US snipers in Iraq lure "insurgents" (read: children) with "bait" left on the ground, then shoot anyone who picks it up

An absolutely horrendous article in today's Washington Post.

A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of "bait," such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.

Uh, I'd pick up ammunition if I saw it lying on the ground. Hell, my friend Matt and I thought we found a spent bullet out back of his house yesterday, and we picked it up. And God knows, any kid most certainly would pick that kind of thing up. I feel like I'm reading about the horrible things the Soviets did in Afghanistan. Tell me again whose side we're on? Read More......

With friends like these: David Duke on Jena

Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke's bank account must be low, so it looks like he's appealing to the "lynch the Jena 6" crowd for some scratch.  It helps that his white supremacist friends have published the home addresses and phone numbers of the families of the young men. 

The people of Jena, the people of Louisiana and I are not racist. We simply want justice to be done. We understand that White people in America have lost our basic civil rights. Whites are now deprived of human rights by racial discrimination in jobs, promotions, scholarships, college admissions and in many other programs. More importantly, Whites are increasingly victims of Black racial violence and hate crimes. In fact, a White person is 40 to 50 times more likely to be a victim of Black gang violence than a Black is likely to be a victim of White gang violence.

...The entire Jena scenario and the coverage of it by the media show once again that it is not the people of Jena who are racists. By voting for me and by demanding justice in this case, they have shown rightly that they believe in fairness to all and that White people are now the real victims of racism in America. Once again it is shown that we must have advocates for our rights and heritage just as any other group is permitted to do so.

May the District Attorney and the people of Jena stay strong and never give in to those who seek take away their rights of life and liberty as guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

He's crying for media attention as well:

David Duke is willing to explain to any media in the world what the real issues are in Jena, Lousiana To contact him press the contact button on the right side of the web page.

This is exactly why open discussions about race are necessary in general society. The open bigots have no shame in declaring their positions, and are quite sure of what they believe. Those who have good intentions by and large stay silent for fear of stepping on the third rail and "talking out of school." Discussions about solving racial tensions and its cascading impact are not the sole providence of blacks (or POC) who feel whites have no business talking about this difficult subject, nor does it belong with the David Dukes of the country, who are easy to point a finger at and declare "that's not me."

The resulting silence allows basic, human lack of understanding about the issues that challenge all of us on this topic to remain underground. No one learns about building bridges when they retreat to their respective corners.

dnA:

Reading David Duke reminds me of that old  joke about the Jewish guy in Germany during the beginning of the Holocaust. A Jewish friend asks him why he's reading the Nazi  newspaper, and he says "Because it has all the good news! We own the banks, we own the government..."

I feel the same way about Mr. Duke believing we are somehow overrepresented in higher education and high paying jobs. It's a facile rationalization for his hatred, but that perception of unequal treatment for white people (when the opposite is actually true) is only slightly refined before being blared 24-hours a day from Fox News, where it gains the kind of legitimacy he could never give it. Simply put what he's saying really isn't so different from what Bill O'Reilly says on a daily basis.

Here in my home state of North Carolina, four nooses were found hung from a tree at a school in High Point:

Scholars call it a symbol that reflects a shameful period in our nation's history. Friday, High Point police removed four nooses hung from different spots around Andrews High School.

"To get to a situation in 2007 where people can feel like this as a prank is acceptable, that tells us a lot about how much progress we've made and how much progress we've got to continue to work on," Claude Barnes, a political science professor at North Carolina A&T; said.

That situation is four nooses hung from the flag pole and other locations at the High Point school. "And so the symbol here of a noose is very, very disturbing whether it was a joke or prank or whatever; whether this was perpetrated by whites, blacks, or whoever, it's not funny," Barnes said, "because it takes us back to a tragic and very shameful period is our nation's history." 

Video is at this link.

The principal of the school, Monique Wallace, sent a letter to parents after the four nooses were discovered.

Via WXII's web site:

Dear Parents/Guardians:

Unfortunately, this letter is to inform you that today, four nooses were found at Andrews High School. School administrators immediately notified the High Point Police Department; the incident is currently under investigation and additional staff and law enforcement presence will be maintained for a period of time. Guilford County Schools (GCS) is fully cooperating with law enforcement regarding this matter. Those found to be responsible for this criminal act will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

We want to impress upon you that this inappropriate act is not a representation of Andrews' administration, students or staff. Andrews and GCS will not tolerate behavior that is discriminatory or that disrupts the safe learning environment of our students.

Counseling will be available to students as needed by GCS. Additionally, the City of High Point has worked collaboratively with the school since 2004 through the High Point Human Relations Commission to establish a school-based student commission. These students are trained and ready to assist as needed. Please make sure your children are aware that threatening acts are not acceptable. Should your child observe inappropriate behavior or have any information regarding this incident, please ask him/her to immediately notify a teacher, staff member or our school's resource officer.

