What's with our love affair with guns?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Second Ammendment and all that. But read the thing, all right? It's all about having a militia. It's not about an individual having an AK-47 that their 19 year-old stepchild can steal and then shoot up a mall:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Once again there has been a mass shooting in the United States, this time in a Nebraska shopping mall. Once again there is no national outcry for gun control.

A 19-year-old man shot and killed eight people and then himself in Omaha, Nebraska, on Wednesday with a semi-automatic AK-47 that police say he stole from
his stepfather.

Leading presidential candidates for the November 2008 U.S. election issued statements expressing sorrow and support for the victims. None called for tighter gun laws, which are traditionally left to state and local authorities.

The crime revived memories of a massacre in April at Virginia Tech university, where a student killed 32 people.

Why we make high powered weapons so easy to obtain is byond me.

Quote of the week

Here's the quote of the week from Sojourners:

The really uncomfortable part for the administration, aside from the embarrassment, is the policy implication. The dirty secret is the administration has never put on the table an offer to negotiate with Iran the issues that would really matter: their own security, the legitimacy of the Islamic republic, and Iran’s place in the regional order.

- Flynt Leverett, Middle East expert at the New America Foundation, who served on President Bush's National Security Council, describing how the White House has consistently ruled out any real diplomacy with Iran that could resolve the conflict over its nuclear program.

Save the planet! Eat chocolate!

Ha! Don't we wish! It's really that we need to plant chocolate. Take a look at part of an NPR report on the subject:

Many people agree that chocolate is good for the soul, and researchers are finding that chocolate can be good for the body, too. But the environment? How could chocolate help with global climate change?

The answer is found in a little piece of paradise, a patch of rainforest in eastern Brazil.

Everywhere you look, something is growing. Orchids nestle in the crooks of trees. There are hundreds of shades of green, and the forest is loud with birds and insects.

Some areas have been thinned out and planted with cacao trees — the source of chocolate. The pods contain the magical beans that Aztecs counted like gold. The cultivated cacao trees grow just a bit higher than a man can reach, and rainforest trees tower over them like something out of Dr. Seuss — some round like lollipops, some flat like a plate.

And here's the climate connection. Rainforest trees and plants store massive amounts of carbon — keeping it from getting into the air as carbon dioxide.
...
Joao Tavares is a fourth-generation cocoa producer. Tavares, along with his brother and father, has 2,200 acres of rainforest planted with cacao trees. They grow cocoa using a method called cabruca — cutting down just a few of the tall rainforest trees, and planting the mid-height cacao trees underneath.
...
Tavares has worked hard to maintain, and also to restore, his little piece of the rainforest. He says that in the past 10 years, he has planted many wild trees.

"We understand that we have to preserve the cabruca," Tavares says, "even if you have less production."

It seems that cocoa plants raised the cabruca way attract fewer insects and less disease. And environmentally-friendly chocolate fetches a higher price than that grown by so-called modern methods. So that's a good deal all the way around.

Hatred

See how efficient it still is,
how it keeps itself in shape—our century's hatred.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.

It's not like other feelings.
At once both older and younger.
It gives birth itself to the reasons
that give it life.
When it sleeps, it's never eternal rest.
And sleeplessness won't sap its strength; it feeds it.

One religion or another -
whatever gets it ready, in position.
One fatherland or another -
whatever helps it get a running start.
Justice also works well at the outset
until hate gets its own momentum going.
Hatred. Hatred.
Its face twisted in a grimace
of erotic ecstasy.

Oh these other feelings,
listless weaklings.
Since when does brotherhood
draw crowds?
Has compassion
ever finished first?
Does doubt ever really rouse the rabble?
Only hatred has just what it takes.

Gifted, diligent, hard-working.
Need we mention all the songs it has composed?
All the pages it has added to our history books?
All the human carpets it has spread
over countless city squares and football fields?

Let's face it:
it knows how to make beauty.
The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies.
Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns.
You can't deny the inspiring pathos of ruins
and a certain bawdy humor to be found
in the sturdy column jutting from their midst.

