Category Archives: Outrages

Health Care

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It is unfortunate that Barak Obama was not able to move his health care agenda along faster. From never granting the single-payer option a seat at the table to distractions over racial profiling in Cambridge, he didn’t get ahead of the opposition on this issue. This is a shame. As a result, expect, starting now, a great uprising from the fringe right, led by types such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. They are fomenting extremist racial hatred in opposition of meaningful health care reform. Click here to read a good take on the true motivations of the anti-reform crowd.

This kinda of action is sick, and it shows that we progressives need to fight back. If these people will not accept that the demographics of America are changing, and are willing to disrupt legitimate public debate to broadcast their fear and ignorance, it is our duty as progressives to take them on, head on. In this regard, I’d like to ask you to click the banner to the right and sign up to be a part of the movement to get health care reform passed through the grassroots. Remember, this is how President Obama was elected, and hopefully, this is how we can stand our ground against well funded interests hell bent on maintaining the status quo. Thank You.

The New Blackwater

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Blackwater has a new name and look. The infamous security company has been given a makeover, and if I’m correct, most Americans will forget.

Former:
blackwater

Current:
blackwater-redux

From a design perspective, the new website has a much lighter background, and the main area has a white background. As if to escape the old name decisively, the webmaster sought to abolish the “black” from Blackwater. The new design makes me feel like I’m floating in some underwater mario world. I still find the new site sinister, however, thanks in large part to the surveillance blimp hovering above.

If you have read Jeremy Scahill’s book Blackwater, you are aware that the company’s founder, Erik Prince, is an extremely wealthy and powerful Dominionist. Taking this into account, I noticed two features of the new website that seem to be coded references to this fact. First, the logo of the new company, “XeServices LLC,” is itself very cross-like. If you can’t see that, just tilt your head 45⁰ to the left. Also, on the “About Us” page, one of the images used in that page is this:
blackwater-chopper

Maybe I am reading too much in to things, but this latest story in The Nation makes me feel otherwise. It appears that Mr. Prince may have ordered killed individuals who had provided or were going to provide the federal government with information regarding Blackwater’s criminal activities. In sum, Blackwater operatives knowingly committed war crimes and were enabled by a complicit federal government.

Stay tuned…

In Too Deep

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I had a vivid dream cycle last night, and though I can’t remember it all, one part of it is still with me.

I was in a movie theater waiting for the show to begin. Behind me was a man and a woman. I thought I did not know them but when I turned to look, the man greeted me by name and I remembered that he had been to the law school for the environmental conference. This person was real, not just a dream character; his visage had oddly and inexplicably transfixed me during the conference.

Between two previews there was a sound from the projection booth, and it appeared that something had gone wrong. The movie began but it did not start at the beginning. After the first reel ended the screen went dark. Angered, I stood up and looked into the projection booth to see a curly haired man with thick glasses attempting to repair the projector. I shouted at him loudly, startling the other theater patrons.

When the movie continued, it was very small, filling up only a tiny portion of the screen. Though nobody else seemed to mind, I got up to leave, only to find myself in a hallway between the theater from which I had come and the open door of another. A uniformed usher asked me what was wrong and I screamed, “It looks like Quicktime!”

Rushing down the dark red stairwell it was too late by the time I realized that I had gone down one flight too many and found myself in the basement lair of the broken down film palace. A black woman rushed from a doorway and I asked here where the box office was. She pointed cursorily and hurried on, but I could no longer find my way back.

15 Soldiers Dead in Iraq 4/09

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Following up on my last post and Dan’s comment, I will borrow from a far better wordsmith than myself:

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

– Frank Rich, NYT, 4/25/09

Rich goes on to propose that the best way forward would be for the DOJ to appoint a panel of non-partisan outsiders, such as retired federal judges, to analyze all the information and set the wheels in motion for the correct prosecution. While I was not a fan of Obama’s initial response, I have come around to understanding that his relative lack of outrage is calculated to ensure that this investigation is handled in a non-partisan manner. The gravity of the information now available is strong enough to stand on its own, and I suspect that many Republicans will end up supporting such an investigative commission.

Torture Memos Utilized Flawed Legal Reasoning

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If you have not looked over the torture memos, please do so.

Then, take a look at this video from Philip Zelikow, a high level State Department lawyer during the Bush administration. He authored a memorandum expressing grave concerns with the legal reasoning underlying those torture memos. While a copy of Zelikow’s memorandum is not yet available, a FOIA request has been made and it is likely to surface soon: