Tuesday News Bucket

Posted by CabinGirl | Sep 25, 2007 | 24 |

“Don’t you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There’s one marked ‘Brightness,’ but it doesn’t work.”
– Gallagher

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CabinGirl

24 Comments

CabinGirl on September 25, 2007 at 7:05 am

calls out a GOP hypocrite on teevee. And she behaves like a robot, sticking to her progr…erm, talking points like a champ.
- CabinGirl on September 25, 2007 at 7:06 am
  
  (h/t to Susie for that one.)
- michaelmt on September 25, 2007 at 7:54 am
  
  And on “Tucker” too…
- Second Nature on September 25, 2007 at 8:23 am
  
  I love David Shuster. He should really have his own show and send that preppy gasbag, Tucker, over to Fox where he belongs.
  
  Could you believe the look on her face and how she stammered, time and again, every time he asked her about the dead kid from her district? Wow, if looks could kill…
- Connecticut Man1 on September 25, 2007 at 9:40 am
  
  When sh started going on about all of the military she is in contact with all the time, I know this might have been rude and flat out “gotcha” journalism, but I would have loved to see him ask her to name some of those “local soldiers” she is in constant contact with and their issues. Anyone think she would have been able to answer that honestly?
  - CabinGirl on September 25, 2007 at 2:46 pm
    
    Nope.
    
    I think Schuster is on fire this week. Apparently he’s also calling out GOP war mongers for refusing to discuss their views on teevee.
ask on September 25, 2007 at 7:11 am

Man causing climate change – poll

Large majorities in many countries now believe human activity is causing global warming, a BBC World Service poll suggests.

A sizable majority of people agreed that major steps needed to be taken soon to address global warming.

More than 22,000 people were surveyed in 21 countries and the results show a great deal of agreement on the issue.

The survey is published a day after 150 countries met at the United Nations to discuss climate change.

An average of 79% of respondents to the BBC survey agreed that “human activity, including industry and transportation, is a significant cause of climate change”.

Nine out of 10 people said action was necessary, with two-thirds of people going further, saying “it is necessary to take major steps starting very soon”.

In none of the countries did a majority say no action was necessary to combat climate change.

[…]
CabinGirl on September 25, 2007 at 7:16 am

NYT

housands of Indians report to Infosys Technologies’ campus here to learn the finer points of programming. Lately, though, packs of foreigners have been roaming the manicured lawns, too.

Many of them are recent American college graduates, and some have even turned down job offers from coveted employers like Google. Instead, they accepted a novel assignment from Infosys, the Indian technology giant: fly here for six months of training, then return home to work in the company’s American back offices.

India is outsourcing outsourcing.

To fight on the shifting terrain, and to beat back emerging rivals, Indian companies are hiring workers and opening offices in developing countries themselves, before their clients do…

So where are these countries?

…Wipro, another Indian technology services company, has outsourcing offices in Canada, China, Portugal, Romania and Saudi Arabia, among other locations.

And last month, Wipro said it was opening a software development center in Atlanta that would hire 500 programmers in three years.

In a poetic reflection of outsourcing’s new face, Wipro’s chairman, Azim Premji, told Wall Street analysts this year that he was considering hubs in Idaho and Virginia, in addition to Georgia, to take advantage of American “states which are less developed.” (India’s per capita income is less than $1,000 a year.)

Woo-hoo! This globalization thing works great, doesn’t it? Ship jobs overseas so you can pay the workers less, then when the folks back home have been unemployed long enough, ship the jbs back for the same bargain rate you got in India.
- hens teeth on September 25, 2007 at 10:46 am
  
  Amazing. I hadn’t heard about this one yet. And they still keep saying that our kids are too lazy to study engineering. The reality is that they have enough sense to see a sinking ship, and stay off it.
michaelmt on September 25, 2007 at 7:59 am

I heard so many people with grave misunderstandings of the history of Palestine and Israel yesterday I was trying to find the time to put in a little history lesson. I hope someone takes the time, but I won’t hold my breath. It would be great to just have something quick to throw at the right wing whiners this morning.

First, while Ahmadinejad says it very badly, what he’s saying about Israel is pretty much conventional wisdom on the streets of any Arab country. Israel shouldn’t have existed…because it was cut out of the territory in part as a punishment for that area’s involvement in WWII. It’s the tense that makes all the difference. It’s as if a big hunk of South Carolina was suddenly cut out and given back to the indigenous peoples as punishment for the removal of the Cherokee. It would be just, but historically and politically very difficult today. At his nastiest, Ahmadinejad says: “Why didn’t they just take North Dakota?” The world disagrees, but he’s not the only one who says that. The Saudis or Kuwaitis would probably say the same thing.