Hatred is a master of contrast-
between explosions and dead quiet,
red blood and white snow.
Above all, it never tires
of its leitmotif - the impeccable executioner
towering over its soiled victim.

It's always ready for new challenges.
If it has to wait awhile, it will.
They say it's blind. Blind?
It has a sniper's keen sight
and gazes unflinchingly at the future
as only it can.

--Wislawa Szymborska (translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)

This was sent to me by Poppi and Tom.

Getting the facts wrong

I want to share an article with you called "The Dubious Mr. Dobbs". It's, of course, about Lou Dobbs who is rabidly anti-immigration. Here's how it gets started:

Truth matters. History and context count. “You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts,” the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed. CNN’s Lou Dobbs has migrated to a pre-eminent position in the debate on immigration in the U.S. Since he identifies himself as a journalist, he has a special responsibility to rely on facts and to correct misstatements of fact. CNN, which purports to be a news organization, touting itself as the “Most Trusted Name in News,” has an equally strong obligation to its audience to tell the truth.

Dobbs was best known for anchoring CNN’s “Moneyline,” an early and influential program that helped create the televised financial-news genre. On “Moneyline,” Dobbs featured corporate CEOs and generally lauded them. About five years ago, Dobbs began changing his line, invoking populist rhetoric and championing the cause of the middle class. He thematically titled his coverage “War on the Middle Class” and “Broken Borders.” Dobbs’ signature issue of undocumented immigrants, or, as he calls them, illegal aliens, has tremendous influence on the debate nationally. So it matters if he is wrong.

On March 28, 2006, Dobbs said on his show, “And it’s costing us, no one knows precisely how much, to incarcerate what is about a third of our prison population who are illegal aliens.” As it turns out, the number of noncitizens incarcerated in the U.S. federal and state prisons is closer to 6 percent, not 33 percent. Note that the 6 percent includes legal immigrants as well.

There's more if you want to click through.

There's no excuse for these out and out lies. But the right-wingers, who use what Dobbs says as an excuse to hate Mexicans, believe these lies.

Letter from Harry Reid

I just got an email from (Senate Majority Leader) Harry Reid who says the following:

We've all heard their heated rhetoric on Iran.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, other administration officials, and right wing pundits using phrases such as "imminent threat" and talking about the potential for World War III. Now we know these are just the latest in a long line of inaccurate and misleading comments -- the same type of misinformation that got us into the Iraq war.

All 16 of our nation's intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program four years ago. This finding, contained in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was released yesterday, further diminished the credibility of the President, who has a dangerous record of overstating threats.

Of course, instead of announcing a new diplomatic offensive, George Bush's response was to state, "the NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world." Well, maybe his opinion hasn't changed, but the facts have. The President is the only person that I know who can receive a report like the NIE and believe that it's a warning signal.
...
Instead of stubbornly insisting the NIE did not "change his opinion", George Bush should announce a new diplomatic surge.

George Bush used this playbook in the build-up to the war in Iraq -- and now he is trying to lay the same foundation for us to go to war in Iran. For the last seven years, we've seen this kind of misinformation coming from the White House. Our nation deserves better.

It does indeed.

Reid is urging people to send a letter to the editor to their local newspaper. If you're talented in that way, may I recommend doing so as well.

Our health care system

There's something really morally perverse about a for-profit hospital. Please read this comment I found to an article on the Common Dreams site:

I’m sitting in a hospital room watching my mother snooze as I post this comment. Two weeks ago she entered the hospital for thyroid surgery. Not a small town hospital. A large, a major medical center in a Florida metropolis. But by the Grace of God, she is still alive.

As a nursing instrutor, I know the standards of care and have seen them violated no less than 30 times a day here, every day. I know better than to ever leave her alone here for more than an hour at a time. If I were not a nurse, I have no doubt my mother would not have survived this hospital stay. I really feel for any one in who does not have a nurse in the family to advocate for them when they are at the mercy of this broken system.

American hospitals are some of the most dangerous places on earth if you value your life…. Even the best nurses are stretched beyond their limits by poor staffing ratios. Corporate America cuts nursing care at the bedside to reap profits for their ceo’s and stockholders. Every single one of my mother’s grave complications might have been prevented with good nuring care.

Those of you who think we have the best “health care system in the world”, take it from someone with twenty five years in health care, you are very sadly mistaken, and it could very easily cost you your life.

But some (many) in this country would rather have a dangerous system than (horrors!) "socialized medicine". And that attitude is morally perverse too.

Bush on Iran

Bush is just itching to attack Iran - as if we didn't already know that. The fact that it has been discovered that Iran has no nuclear weapons doesn't seem to bother him at all. Take a look at this from CNN:

Iran remains a danger to the world even though it stopped a program to develop a nuclear weapon four years ago, President Bush said today. "Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," Bush said.

The knowledge to make nuclear weapons belongs to the world. You can't keep people from getting it. Attacking people for what they know or could know is creating thought crimes. And it's only totalitarian societies that do that. But, of course, Bush has made it clear that he wants us to be a totalitarian country more than anything.

What's happened to freedom of speech in this country

Please go read the article entitled "Civics 101: USA v. Al Arian". I really can't do it justice with an excerpt. It's short but needs to be read in its entirety.

Once more with feeling: It's the hypocrisy!

Take a look at this excerpt from an article entitled "Tom Tancredo Hired Illegal Laborers to Renovate His McMansion":

When Republican Representative Tom Tancredo isn’t railing against the “scourge” of illegal immigration on the presidential campaign trail, he relaxes in the 1053 square foot basement recreation room of his Littleton, Colorado McMansion. There, he and his family can rack up a game of billiards on their tournament size pool table, play pinball, or enjoy their favorite movies in the terraced seating area of a home theater system. Tancredo, who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by producing evidence that he suffered from mentally illnesses, especially likes entertaining his buddies with classic war movies.

“We have friends over and I have now shown Pearl Harbor about six times,” Tancredo boasted to the Rocky Mountain News about his 102-inch television. “But I mainly just show the attack scene because the sound is so good.”

When Tancredo hired a construction crew to transform his drab basement into a high-tech pleasure den in October 2001, however, he did not express concern that only two of its members spoke English. Nor did he bother to check the workers’ documentation to see if they were legal residents of the United States. Had Tancredo done so, he would have learned that most of the crew consisted of undocumented immigrants, or “criminal aliens” as he likes to call them. Instead, Tancredo paid the crew $60,000 for its labor and waited innocently for the completion of his elaborate entertainment complex.

During the renovation process, two illegal workers hired by Tancredo were alerted to his reputation for immigrant bashing. They went straight to the Denver Post to complain. Tancredo “doesn't want us here, but he'll take advantage of our sweat and our labor,” one of the workers complained to the Post on September 19, 2002. “It's just not right.”

You're damn straight it's not right.

Now this is the part that really depresses me:

Only days before the Post’s story appeared, Tancredo had personally reported an honor student profiled in the Denver Post to the INS because the 14-year-old was not a legal resident of the United States. The stunt forced the boy’s family to go into hiding. Fortunately for Tancredo, the ensuing revelations of his hiring of illegal labor fell below the radar of the national media, allowing his anti-immigrant crusade to proceed unabated.

We have a liberal press??? Yeah, in what universe?

This anti-science administration

I've said before that we are moving into a new Dark Age. I really think we're already there:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reversed a handful of rulings that denied endangered-species protection after an investigation found that a former Bush administration official, Julie McDonald, pressured scientists to change their conclusions for political reasons.

McDonald, who served as the deputy assistant secretary overseeing the agency, resigned in May. Without naming McDonald, the investigation found that the decisions had been “inappropriately influenced … revising the seven identified decisions is supported by scientific evidence and the proper legal standards.”
...
McDonald shamefully illustrates the baldly political Bush administration approach to science. Trained as a civil engineer, she had no expertise in biology or species protection. And when the science pointed to conclusions not to her bosses’ liking, she simply put the screws to those working under her to “fix” the findings. She told them to lie, in other words.
...
One of the most disturbing developments in the past seven years has been the growing currency of the notion that science is just another political philosophy, based on the opinions of scheming scientists (though what, exactly, they’re scheming for is never made clear).