Andrews High School has proven to be a school accepting of all races, cultures, religions and backgrounds. We will continue to take all necessary steps to ensure that all students feel welcomed and safe in our school. If you have questions, please contact me at 819-2800.

Sincerely,
Monique Wallace
Principal

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Super-rich Republican financier, Mellon Scaife's, messy messy divorce papers now online

What has become of our family values?

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette carried details last week of the rather messy divorce involving rival publisher, and conservative funder, Richard Mellon Scaife. Now attorneys for Scaife have filed court papers demanding the paper return documents related to the divorce.

The Post-Gazette has responded by not only denying that but posting multiple links on its Web site to the available documents, while removing some personal or financial details.....

The Post-Gazette pointed out this his "attempt to make court documents inaccessible is unusual for the head of a news organization. Historically, newspapers and television stations have fought for greater rather than more restricted access. In fact, Mr. Scaife's Tribune-Review joined other organizations in seeking to unseal the estate records of the late Sen. John Heinz during the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry, who is married to Sen. Heinz's widow, Teresa."

The paper had reported that Scaife's wife was to get over $750,000 a month in payments and that a huge dispute continued -- over a dog, including "dognapping" charges.

Ruh roh... Read More......

Giuliani really loves his third wife

Best part of the story is the last line. As much as we criticize AP, sometimes they get it just right. Read More......

George W. Bush's pool boy speaks

He's a 23 year old Mainer. Read it.

From Chris Colin in the SF Chronicle:

Razsa recalls one day when former first lady Barbara Bush was on her way over, and it looked like there wouldn't be time to bring the pool's temperature up to her desired 82 degrees in time. The family's caretaker was in a panic, he says.

"He kept shouting, 'Barbara will go crazy! Barbara will go crazy!'" Razsa recalls. "This is the same woman who after Hurricane Katrina said (of the Houston Astrodome refugees), 'You know, they're underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them.'" ....

I ask Razsa if he has a monologue loaded up, in the event that his next encounter was at closer range. To my surprise, the idea doesn't appeal.

"What do you say? 'Thanks for School of the Americas, and Iran-Contra, and NAFTA, and shipping all those jobs overseas, and arming Saddam, and funding the Taliban?' What do you say -- 'You're a jerk?' There's nothing that can be put into a sentence that would capture the lives these people have taken, and the way of life that's been taken."...

he stopped at a lemonade stand where a young girl and her mother had set up shop. They got to talking, and it turned out they were family of George Herbert Walker III, former ambassador to Hungary and first cousin of the ex-president up the road.

Ever respectful, Razsa kept his politics to himself and enjoyed the lemonade. It was the young girl who turned to him and held forth: "Just because we're related to them, doesn't mean we vote for them or believe in what they do."

"What did she say?" the mother asked.

Shocked, Razsa repeated the girl's declaration.

The mother nodded in approval....

"There are two things I wanted to do since I was a little kid. The first was join the Marines and then transfer to the Navy Seals," he says. When he got older, that dream unraveled. "I tried to talk myself into it being okay, but I couldn't get past the possibility of the government misusing our service."

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Iran president: "We don't have homosexuals in our country"

How do you say "wide stance" in Farsi? Iran's wacky president just said at Columbia University, three times, that they do not have homosexuals in Iran. Uh huh. Methinks the bearded lady doth protest too much.

Oh my God, Joe got the video. You have got to see this.

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Honor killing in Syria: so far, and yet so close

My new favorite blog has, by my rough count, 14 new posts this morning. All substantive, many on foreign policy issues (yay!), and on a Monday, no less. By the time I get this post up, I'm sure there will be more, and you really should go scroll through 'em all. I want to highlight one in particular, though, that gets to the core (in a roundabout way) of why the US has such problems dealing with international issues in general and the Middle East in particular.

In discussing a really spectacular (and heart-wrenching) article in the NYTMag about a young girl in Syria who dishonored her family at the tender age of 15 by . . . being kidnapped and raped, and who was stabbed to death by her brother a year later, Jill points out that there's a tendency to "other" the attitudes and behaviors of so-called honor cultures. I certainly did it when I read the article; my first response was, "Those people are insane." Hell, this happens even when bad stuff happens here -- we immediately distance ourselves from uncomfortable attitudes or events -- but it turns out that the "honor codes" from which the relevant Syrian laws derive come not from the much-maligned Quran, but from a combination of Bedouin tradition and . . . Napoleonic regulations, imposed upon the region by the French mandate. As Jill notes,

The notion of protecting women’s chastity is certainly not solely an Islamic one. Honor killings are the most brutal outcome of a system that fetishizes virginity, female submission and male authority and ownership, but it’s dishonest to pretend that these killings come from some crazy foreign value system totally unlike our own. [...]