Of course, Ahmadinejad doesn’t put anything in the past tense when he’s home; he suggests that the establishment of Israel should be reversed, despite what he says here. When he’s home, he suggests there was no Holocaust. Here, he softens that and simply says: “Europeans did it; why should we be punished?”

His statements on homosexuals are even more telling. This guy is a right wing religious fundamentalist of the worst kind. We’ve got a lot of them here, who insist the world is flat and that evolution never existed. You have to take him in that context.

There’s a much, much bigger question here. What massive failure of our own world policy created the climate that would make the people of Iran elect and support such a nutcase? In general, this is a nation of educated and hardworking people, with a history of peace going back many thousands of years. To find the answer to that, you need to review what the CIA did there in the 80s. (For a quick synopsis in a book that has a lot of other examples of our $%^&* global policies, I highly recommend Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

And while I’m on the subject–While Bollinger may have been technically correct, his introduction of Ahmadinejad will be perceived all over the Arab world as a massive violation of hospitality. (Remember, lack of hospitality was what got Sodom and Gomorrah nuked.) He would have been far, far better to begin with a welcome, say: “In the questioning you may be subject to some very frank opinions…” and then hit him with both barrels at the end of the talk rather than in the introduction. Cultural insensitivity!
CabinGirl on September 25, 2007 at 10:59 am

can you say ‘war crime’? I knew you could: AP/Yahoo

Army snipers hunting insurgents in Iraq were under orders to “bait” their targets with suspicious materials, such as detonation cords, and then kill whoever picked up the items, according to the defense attorney for a soldier accused of planting evidence on an Iraqi he killed. Gary Myers, an attorney for Sgt. Evan Vela, said his client had acted “pursuant to orders.”

“We believe that our client has done nothing more than he was instructed to do by superiors,” Myers said in a telephone interview.

Myers and Vela’s father, Curtis Carnahan of Idaho Falls, Idaho, said in separate interviews that sworn statements and testimony in the cases of two other accused Ranger snipers indicate that the Army has a classified program that encourages snipers to “bait” potential targets and then kill whoever takes the bait.

The Army on Monday declined to confirm such a program exists.

WTF are we doing over there?
- dada on September 25, 2007 at 12:59 pm
  
  there’s a lot more to this story than what’s in the the ap article. more from wapo:
  
  In documents obtained by The Washington Post from family members of the accused soldiers, Didier said members of the U.S. military’s Asymmetric Warfare Group visited his unit in January and later passed along ammunition boxes filled with the “drop items” to be used “to disrupt the AIF [Anti-Iraq Forces] attempts at harming Coalition Forces and give us the upper hand in a fight.”
  
  […]
  
  …a civilian attorney for one of the snipers, Sgt. Evan Vela, said the soldiers became “battle-fatigued pawns in a newfangled concept of ‘baiting’ warfare that, like an onion, perhaps looked good on the surface, but started stinking to high hell the minute the layers were pulled back and scrutinized.”
  
  […]
  
  “It’s an injustice that is being done to them,” Carnahan said. “I feel like you can’t prosecute our soldiers for acts of war and threaten them with years and years of confinement when this program, if it comes to the light of day, was clearly coming from higher levels. . . . All those people who said ‘go use this stuff’ just disappeared, like they never sanctioned it.”
  
  via wapo
  
  lTMF’sA
- Gaianne on September 25, 2007 at 5:56 pm
  
  You kill a few babies, call them communist insurgents, your CO pats you on the head while sending the report off to HQ, the general reads the report, tallies the numbers, smiles, and announces to all and sundry that the US is winning.
  
  It’s called how to lose a war while committing mass murder to do it.
  
  The US never repudiated nor apologized for its crimes then, and here we are today.
  
  With one difference: The current war is going to destroy us. We have willingly and blithely passed by the window of choice:
  
  It is now Fate.
rba on September 25, 2007 at 11:36 am

Mark Glaser/MediaShift: EarmarkWatch.org Enables D.I.Y. Investigative Work

“The Sunlight Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense have built a platform on top of that (earmark) database called EarmarkWatch.org, in which anyone can perform searches on various earmarks in Defense and Labor appropriation bills before the U.S. House and Senate.“

Image from THX 1138 (1971)
Man Eegee on September 25, 2007 at 1:06 pm

Update on the Nicholas Corbett’s murder trial

The trial of a U.S. Border Patrol agent charged with second-degree murder will take place in U.S. federal court in Tucson in February.

During a hearing Monday morning, U.S. District Judge David C. Bury approved a motion filed by attorneys for agent Nicholas Corbett — Sean Chapman and Daniel Santander — to move the trial to federal court from Cochise County Superior Court.

The judge set aside two weeks for the trial, set to begin Feb. 26. – linkage
Man Eegee on September 25, 2007 at 1:16 pm

Senators refuse to pass reforms to bring people out of the shadows, yet are salivating at the chance to extend military deployments along the U.S./Mexico border. It’s disgusting.

Already, half of the 6,000 National Guard troops sent to help secure the border with Mexico are gone with the rest leaving next summer, as planned.

“Americans could rightly question why the administration has dedicated 160,000 National Guardsmen to maintain order and security in Iraq, while eliminating the less than 6,000 Guardsmen performing an important task on our own southern border, which most agree is in a state of crisis,” Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., wrote in July to President Bush. Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Pete Domenici, R-N.M., also signed the letter. – linkage
dada on September 25, 2007 at 1:24 pm

tom engelhardt, of tom dispatch has a very good article in todays’ asia times, where he has a look at some of the background concerning the us-iraqi stand-off over blackwater, of specific interest is the infamous “order 17“, issued by bremer as he was leaving the country:

How Iraq won its ‘freedom’
By Tom Engelhardt

… He in essence turned that Baghdad clock back to the 19th century and made that “time” stick to this very day. On the eve of his departure, he issued a remarkable document of freedom – a declaration of foreign independence – that went by the name of “Order 17” [1] and that, in the US mainstream media, is still often referred to as “the law” in Iraq.

[…]

More than three years later, the language of Order 17, written in high legalese, remains striking when it comes to the contractors. (The man who, according to the Washington Post, composed the initial draft of the document, Lawrence T Peter, is, perhaps not surprisingly, now director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, which “represents at least 50 security companies”.) Order 17 begins on private security firms with a stated need “to clarify the status of … certain international consultants, and certain contractors in respect of the government and the local courts.” But the key passage is this:

Contractors shall not be subject to Iraqi laws or regulations in matters relating to the terms and conditions of their contracts … Contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal processes with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a contract or any subcontract thereto … Certification by the Sending State that its contractor acted pursuant to the terms and conditions of the contract shall, in any Iraqi legal process, be conclusive evidence of the facts so certified …

In other words, when, in June 2004, Bremer handed over “sovereignty” to an Iraqi “government” lodged in the foreign-controlled Green Zone and left town as fast as he could, he in essence handed over next to nothing. He had already succeeded in making Iraq a “free” country, as only the Bush administration might have defined “freedom”: free of taxes, duties, tolls, accountability or responsibility of any kind, no matter what Americans or their allies and hirelings did or what they took. In Iraq, in a twist on the nightmare language of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, freedom meant theft.

When it came to the Iraqi government, freedom also meant the freedom not to be informed. Take an example: the US military recently announced that it was about to build a new base in Iraq, right up against the Iranian border, that would be ready for operation this November. Officially, such decisions are, of course, supposed to be made in conjunction with the sovereign government of the country, but Kaveh L Afrasiabi of Asia Times Online informs us that “Iraqi officials were apparently not even consulted prior to an announcement on this issue”. (See Growing need for US-Iran confidence steps, September 18.)

[…]

asia times 25 sep 07

recommended reading

lTMF’sA
- rba on September 25, 2007 at 2:26 pm
  
  Sets of documents available @ CPA-Iraq, parked for “historical purposes”. Idiots give new meaning to “90-day wonder”.
dada on September 25, 2007 at 1:47 pm

BushCo™ has been collecting detailed records on the travel habits of Americans headed overseas…whether you fly, drive or take cruises abroad…not simply your method of transit but the personal items you carry with you., the people you stay with…names, addresses and credit-card information, as well as telephone and e-mail contact details, itineraries, hotel and rental car reservations, and even the type of bed requested in a hotel, and what you’re reading:

Collecting of Details on Travelers Documented
U.S. Effort More Extensive Than Previously Known

…new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel….

The Automated Targeting System has been used to screen passengers since the mid-1990s, but the collection of data for it has been greatly expanded and automated since 2002, according to former DHS officials.

[…]

The activists alleged that the data collection effort, as carried out now, violates the Privacy Act, which bars the gathering of data related to Americans’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, such as their choice of reading material or persons with whom to associate. They also expressed concern that such personal data could one day be used to impede their right to travel.

“The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society,” said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco whose records were requested by the Identity Project, an ad-hoc group of privacy advocates in California and Alaska….

Gilmore’s file, which he provided to The Washington Post, included a note from a Customs and Border Patrol officer that he carried the marijuana-related book “Drugs and Your Rights.”…

DHS officials said this week that the government is not interested in passengers’ reading habits, that the program is transparent, and that it affords redress for travelers who are inappropriately stymied. “I flatly reject the premise that the department is interested in what travelers are reading,” DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said. “We are completely uninterested in the latest Tom Clancy novel that the traveler may be reading.”

But, Knocke said, “if there is some indication based upon the behavior or an item in the traveler’s possession that leads the inspection officer to conclude there could be a possible violation of the law, it is the front-line officer’s duty to further scrutinize the traveler.” Once that happens, Knocke said, “it is not uncommon for the officer to document interactions with a traveler that merited additional scrutiny.”

He said that he is not familiar with the file that mentions Gilmore’s book about drug rights, but that generally “front-line officers have a duty to enforce all laws within our authority, for example, the counter-narcotics mission.” Officers making a decision to admit someone at a port of entry have a duty to apply extra scrutiny if there is some indication of a violation of the law, he said.

[…]

…DHS spokesman, added that the program is not used to determine “guilt by association.” He said the DHS has created a program called DHS Trip to provide redress for travelers who faced screening problems at ports of entry.

*But DHS Trip does not allow a traveler to challenge an agency decision in court, said David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued the DHS over information concerning the policy underlying the ATS. Because the system is exempted from certain Privacy Act requirements, including the right to “contest the content of the record,” a traveler has no ability to correct erroneous information

…

link

that’s a pretty big BUT, wouldn’t you say?

be careful out there.

lTMF’sA
dada on September 25, 2007 at 2:40 pm

A rare copy of the Magna Carta…[a quaint old document, no longer relevant in today’s political climate]… a 13th century English document enshrining the rule of law, is to go on sale in December, in one of the most important sales of a document in history.

The royal charter, dated 1297 and bearing the seal of King Edward I, is expected to fetch up to 30 million dollars when it goes under the hammer at Sotheby’s in New York, the auction house said in a statement Tuesday

.

link

lTMF’sA
- stormkite on September 25, 2007 at 2:56 pm
  
  When I saw this story the first time the headline read “Only North American Magna Carta up for sale” and my immediate thought was “well, that figures…”
Man Eegee on September 25, 2007 at 2:52 pm

Bolivia’s President, and first indigenous leader of that country (in its current form, that is), will be on the Daily Show tonight

Political satirist Jon Stewart, host of the popular mock cable TV newscast “The Daily Show,” will interview Bolivian President Evo Morales on the program on Tuesday, the show’s network announced on Monday.

The guest spot by Morales will mark only the second appearance on the Emmy-winning show by a sitting head of state, following Stewart’s interview a year ago of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan and a key U.S. ally. – linkage

(h/t to The Latin Americanist)
Man Eegee on September 25, 2007 at 5:23 pm

Nicaragua’s President, Daniel Ortega, took the U.S. to task at the UN today.

Ortega had started off addressing the central theme of this year’s General Assembly meeting — climate change — but he quickly launched into a tirade against global capitalism, meandering from his notes and speaking well beyond his allotted 15 minutes.

The world is under “the most impressive, huge dictatorship that has existed — the empire of North America,” he said. An “imperialist minority is imposing global capitalism to impoverish us all and impose apartheid against Latin American immigrants and against African immigrants.”

He said the United States, as the only country to have used nuclear bombs in a war, was in no position to question the right of Iran and North Korea to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. – linkage

Ortega and the fight against U.S. imperialism go way back, in case you don’t know the history.
- KNUCKLEHEAD on September 25, 2007 at 8:21 pm
  
  Those who speak out, embolden those who hold similar views, but have kept them in check for fear of being alone. It only takes one, “alone” person, to be the spark that lights the fire. Pretty soon this turns into a conflagration that will smoke out the imperialists who have tried for two centuries to subjugate others, mostly the others who had natural resources, or were in geographically important areas deemed too important to be left to the mere brown skins ( insert the crayola box here).

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