Category: Issues of the Day

You should go to Eschaton and read the whole post, but I wanted you to see this.

It seems that the children of Afghanistan want nothing more than they want a pen.

It was explained to me that the villages through which I traveled (near Kandahar, where I’m based) are so poor that a pen is like a scholarship to these children. They desperately want to learn but, without a pen, they simply won’t. It’s a long story. I won’t bore you with it. Trust me, though, when I say that it would be a big deal if even a few of you could put up the call for pens for me. Anyone interested in helping out could either send some directly to me or go to these sites and send them, where you can find them for as cheap as $.89 a dozen.

You can send them to me at this address:

Terry L. Welch
105th MPAD
Kandahar Public Affairs Office
APO AE 09355

Atrios edited the sites Welch included but says Office Max works.

The Albuquerque Tribune reports —

According to 2002 U.S. Census figures, New Mexico, at about 21 percent, has the second-worst rate of uninsured after Texas. The national average is 15 percent.

About 73 percent of the state’s uninsured are ages 19 to 64 and not covered by Medicaid or Medicare.

Fewer than half of New Mexico employers offer health insurance – 49.7 percent, compared with 62.6 percent nationally.

And the state has a higher rate of children without health insurance – 15 percent vs. 12 percent nationally.

“When you are the good guys, you’ve got to act like the good guys.”
— Senator Lindsey Graham

Josh Marshall —

As I said earlier today, I don’t think I can remember a more shameful spectacle in the United States Congress, in my living memory, than the comments today of James Inhofe, the junior senator from Oklahoma.

Continue Talking Points Memo.

According to Gallup (polling May 7-9) 79% of Americans are bothered a “great deal” (54%) or a “fair amount” (25%) by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. 73% think there are no circumstances that would justify the behavior. 71% think the offenses are serious.

NewMexiKen is just outraged that anyone can think that the behavior toward the captives in Iraq (and likely elsewhere) is justified under any circumstances. What kind of people are we becoming?

And, though I think that individual soldiers are culpable — they should know right from wrong — it’s their military and our political leaders we need to hold responsible.

Senator Inhofe said he was “more outraged by the outrage than…by the treatment.” I, among many, am outraged at Senator Inhofe.

The sanctimonious, self-serving jerks who serve in the U.S. Senate like Daniel Inhofe are too much for NewMexiKen. Today Inhofe said,

The idea that these prisoners, they’re not there for traffic violations. If they’re in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners, they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents, and many of them probably have American blood probably on their hands and here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.

The Red Cross tells us however, that “military intelligence officers told the ICRC that in their estimate between 70% and 90% of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.”

Furthermore, the purpose of the Geneva Convention is to protect our servicemen should they be captured. It’s a reciprocal agreement among civilized nations, of which we presume to be one.

Pointer via Kos.

Update: CNN implied McCain walked out on Inhofe’s remarks. They all should have!

Gary Rivlin has a fascinating and informative article about slot machines in The New York Times Magazine. It’s well worth your time if you’re interested in gambling. More so if you are a victim of it.

Some factoids from the article:

“In its 14-year lifetime, ‘Madden N.F.L. Football,’ from Electronic Arts, has made roughly $1 billion, making it one of the most successful home video games ever produced. ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ [the slot machine] by contrast, takes in more than a billion dollars each year.”

“[Slot machines] gross more annually than McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Starbucks combined.”

North American casinos took in $30 billion from slots in 2003 — an amount that dwarfs the $9 billion spent on movie tickets or the $10 billion on pornography in all commercial forms.

“[T]he machines’ ability to hook so deeply into a player’s cerebral cortex derives from one of the more powerful human feedback mechanisms, a phenomenon behavioral scientists call infrequent random reinforcement or “intermittent reward.”

From U.S. News:

It was the lead item on the government’s daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. “Stand down,” came the order from embarrassed national security types.

Link via Eschaton.

The two leading articles on the military prison situation in Iraq are by Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker last week and this.

Torture at Abu Ghraib

Chain of Command

From the Guardian:

The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.

The techniques devised in the system, called R2I – resistance to interrogation – match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, saPOSTID: “It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn’t know what they were doing.”

Link via Josh Marshall, who notes, “What’s now happening in Iraq is that the same methods are being passed down to untrained and unsupervised reservists; and the whole situation spirals out of control.”

The warden in Shawshank Redemption — the one who used Andy Dufresne but punished him anyway — is beginning to look like a good guy as wardens go.

See Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S. in Saturday’s New York Times.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

That pandering jerk Lieberman couldn’t even get his syntax right yesterday:

“And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah a while ago never received an apology from anybody.”

Newsday:

[T]he whole national security team should be fired.

It’s just not Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz – and his deputy, Douglas Feith – it’s also the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. They were wrong about the reasons for going to war; they were wrong about the danger of a terrorist attack before Sept. 11, 2001; they were wrong about how easy it would be to rebuild post-war Iraq, and they have been wrong about how Iraqis detained and imprisoned should be treated – not to mention denying U.S. citizens held in terrorism investigations their basic constitutional rights.

And we’re not even talking here about the No. 1 honcho on every aspect of the war: Vice President Dick Cheney. He can’t be fired, of course. But why does he have to be on the Republican ticket come November? Then again, the last president to shake up his government in a dramatic fashion was Jimmy Carter, and look where it got him. Once you take the top people out, there is only one person left to blame.

Link via Eschaton.

True hero athlete from Gwen Knapp in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Link via Eschaton.

“I continue to believe that the Diebold voting machines represent a huge threat to our democracy.” Johns Hopkins University Professor Aviel D. Rubin, quoted in a New York Times article, Who Hacked the Voting System? The Teacher.

Eleven American military personnel were killed in action in Iraq Sunday.

Six U.S. service members were killed and another 30 were wounded in a mortar attack near the western city of Ramadi.

The city is about 60 miles west of Baghdad in Anbar province, which includes Fallujah. A military spokeswoman gave no further details and did not say whether the victims were Marines or Army soldiers, but most Americans stationed there are Marines.

Another U.S. soldier was killed and 10 were wounded in a bomb and small arms attack on a coalition base near the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

Overnight, Shiite militiamen attacked a U.S. convoy with small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades near the southern city of Amarah, 180 miles south of Baghdad. Two soldiers were killed, the military said. Through the night and into Sunday morning, Iraqis set fire to the long line of abandoned vehicles, jumping on the hoods and beating them with sticks.

An attack in northwest Baghdad killed two other soldiers and wounded two Iraqi security officers and another American, the military said.

Source: Associated Press

From Thursday’s Washington Post:

The American Civil Liberties Union disclosed yesterday that it filed a lawsuit three weeks ago challenging the FBI’s methods of obtaining many business records, but the group was barred from revealing even the existence of the case until now.

The lawsuit was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, but the case was kept under seal to avoid violating secrecy rules contained in the USA Patriot Act, the ACLU said. The group was allowed to release a redacted version of the lawsuit after weeks of negotiations with the government.

“It is remarkable that a gag provision in the Patriot Act kept the public in the dark about the mere fact that a constitutional challenge had been filed in court,” Ann Beeson, the ACLU’s associate legal director, said in a statement. “President Bush can talk about extending the life of the Patriot Act, but the ACLU is still gagged from discussing details of our challenge to it.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the case.

From The New York Times:

PENSACOLA, Fla., April 29 — Robert and Schön Passmore took their children to Disney World last fall and left bitterly disappointed. As Christians who reject evolutionary theory, the family scoffed at the park’s dinosaur attractions, which date the apatosaurus, brachiosaurus and the like to prehistoric times.

“My kids kept recognizing flaws in the presentation,” said Mrs. Passmore, of Jackson, Ala. “You know — the whole `millions of years ago dinosaurs ruled the earth’ thing.”

So this week, the Passmores sought out a lower-profile Florida attraction: Dinosaur Adventure Land, a creationist theme park and museum here that beckons children to “find out the truth about dinosaurs” with games that roll science and religion into one big funfest with the message that Genesis, not science, tells the real story of the creation.

Continue reading from The New York Times.

Factoid from article: “God made dinosaurs on Day 6 of the creation as described in Genesis.”

Marketing factoid from article: “You’re missing 98 percent of the population if you only go the intellectual route.”

Bob Somerby is mad as hell and the rest of us should be — The Washington press corps is deeply disordered. Here–let the New York Times show you.

From Molly Ivins:

AUSTIN — Sinners of Texas, unite! We have nothing to lose but our vices! In case you hadn’t noticed, our only governor, Goodhair Perry, is fixing to tax the bejeezus out of us. It’s not as though the state’s topers, gamblers and smokers aren’t already putting in well more than our fair share. And do we get any recognition for it? Do we get any respect? We do not! All we get is a bunch of Baptists telling us we’re going to hell. As we lift our heavy glasses in bars from El Paso to Corpus, as we puff poison into our lungs from Amarillo to Laredo, nobly sacrificing our health for the sake of better education, we are despised and scorned. If it weren’t for sinners, this state would be broke already. Now the man wants to pile even more taxes on us. We have to draw the line somewhere: I want to make it clear that much as I support public education, I will not go to topless bars for the sake of the schoolchildren of Texas.

Continue reading Molly Ivins.