The people who killed Zhara, and the people who kill thousands of girls and women all over the world in the name of “honor,” are evil extremists. But they aren’t rare, and they aren’t unique in their view of women as property, their emphasis on “chastity” as an all-important freshness guarantee, and their desire to control women’s bodies and sexual choices.

Indeed. Adding to that, on a more meta level this helps demonstrate the weird dichotomy of having an action (honor killing) that's so far beyond our experience -- to the point of revulsion, and, I think, rightfully so -- that we can't have any response but mental separation *along with* the fact that Americans exist in a culture that largely sympathizes with the ideas behind that horrific act, ideas elucidated by Jill above.

This is a tough line to walk as we try to deal with other cultures and people (especially in the Middle East), and it further represents a challenge for those of us who want to simultaneously understand and respect differing values . . . but retain the right to condemn them. I'm certainly not a full-on cultural relativist, and I have no problem saying that some cultural practices are bad, or even evil (including, I should note, some of our own). Conversely, we can't just dismiss everything we don't like, if only because the best tactical way to change things is to know where the weak spots are, know how to effect change in an pragmatic way. Read More......

Court finds bloggers not liable for anonymous jerks who post in their comments

Bill O'Reilly must be relieved. Read More......

Iraqis say they have video of US contractor Blackwater firing on innocent civilians

This is what happens when you believe that no oversight is the best oversight. Eventually, the screw up is so large that it damages everything. Read More......

One Strong Ad

For the past couple weeks MoveOn.org's ad “General Betray Us” has dominated the news and even managed to be condemned by the U.S. Senate. It has gone so far as having almost every Presidential candidate put to the “patriotism test” by the media with questions related to their feelings toward the ad. It even got the President on record saying “I think it’s disgusting.” As if it’s treason – well America, it’s not.

This is a quite common tactic used in modern day politics, and some might argue that it originated with the Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign when they ruthlessly attacked John McCain in the South Carolina primary. They rallied the right wing against McCain with accusations of being the candidate of gay people, having an African-American love child, and that he was not mentally capable of being Commander in Chief because of his time as prisoner of war in Vietnam caused him to be “the Manchurian Candidate.” I totally disagree with John McCain and his politics, but to this day, as a veteran, I am still outraged by what Bush did to him in 2000 with his Rovian style, cut-throat, political smear machine. To me that is “DISGUSTING.”

Then it went on to Senator Max Cleland who gave up most of his body in service to his country. We all know how they despicably attempted to put a true American patriot like Max Cleland into the same category as Bin Laden in a campaign ad for one of their fellow draft dodgers – Saxby Chambliss. That is just as low as you can go. To me that is “DISGUSTING.”

Then came the presidential campaign of 2004 with the notorious “swift boat veterans for truth.” They continuously bashed John Kerry’s military service in Vietnam on behalf of two cowardly draft dodgers like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. At the Republican National Convention hundreds displayed purple band aids on their faces mocking John Kerry’s multiple purple hearts. To me that is “DISGUSTING.”

Bush didn’t stop with John Kerry. He decided to attack the entire Democratic Party when they began to initiate legislation that would bring the war in Iraq to an end. Bush said the Democratic Party is “now the party of cut and run.” Coming from a man who knows damn well how to “cut and run” from a war he supported (Vietnam) - that is “DISGUSTING.”

In November of 2005 Congressman John Murtha made himself ripe for the picking by Bush's henchman who will search the entire planet to dig up anyone to counter decorated war heroes who question Bush's and Cheney's war, again - "DISGUSTING." But thanks to Senator James Webb, people saw right through the lies.

It doesn’t stop at the top though – it goes down to the lower levels as well. And for the most part you don’t hear about these incidents. When I returned home from Iraq I attended a Kerry/Edwards rally in Kansas City where I was greeted by the “Young Republicans” carrying signs that read “Students for Bush.” Outraged at the sight of it I asked them “If you support George W. Bush and his war in Iraq – why don’t you join the military and go over and fight?” In response they screamed at me “traitor," "you support terrorists," and "move to France.” I will never forget how I was treated by a group of able-bodied males, who fully supported and advocated for a war I fought, but lacked the courage to go anywhere near. To me that is “DISGUSTING.”

Up until now the swiftboating of heroic combat veterans was all fair game for Bush, his cronies in Congress, and his minuscule portion of left over supporters (including Fox News). The ad from MoveOn.org against Petraeus finally woke America up to the reality of what George W. Bush has done for the last 7 years of his tragic presidency. It’s just sad that no one came out on the national level in a similar manner in which they did to MoveOn.org to condemn Bush for his attacks on Cleland, Kerry, Murtha, The Democratic Party, and other patriots who wore the uniform in service to our great nation.

