists
Will Woodward and Riazat Butt The Guardian, Friday 8 February 2008
...Umar expressed concerned, however, that Williams had reiterated his support for the Bishop of Rochester and his remarks on there being geographical "no-go" areas for non-Muslims.
In Britain?
Brits can't be in certain areas if they're not Muslim?
What, like in Mecca?
This 2007 study leaves no doubt that the Saudis were still exporting hatred towards non- Wahhabis
Revealed: UK’s first official sharia courts
From The Sunday Times September 14, 2008
Abul Taher
Decapitates Wife Because She Wanted Divorce
Published: February 15, 2009 18:09h
Muzzammil Hassan established his own TV network to show Muslims in a good light. Decapitation charges will not help.
Muzzammil Hassan (44) established Bridges TV network in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York in 2004, with the hope of showing American Muslims in positive way, Buffalo news reports.
However, his idea and reputation were questioned when the police arrested him under suspicion that he decapitated his 37-year-old wife Aasiya.
Hassan turned to a police station and reported his wife`s death. He told the officers that his wife was at his office, thus the police went to the TV network to find the headless body.
The husband was the prime suspect, because Aasiya filed for divorce and she recently requested a restraining order, thus he was not allowed to come home.
- Obviously, this is the worst form of domestic violence possible - the Buffalo district attorney told the media.
The police are still looking for the murder weapon, while Hassan has been detained under second-degree murder.
Muslims in USA
The number of Muslims in the USA amounted to 7 to 8 million last year, which is a significant increase in relation to 2001, where there were only a million Muslims in America.
(same story from raw story )
Allah's ambassadors
Edna Fernandes gains unique access to the ultra-orthodox Deoband madrassa in rural India
Edna Fernandes Articles > Volume 122 Issue 6 November/December 2007 >
...Deobandi Islam is now the dominant force in British Islam, controlling 600 of its 1,350 mosques and 17 of the country’s 26 seminaries. That means 80 per cent of Muslim clerics preaching in Britain are Deobandis....
(author of article tells of visiting the source of Deobandis in India to find out about them)
... Darul Uloom is just five hours’ drive from Delhi and yet on entering the Deoband madrassa it feels like a different country. I arrived at sundown with my Sikh driver Mr Singh, a usually unflappable character who was uncharacteristically anxious as we approached the campus. He was well aware of the madrassa’s reputation. A tight nexus of alleys and a medieval-style bazaar surrounded the school itself. Carts, sorrowful-looking mules and skittish goats thronged the dark walkways as crowds of white-capped and turbaned young men filled lanes lined with Islamic bookshops supplying textbooks, literature and copies of the Koran. No women were on the streets.
I was greeted by the madrassa’s official spokesman, Mr Adil Siddiqui, an austere man sporting a camouflage puffa jacket and regulation-length white beard. His favourite catchphrase when introducing me to people was “This is Mr So-and-So. He is not a terrorist.”
I read these articles and it just seems so weird to me. I worked with a Muslim man from India and he was the nicest guy. My neighbors are Muslim and they are the nicest people. If you believe some of these articles you would think that there is some sort of Islamic doctrine that orders Muslims to spread the faith world wide and treat non-Muslims differently.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
Politicians
Listen up, you doofballs! (mp3 file)
Societies and Anxieties
Paul Solman and "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" author Jared Diamond examine how societies handle crises and can even thrive in the aftermath.
And read this book
And then watch this and get a damned clue.
It's Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting, not FDR's policies that should be studied for solutions to the banking crisis
Societies and Anxieties
Paul Solman and "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" author Jared Diamond examine how societies handle crises and can even thrive in the aftermath.
And read this book
And then watch this and get a damned clue.
It's Teddy Roosevelt's trust busting, not FDR's policies that should be studied for solutions to the banking crisis
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Joseph Stiglitz talks to TPM
It can't hurt to listen to what a Nobel Prize winning economist has to say, can it? He's the one who tried to tell us about the three trillion dollar war.
Susan Collins Stripped Whistleblower Protection from Stimulus Bill So GOP Can Blame Dems Later
By Susie Madrak Thursday Feb 12, 2009 3:00pm
Via TPMMuckraker: Gotta love those "centrists"!
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Roman Empire and United States
The Stimulus Plans: How They Differ
February 10, 2009
hit CTRL F and put in "military" and check it out. And then look at this.
Fiscal Year 2009 Department Of Defense Budget Released
Global miitary spending chart
Fall of the Roman Empire
February 10, 2009
hit CTRL F and put in "military" and check it out. And then look at this.