I think it's because of projection. People in the Bush administration have no other motivations than political ones and so they assume that is true for everybody else.

Today is World AIDS Day

And I want to show you part of an article entitled "WORLD AIDS DAY: Ideology Trumping Health, US Activists Say":

WASHINGTON - On the eve of World AIDS Day Saturday, the U.S. Park Police arrested 40 demonstrators outside the White House as they chanted for sweeping changes to the George W. Bush administration’s domestic and global AIDS policies.

The protesters were part of a larger rally in Lafayette Park just across Pennsylvania Avenue before they broke off and walked up to the perimeter fence on the north side of the White House and sat down in a line.

After three public warnings stating that their demonstration permit had been revoked and asking the crowd to disperse from an area cordoned off with police barricades and yellow tape, the protesters were arrested for disobeying an official order.

The arrestees, mostly college students, responded to the warnings by chanting, “Warning one, warning two, warning three, warning eight. We won’t leave ’til you cut the red tape,” before being cuffed with plastic ties, and carted away in Park Police
wagons.

The larger rally — co-sponsored by Africa Action, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the Global AIDS alliance and several other organisations — hoped to raise awareness and suggest changes to what the groups felt were inadequate and misguided policies.

The speakers called for drastic adjustments, including boosting global funds to combat the spread of the disease through prevention by shifting the focus of U.S. AIDS funds in Africa away from the Bush administration’s emphasis on “abstinence only” prevention education.
...
“Abstinence-only prevention measures don’t work. It’s been proven time and time again if you look at journals,” said third year medical student Dan Murphy, the legislative director of the American Medical Student Association, who was subsequently arrested on the White House sidewalk. “As the future doctors of America, we know that HIV prevention has to be based on science and based on evidence.”

Now take a look at what one commenter had to say:

Isn’t it interesting that it very likely takes an inordinate amount of time to obtain a permit to assemble, which of course is supposed to be a Contitutionally guaranteed right, but it seems to take just minutes to “revoke” the permit? This is all assumption. I would certainly like to know why and how the permit was revoked.

Yeah, I would too.

The vote in 2008

I just finished watching NOW on PBS. This week's program is entitled "Will The 2008 Vote Be Fair?" and watching it was very disturbing.

Here's the show's description:

How safe is your right to vote? Former Justice Department official and voting rights lawyer David Becker, who worked under both President George W. Bush and former President Bill Clinton, alleges a systematic effort to deny the vote to hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Americans. In a revealing interview with NOW's David Brancaccio, Becker openly worries that the 2008 election will not be free and fair. Is our government part of the solution, or part of the problem?

You can see it on video at the PBS website. Please watch it. I must say, knowing how Republicans are preventing likely Democrats from voting is really depressing.

Superman's predicament

Our war crimes

I wonder if anything will come of this:

SAN FRANCISCO — U.S. war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have announced they’re planning to descend on Washington, DC this March to testify about war crimes they committed or personally witnessed in Iraq.

“The war in Iraq is not covered to its potential because of how dangerous it is for reporters to cover it,” said Liam Madden, a former Marine and member of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. “That’s left a lot of misconceptions in the minds of the American public about what the true nature of military occupation looks like.”

Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicized incidents of American brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not the isolated incidents perpetrated by “a few bad apples,” as many politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a pattern, the group says, of “an increasingly bloody occupation.”

“This is our generation getting to tell history,” Madden told OneWorld, “to ensure that the actual history gets told — that it’s not a sugar-coated, diluted version of what actually happened.”
...
[Author Gerald Nicosia said,] “The majority of the American people are very dissatisfied with the Iraq war now and would be happy to get out of it. But Americans are bred deep into their psyches to think of America as a good country and, I think, much harder than just the hurdle of getting troops out of Iraq, is to get Americans to realize the terrible things we do in the name of the United States.”

It's up to the press now, isn't it, whether this story will get the attention it deserves.

Two roads diverge

I just found this in my files and can't remember if I've posted it or not. Anyway, it bears repeating if I have:

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one "less traveled by"—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

— Rachel Carson

A country that gets it right

Be sure to watch this all the way to the end: