“In your best interest: choose the Liberal People’s Party”
August 8, 2011 at 12:37 pm | Posted in Economy, Education, Foreign Affairs, Historical, politics straight up | Leave a commentTags: Education, Finland, health care, liberalism, life expectancy, senior citizens, socialism, unemployment, unemployment insurance, welfare services
(WaPo) Finns have one of the world’s most generous systems of state-funded educational, medical and welfare services, from pregnancy to the end of life. They pay nothing for education at any level, including medical school or law school. Their medical care, which contributes to an infant mortality rate that is half of ours and a life expectancy greater than ours, costs relatively little. (Finns devote 7 percent of gross domestic product to health care; we spend 15 percent.) Finnish senior citizens are well cared for. Unemployment benefits are good and last, in one form or another, indefinitely.
Why is the Obama Administration negotiating with terrorists?
November 17, 2010 at 10:15 am | Posted in Bush, Foreign Affairs, Obama!, politics straight up, Reality Bites, terrorism | Leave a commentTags: Bush tax cuts, Democrats, george w. bush, Mitch McConnell, Republicans, Social Security, START Treaty, terrorism, universal health care
"Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. Gas demonstration. Reconditioning gas masks at the gas mask factory." 1942 June. Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)
The Obama administration and Congressional Democrats still don’t understand that Republicans don’t care if they destroy the country, whether it be by foreign or domestic means.
Because a police state is so much better than a nanny state.
Well, better for the terrorists anyway.
Is this really America or a bad dream?
September 28, 2010 at 9:19 am | Posted in Economy, Pirates!, politics straight up | Leave a commentTags: 2010 elections, Caroline Heldman, Economy, Fox News, income gap, Occidental College, Republicans, Stuart Varney
According to Stuart Varney and his conservative friends, it is immoral for those who have benefited most to pay higher taxes than those who are scraping by.
(WaPo) The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its widest amount on record as young adults and children in particular struggled to stay afloat in the recession.
The top-earning 20 percent of Americans – those making more than $100,000 each year – received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent earned by those below the poverty line, according to newly released census figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968.
[snip]
Rea Hederman Jr., a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, agreed that census data show families of all income levels had tepid earnings in 2009, with poorer Americans taking a larger hit. “It’s certainly going to take a while for people to recover,” he said.
Is this really the kind of morality American stands for?
(CAP) The “Pledge to America” budget would mean $11.1 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years. By 2020, the federal budget deficit would be 6.3 percent of gross domestic product, the federal debt would exceed 93 percent of GDP, and interest payments on the debt would be more than $1 trillion a year. The budget deficit would be about $200 billion larger in 2020 under the “Pledge to America” plan than it would be under President Barack Obama’s budget, and over the next 10 years deficits would be $1.5 trillion higher than under the president’s budget.
The substantial increase in deficits under the “Pledge to America” budget are due to the significant tax cuts that come from extending all expiring tax provisions and the implementation of several new tax cuts.
Voting Republican in November will guarantee that your life — unless you are one of the super rich — continues to be worse every year.
UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias points us to a chart showing actual distribution of wealth, what people think the distribution of wealth is (“estimated”) and what people believe to be the ideal breakdown. Is it any wonder that economic policy in this country is so heavily weighted toward those who own the most?
Following Rules of War American style: Shoot first, lie about it later.
April 5, 2010 at 2:32 pm | Posted in Department of Defense, Foreign Affairs, Reality Bites, terrorism, Uncategorized | 1 CommentTags: Baghdad, Department of Defense, FOIA, Freedom of Information Act, Iraq occupation, Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, murder, Namir Noor-Eldeen, Reuters, rules of war, Saeed Chmagh, war atrocities, Wikileaks
On July 12, 2007 Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh and nine others, including two children, were killed by a U.S. helicopter strike in Baghdad. The American military authorities claimed they were armed insurgents.
“There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.
WikiLeaks, their Freedom of Information Act request stonewalled by the Defense Department, has obtained video from unnamed military sources that clearly shows that the people targeted and killed in cold blood were not carrying, and certainly not firing, AK-47s or RPGs.
I can only hope that the people who committed this atrocity are haunted by their crime because they will certainly never be held accountable.
UPDATE: If you don’t believe your lying eyes and think that this film was edited in some way to make the US military look bad, go here to see the full, unedited video.
UPDATE: Josh Stieber, a former US Army solider, deployed to Iraq in 2007 and 2008 as a member ofBravo Company 2-16 — the same Company as the infantry ground soldiers involved in the Apache helicopter attack — spoke with Glenn Greenwald about the video and “compellingly explains how the incident depicted there — from the initial killing of the Reuters journalist to the shooting of unarmed rescuers to the language used by the pilots — was anything but rare; it was extremely common.”
