By John Lasker —A PTSD victim looks for a day when the Army will reform the “boys’ club” atmosphere that makes women soldiers a target for sexual abuse.
By Mr. Fish —I began to wonder if I wasn’t, in fact, witnessing the censorship of an enlightening fact rather than the shutting down of mere prurience.
Remember when Sundance was known as the scrappy little flick-fest that could, ushering many an indie darling to theaters of mass consumption from its unlikely setting, nestled in a tony resort town in the Utah mountains, somehow stoking lefty sensibilities all the while? Yeah, that was a long time ago.
Life for most of us can be carefully—if unintentionally—structured to avoid confrontation with the sea of human misery, despair and hopelessness around us. Whatever his intention, British photographer Lee Jeffries is interrupting the arrangement.
My first reaction to the video released recently of the four U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Afghans was that it was too ham-fisted and bombastic a metaphor to add anything of real value to the ongoing critique and analysis of this country’s über-mortiferous foreign policy.
Art Spiegelman’s “MetaMaus” is a 300-page user’s guide to his own Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus” (you know, Holocaust-graphic-novel-Jews-as-mice-Nazis-as-cats).
Did you see the one about the Bulgarian street artists who used a little color to repurpose a public monument commemorating the Soviet takeover of their country in 1944 into a cartoonish visual joke?
Some bitter ironies in Afghanistan these days: U.S. and French soldiers gunned down by the very Afghan troops they work with. America and its NATO allies, facing huge budget problems themselves, persist in squandering billions in Afghanistan to defeat Islamic radicals and create a propitious climate for growth and investment. Right now, the largest investments so safeguarded are Chinese.
We can vote for Romney or Obama, but Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil and Bank of America and the defense contractors always win. However, the iron grip of corporations over our lives will, eventually, be broken.
A PTSD victim looks for a day when the Army will reform the “boys’ club” atmosphere that makes women soldiers a target for discrimination, harassment and rape.
Sunday marks the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, but the big news this year is the debate over the 1965 decision of Griswold v. Connecticut that made contraception legal.
Given time and enough money, the super PACs and other secretive political campaign funds are capable of causing corruptive influence that could reach from the presidency down to the lowest ranked members of the House.
Throughout our decade-long foreign policy debacle in the Greater Middle East, we in the U.S. have generally agreed that no one shall commit the gaucherie of dwelling on civilian casualties. Club rules do, however, permit one loophole: Washington officials may bemoan the nightmare of civilian casualties if they can be pinned on a 24-year-old Army private first class named Bradley Manning.
Sure, there’s the GOP symbol, but the real elephant in the room has been the super PAC, the turbocharged political action committee able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political ads — as long as that spending isn’t coordinated with a particular campaign.
Researchers have invented a kind of soap that can be magnetically corralled to help clean up toxic spills. The feat is accomplished by infusing more mundane suds with tiny iron particles that join together and react to magnets.
She’s thought it over, and now Washington state Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen has made up her mind in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage, which should give the gay-marriage measure currently under consideration in the Evergreen State enough legislative oomph to push it over the line and become law. Stay tuned.
The Iraq War may be “over,” but the unfinished business from years of American occupation still lingers. And a particularly grim chapter from that time, reaching all the way back to 2005, was revisited Monday in the trial of Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who entered a guilty plea on dereliction of duty in association with the killing of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha.
Scary to think that the implication behind the Supreme Court’s ruling, which came down on Monday, that police and other law enforcement agents would need a warrant to plant GPS tracking devices on suspects’ vehicles is that this kind of bugging was obviously happening before without that key intermediary step. Score one for the Fourth Amendment.
One senatorial vote stands between Washington state and gay marriage. Five legislators remain undecided. With a view to tipping the scales, Seattle’s Stranger newspaper has cataloged their indecision, complete with contact info for readers interested in giving them a lean.
A group of doctors and environmentalists in Salt Lake City have joined the Occupy movement to sue the third-largest mining corporation in the world for allegedly violating the Clean Air Act with practices that contribute to thousands of pollution-related deaths in Utah each year. The company, Rio Tinto/Kennecott, pulled in a record $15 billion in profits last year.
Robert Redford Gives Obama a Big Break on Big Oil
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