Fiscal Year 2009 Department Of Defense Budget Released
Global miitary spending chart
Fall of the Roman Empire
Chu, energy, and weirdness I notice
Stephen Chu: "We're Looking at a Scenario Where There's No More Agriculture in California"
By Joseph Romm, Climate Progress. Posted February 11, 2009.
Eight years of disinformation and muzzling U.S. climate scientists has left the public largely unaware of the catastrophes ahead.
Alternet expands on an article I noticed a week ago,because climate change is doing weird things in this country. And other places.
Australia Fires a Climate Wake-up Call: Experts
Published on Wednesday, February 11, 2009 by Reuters
by David Fogarty
I wonder if Chu is keeping his eyes peeled for what the evil seeds of the Cheney Administration are doing outside the country?
Indonesia Lifts Tsunami Warning Issued After Massive 7.0-Magnitude Quake
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Probe eyed on stranding of melon-headed whales
02/11/2009 05:33 AM
Earthquakes caused by underwater oil and gas exploration, shrinking magma, magnetic stripping and polar reversal
Staff Reporter
Mar. 29, 2005
Right.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
No coinkydinks what-so-ever.
By Joseph Romm, Climate Progress. Posted February 11, 2009.
Eight years of disinformation and muzzling U.S. climate scientists has left the public largely unaware of the catastrophes ahead.
Alternet expands on an article I noticed a week ago,because climate change is doing weird things in this country. And other places.
Australia Fires a Climate Wake-up Call: Experts
Published on Wednesday, February 11, 2009 by Reuters
by David Fogarty
I wonder if Chu is keeping his eyes peeled for what the evil seeds of the Cheney Administration are doing outside the country?
Indonesia Lifts Tsunami Warning Issued After Massive 7.0-Magnitude Quake
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Probe eyed on stranding of melon-headed whales
02/11/2009 05:33 AM
Earthquakes caused by underwater oil and gas exploration, shrinking magma, magnetic stripping and polar reversal
Staff Reporter
Mar. 29, 2005
Right.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
No coinkydinks what-so-ever.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Iran 30 year after the revolution
Yeesh, this book is so old. I haven't read enough of it to make a judgment. So far it just brings back memories of thinking that Khomeini was an asshole. I also remember thinking that Reagan was an asshole. I also remember wondering where the hell Beruit was and why we had a barracks full of marines and sailors who could get blown up there? Books: Islam Inflamed
By DAVID K. SHIPLER (NYT)
Published: October 24, 1985
After 30 years, talk shifts from revolution to democracy
Dispatch from Iran
In rural Iran, as agrarian-centered life erodes and attitudes toward government change, some wonder what the Islamic Revolution brought them, especially as they see some sections prospering.
By Borzou Daragahi
February 10, 2009
How has Iran changed since the revolution 30 years ago?
Timeline: US-Iran ties Published: Tuesday, 10 February, 2009, 06:28 GMT 06:28 UK
BBC's "Have Your Say" (The 'reader's recommended' are fun to read)
As Iranians mark the anniversary of their Islamic Republic, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he would welcome talks with the US based on "mutual respect". What is the future of the country?
Iranians rally to mark revolution
AlJazeera.net
UPDATED ON:
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
22:39 Mecca time, 19:39 GMT
Because the "War on Drugs" has so many losers
Obama Makes a Good First Step on Medical Marijuana
-- Here's What He Should Do Next
By Aaron Houston, AlterNet. Posted February 9, 2009.
Everyone else is blogging about the stimulus package. Frankly I'm so goddamned sick of ReupgnantThuglicans and their arrogant ridiculousness I don't even want to think about their attempts to bamboozle the American people into thinking they still got it under control. They don't, and they never fucking did, that's why they have to control everyone around them. The Alternet article has some good ideas about how drug policy can be more sane and pragmatic. I found this site today, it's interesting.
Common sense for Drug Policy
-- Here's What He Should Do Next
By Aaron Houston, AlterNet. Posted February 9, 2009.
Everyone else is blogging about the stimulus package. Frankly I'm so goddamned sick of ReupgnantThuglicans and their arrogant ridiculousness I don't even want to think about their attempts to bamboozle the American people into thinking they still got it under control. They don't, and they never fucking did, that's why they have to control everyone around them. The Alternet article has some good ideas about how drug policy can be more sane and pragmatic. I found this site today, it's interesting.
Common sense for Drug Policy
Monday, February 09, 2009
Iran's new satellite challenges China
Asia times Feb 10, 2009
Page 1 of 2
By Peter J Brown
...With its new satellite in orbit, the focus is both on the state of Iran's ballistic missile systems, and on how soon Israel will wipe out all of Iran's space facilities along with all of its nuclear facilities. By the way, this writer spotted Omid for the first time last Thursday, early in the evening, as it flew by low to the horizon well northwest of Maine.