War: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
March 27, 2010 at 3:23 am | Posted in environment, Foreign Affairs, Historical, Obama!, politics straight up, senate | Leave a commentTags: Dmitry Medvedev, Edwin Starr, George H. W. Bush, nuclear arms treaty, nuclear weapons, Obama!, politics, Russia, START I, START II, US Senate
President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have agreed to sign a new nuclear arms treaty on April 8 in Prague, Czech Republic. Great news, right?
Well, it should be, except that it requires ratification by 67 out of 100 United States senators. It can take some time.
(NYT) According to the White House, the agreement would require both Russia and the United States to reduce their long-range warheads to 1,500. This is 74% lower that the START number in 1991 and 30% lower than the limit of the 2002 Moscow Treaty.
START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) I was signed by President George H. W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin on July 31, 1991. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty on October 1, 1992. START II took a bit longer. Signed by Bush and Yeltsin on January 3, 1993, it was not ratified until January 26, 1996. In other words, let’s not get our panties in a twist if the new treaty is not ratified this year.
That being said, there are very good reasons why the United States should embrace this treaty and renew its commitment to reducing its nuclear weapons arsenal. Here is a short film to demonstrate how absurdly overstocked we are with weapons that benefit no one.
Chilcot Hearings on Iraq War
January 29, 2010 at 10:39 pm | Posted in Bush, Foreign Affairs, Historical, terrorism, torture | Leave a commentTags: Chilcot hearings, Ctesiphon, george w. bush, history, iraq, Iraq Inquiry, Mesopotamia, Tony Blair, war crimes
Ctesiphon, the imperial capital of the Arsacids and of the Sassanids, was one of the great cities of ancient Mesopotamia, now Iraq. c1932 (Library of Congress)
Wufnik at Scholars and Rogues has been doing regular posts on the goings on at the Chilcot hearings on the Iraq war that are well worth a read.
The first post in which Wufnik talks about the inquiry is Christmas music (9)–Best English folk/indie/whatever Christmas album, then Stout Denial, More Chilcot, Blogging Blair and Blogging Blair (2).
The British Government has a website for the Iraq Inquiry that has video, transcripts and background documents.
“La Muralla”
October 31, 2009 at 2:25 pm | Posted in civil rights, Foreign Affairs, politics straight up | Leave a commentTags: chile, CIA, music video, Nicolás Guillen, politics, Salvador Allende, The Left
I don’t visit David Seaton’s News Links nearly often enough.
And you should definitely read this post.
Somewhere In Iran
June 21, 2009 at 12:29 pm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, politics straight up | Leave a comment
Tank cars carrying fuel, winding their way through some of the mountainous country somewhere in Iran. c. 1943 Nick Parrino, photographer (Library of Congress)
Roger Cohen is on the ground in Tehran, reporting from the thick of it. He says, at the end, “Iran has waited long enough to be free.”
What does that mean, though, “to be free”?
Americans like to think they are “free.” We have “free” elections. In fact, we had a presidential election last November. How has the outcome of that election changed the dynamics in this country? It didn’t. Working people continue to be treated like cash machines by elected officials and corporations. Free to vote as we wish, we are barred from justice.
Seventy-two percent of Americans want public health. They gave the Democratic Party the White House and majorities in the House and Senate. But what do we get? A whole lot of STFU. Why? Because single-payer health care cuts into the profits of powerful corporate interests.
For American citizens to be “free, we need to abolish corporate “personhood” and prohibit them from “attempting to influence the outcome of elections, legislation or government policy.”
This blog post from 2005 provides some insight into what Ahmadinejad represents. It sounds pretty awful to me. But what does Moussavi offer as an alternative? We won’t know unless he wins an election.
I don’t know what the Iranian people mean by “freedom” or “democracy,” but I hope they are more successful than Americans have been at achieving it.
An Iranian Voice
June 14, 2009 at 7:19 pm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, politics straight up | Leave a commentTags: Iran, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Mir-Hossei Mousavi, Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, Shah of Persia
Shah of Persia, Mohammed Ali Mirzi, the first Persian monarch to rule under a constitution, deposed July 1909. Photo by G. Grantham/Bain News Service, c. December 19, 1907 (Library of Congress)
There is a lot of concern being expressed in the blogosphere about the outcome of the Iranian presidential election. While I certainly agree that a weaponized Iran is not in anyone’s interest, it seems to me that the certainty with which Americans are declaring the election a fraud is based more in wishful thinking than in fact.
Abbas Barzegar, an Iranian PhD candidate in religious studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, spent the last week in Iran covering, as he put it, “the election carnival.”
His opinion is that Mousavi’s chances of winning were very slim. He has a thoughtful opinion piece in the Guardian explaining his view, which ends with the following:
In the future, observers would do us a favour by taking a deeper look into Iranian society, giving us a more accurate picture of the very organic religious structures of the country, and dispensing with the narrative of liberal inevitability. It is the religious aspects of enigmatic Persia that helped put an 80-year-old exiled ascetic at the head of state 30 years ago, then the charismatic cleric Khatami in office 12 years ago, the honest son of a blacksmith – Ahmedinejad – four years ago, and the same yesterday.
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