I am not writing this to attack General Petraeus. But when a General testifies to Congress on the so called success of a failed policy he puts himself out there for those who disagree to practice their first amendment rights. General Petraeus, with all due respect, could not even say that what we are doing in Iraq is making America safer. He even had the audacity to suggest that the surge has been so successful that we can draw down 30,000 troops by July of 2008. The surge was put in place to establish a secure environment for political reconciliation to take place in Iraq among multiple warring factions. Well folks, the Iraqi government practically collapsed during the surge. We had the bloodiest summer to date during the surge. And by next summer General Petraeus is going to draw down the surge? Then what? We will be right back to square one – Donald Rumsfeld’s plan of fewer troops in a completely hostile civil war without end. All General Petraeus’ testimony accomplished was a smokescreen for George W. Bush to hide behind and deny reality for the rest of his presidency. The reality is that the war in Iraq is Bush’s failure, and he will continue to use people like General Petraeus to carry out his needless war in Iraq for the duration of his presidency while our troops die on a daily basis.

I PLACE THE BLAME COMPLETELY ON GEORGE W. BUSH.

I’m glad the ad from MoveOn.org raised awareness among Bush’s loyal followers who for so long took pleasure in throwing decorated combat veterans under the bus just because those veterans had the courage and the right to disagree. Right or wrong - my hat is off to MoveOn.Org !

John Bruhns
Iraq War Veteran
Legislative Representative
Americans Against Escalation In Iraq
www.IraqCampaign.org Read More......

GOPers to Bush: Shut up and leave us alone; Bush to GOPers: I'm an asset and can't wait to help.

There was one uniting theme from the GOP presidential candiates this weekend (besides their unyielding support for the endless war). According to an AP analysis, the GOPers running for Prez, like most of those running for Senate, can barely utter the name "George Bush":

Republican presidential candidates can't be any more clear: President Bush isn't welcome on the campaign trail.

Competing to succeed him, top GOP candidates Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and John McCain barely utter Bush's name. They essentially ignore the lame-duck president, or give him only passing credit, as they rail against the status quo and promise to fix problems he hasn't solved.

Bush, delusional as usual, thinks otherwise:
Read More......

Monday Morning Open Thread

Here we go. The Senate takes up Iraq again. One thing is crystal clear: For the Republican Senators, this is a political game. McConnell and Lott are just playing politics. The Democrats are searching for a policy solution on Iraq, but the GOP caucus is running out the clock for Bush. It's sick, really. And nothing was more despicable than the flip-flop by Senator John Warner on the Webb pro-troop bill. That proved John Warner is no statesman, he's a hack for Bush. Warner, like Arlen Specter, always talks about finding a grand compromise. In the end, both of them cave to Bush -- every single time.

The Democrats need to add some hardball political strategy to their policy agenda. If the GOPers want to continue this endless war, make them work for it.

And, it's only Monday. Read More......

Myanmar protests grow on Monday - 30,000 hit the streets

Absolutely amazing. The military junta in Myanmar is not known for freedom of expression nor allowing any dissent. A few years ago I attended a performance by the Moustache Brothers in Mandalay shortly after one of the brothers had been released from prison for making what sounded to me like a pretty harmless joke. The joke had been performed a few years earlier at a Suu Kyi rally and the comedian held out a police helmet and asked "what is this?" When people said "police helmet" he laughed and said "no" as he turned it upside down. "It's a collection box" meaning something to carry bribes, as the Myanmar police have a reputation for being extremely corrupt.

That simple joke landed two of the brothers in prison for six years so you can imagine how much is on the line when the people of Myanmar take to the streets to protest the brutal junta.

UPDATE: CNN now reporting 100,000 protesters in Yangon. Read More......

Oh no, Romney now telling people he'll be a CEO president

Remember Bush, the first CEO President? That didn't really work out too well now, did it? Considering how badly American CEO's are enriching themselves at the expense of others, hmmm, maybe he's onto something though perhaps he might not want to brag too loudly on this point considering the mood towards CEOs bathing in riches while the rest of us live like, well, the rest of us. On the bright site of his latest pitch, he provides some quality entertainment and I have to give him credit for being able to make this denial while not laughing. Pretty impressive delivery, really.

"I'm not in this race for the next step in my political career. I don't have a political career, to tell you the truth," Romney said during a stop at Chapman University. "I've only been in politics four years as a governor. I loved the experience, but my life is my wife and my family. My career was building an enterprise, a business, with some other fellows."

Also of note here is the final line "with some fellows." Sounds like women will do well trying with a guy like this. What century is he living in? What a knuckle-dragging buffoon. Read More......

Open thread

So what other great Democratic wimp-fests will the week bring? Read More......