Last time we checked, no mention whatsoever of it appears on the English-language section of the Iranian Space Agency (ISA) website, which, like the website maintained by the China National Space Administration, is of very limited value to the international community of space enthusiasts. ....(title link for the rest of this article)
Israel reacts as Iran sends up satellite
Canwest News Service
February 4, 2009
Shouting "God is great," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gleefully oversaw the launching of Iran's first satellite into orbit late Monday to celebrate the 30th....
What a moron.
Page 1 of 2
By Peter J Brown
...With its new satellite in orbit, the focus is both on the state of Iran's ballistic missile systems, and on how soon Israel will wipe out all of Iran's space facilities along with all of its nuclear facilities. By the way, this writer spotted Omid for the first time last Thursday, early in the evening, as it flew by low to the horizon well northwest of Maine.
Last time we checked, no mention whatsoever of it appears on the English-language section of the Iranian Space Agency (ISA) website, which, like the website maintained by the China National Space Administration, is of very limited value to the international community of space enthusiasts. ....(title link for the rest of this article)
Israel reacts as Iran sends up satellite
Canwest News Service
February 4, 2009
Shouting "God is great," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gleefully oversaw the launching of Iran's first satellite into orbit late Monday to celebrate the 30th....
What a moron.
Israel's elections and U.S. policy
Glenn Greenwald
Monday Feb. 9, 2009 08:35 EST
...International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), surveyed 21 countries from six continents and asked whether the influence exerted by various nations in the world was positive or negative. The three countries most viewed as having a negative influence in the world -- essentially tied with one another -- were Iran, Pakistan and Israel, all of whom finished just behind North Korea -- and this poll was conducted before Israel’s attack on Gaza. Even before the war on Gaza, Israel was viewed overwhelmingly negatively in every country except two -- the U.S., where citizens view Israel favorably by a not very large 13-point margin (47-34%), and Russia, where public opinion is split. In every other country, the view of Israel's influence on the world is significantly negative -- in most cases, overwhelmingly so....
Gaza protests in Chicago stir charges of anti-Zionism
By Manya A. Brachear Tribune reporter
January 16, 2009
Six Jewish institutions have been vandalized in recent weeks, including one arson attempt. On one college campus, a Jewish student was called a Nazi, Benn said.
The Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago has condemned the synagogue attacks.
"There's a fine line between what's anti-Israel and what's anti-Semitic," she said. "If the U.S. were being repeatedly attacked from Canada by rockets, we would retaliate, whereas Israel doesn't have that right . . . Comparing Jews to Nazis [is] problematic."
But Stephanie Weiner, who organized Thursday's protest of Chicago's ties to Petach Tikva, one of Chicago sister cities, simply doesn't want Chicago to support what she believes are war crimes. Seven miles east of Tel Aviv, Petach Tikva was one of the first exclusive Jewish settlements in Israel. Weiner and about five protesters distributed leaflets to guests at a breakfast hosted by Mayor Richard Daley.
"This has nothing to do with religion," she said. "People who know and care know it's a human-rights issue."
mbrachear@tribune.com
Not just Chicago, Europe also.
Violent Gaza protests reveal how gentle civilised Britain has changed into something very ugly indeed
Last updated at 9:37 AM on 11th January 2009
Comments (17) Add to My Stories People who have been at the pro-and anti-Israel demonstrations in London have been producing some absolutely horrifying descriptions and images.
On Harry’s Place pictures (such as the one here from Indymedia) capture the violence and thuggery of the left/Islamist alliance.
Monday Feb. 9, 2009 08:35 EST
...International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), surveyed 21 countries from six continents and asked whether the influence exerted by various nations in the world was positive or negative. The three countries most viewed as having a negative influence in the world -- essentially tied with one another -- were Iran, Pakistan and Israel, all of whom finished just behind North Korea -- and this poll was conducted before Israel’s attack on Gaza. Even before the war on Gaza, Israel was viewed overwhelmingly negatively in every country except two -- the U.S., where citizens view Israel favorably by a not very large 13-point margin (47-34%), and Russia, where public opinion is split. In every other country, the view of Israel's influence on the world is significantly negative -- in most cases, overwhelmingly so....
Gaza protests in Chicago stir charges of anti-Zionism
By Manya A. Brachear Tribune reporter
January 16, 2009
Six Jewish institutions have been vandalized in recent weeks, including one arson attempt. On one college campus, a Jewish student was called a Nazi, Benn said.
The Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago has condemned the synagogue attacks.
"There's a fine line between what's anti-Israel and what's anti-Semitic," she said. "If the U.S. were being repeatedly attacked from Canada by rockets, we would retaliate, whereas Israel doesn't have that right . . . Comparing Jews to Nazis [is] problematic."
But Stephanie Weiner, who organized Thursday's protest of Chicago's ties to Petach Tikva, one of Chicago sister cities, simply doesn't want Chicago to support what she believes are war crimes. Seven miles east of Tel Aviv, Petach Tikva was one of the first exclusive Jewish settlements in Israel. Weiner and about five protesters distributed leaflets to guests at a breakfast hosted by Mayor Richard Daley.
"This has nothing to do with religion," she said. "People who know and care know it's a human-rights issue."
mbrachear@tribune.com
Not just Chicago, Europe also.
Violent Gaza protests reveal how gentle civilised Britain has changed into something very ugly indeed
Last updated at 9:37 AM on 11th January 2009
Comments (17) Add to My Stories People who have been at the pro-and anti-Israel demonstrations in London have been producing some absolutely horrifying descriptions and images.
On Harry’s Place pictures (such as the one here from Indymedia) capture the violence and thuggery of the left/Islamist alliance.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Pregnant ladybug at the Grammys
Ummmm. Who dressed this woman?
Update 1:36 PM 2/11/2009 Possible Tamil terrorist supporting pregnant ladybug
Grammys. Meh.
By: TBogg Sunday February 8, 2009 10:02 pm
Energy and the tanking economy, not disconnected
Oy vey. We can complicate the shit out of things and go into all the separate disciplines of Energy Economics or we could open our eyes and see that our economy has been built on cheap energy (oil) that we didn't have to compete for and we thought we'd never run out of.
Things changed. We use so much oil that we started having to import more and more and the fucking geniuses that thought we could always depend on military might to safeguard the energy resources we are so dependent upon were arrogant and wrong.
Click on the book cover to read part of the book. And stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Then read the book...
Update 8:35 AM 2/8/2009 I finished the book and I'll summarize what I think is the most important message in this book:
If the best minds from different countries can learn to work together in energy partnerships then they can save a lot of money and lives that are now being wasted on military expenditures in military adventures using military partnerships because they are competing and collaborating (militarily) for energy resources.
I understand that. I was a competitive swimmer for 6 years and you know what I hated about competitive swimming?
Competing....
Update 10:32 AM 2/8/2009
We ignore the leader of an ex-empire that was our competition to our peril. It is us (well, American foreign policy anyway) who is isolating us by acting unilaterally.
A Russia Reality Check
By Fred Hiatt
Sunday, February 8, 2009; Page B07
Yeah, whatever, Hiatt's been in Washington too long in my opinion.
Update 10:08 AM 2/9/2009 links fixed
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Plunder and Blunder; How the 'Financial Experts' Keep Screwing You
By Dean Baker, PoliPoint Press. Posted February 7, 2009.
Anyone with common sense, a grasp of simple arithmetic and a desire to go against the consensus should have seen the financial crisis coming.
Naomi Klein: Public Revolt Builds Against Rip-off Rescue Plans for the Economy
Naomi Klein
More stories by Dean Baker
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy by Dean Baker, published by PoliPoint Press, 2009.
Facing Foreclosure? Don't Leave. Squat.
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted February 6, 2009.
My parents bought a brand new house almost forty years ago for $39,000. It had five bedrooms, three full bathrooms, a living room and a family room, 26,00 square feet, and it was in a nice neighborhood. They raised their kids in it and maintained it well. Still, when they told me a few years of years ago it was worth $750,000 I knew the economy was in deep shit, and that the price was overinflated.
Anyone with common sense, a grasp of simple arithmetic and a desire to go against the consensus should have seen the financial crisis coming.
Naomi Klein: Public Revolt Builds Against Rip-off Rescue Plans for the Economy
Naomi Klein
More stories by Dean Baker
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy by Dean Baker, published by PoliPoint Press, 2009.
Facing Foreclosure? Don't Leave. Squat.
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted February 6, 2009.
My parents bought a brand new house almost forty years ago for $39,000. It had five bedrooms, three full bathrooms, a living room and a family room, 26,00 square feet, and it was in a nice neighborhood. They raised their kids in it and maintained it well. Still, when they told me a few years of years ago it was worth $750,000 I knew the economy was in deep shit, and that the price was overinflated.
Friday, February 06, 2009
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