Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
KATIE ZEZIMA and ABBY GOODNOUGH, - The New York Times
Stephan: This was inevitable given the encroachment of privacy that we have experienced over the past decade.
Thanks to Judy Tart.
Her employer, Dura Automotive Systems, had changed the policy at its sprawling plant here to test for certain prescription drugs as well as illicit ones. The medication that Mrs. Bates was taking for back pain - hydrocodone, a narcotic prescribed by her doctor - was among many that the company, which makes car parts, had suddenly deemed unsafe.
‘I don’t think it should end the way it did,
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Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
ELLEN KNICKMEYER, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: These Wikileaks expose the profound dishonesty behind the Bush Administration's strategy to get us into the Iraq War, one of the most catastrophic foreign policy mistakes in modern history. It is my view that Donald Rumsfeld and his minions are guilty of crimes against humanity and should be arrested and prosecuted.
Ellen Knickmeyer is a former Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad and Cairo. Before coming to the Post, she was the West Africa bureau chief for The Associated Press. This year, she graduated from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
Recent revelations by WikiLeaks show how top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world. Ellen Knickmeyer on the carnage she saw as Baghdad bureau chief.
In the dark morning hours of Feb. 22, 2006, a group of unknown attackers detonated bombs in the northern Iraqi city of Samarra, bringing down the golden dome of a revered Shia Muslim shrine.
A few hours later, I drove through Baghdad and watched the country descend into civil war. Then the Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post, I drove with Iraqi and American colleagues to Sadr City, the sprawling slum on the outskirts of the city. We watched hundreds of black-clad religious militiamen, waving their AK 47s in the air and calling for revenge, in what would be the start to a campaign of sectarian killing and torture.
During visits to Baghdad’s morgue over the next two days, I saw Sunni families thronging to find
the bodies of loved ones killed by the militias. The morgue’s computer registrar told the grim-faced families and me that we would have to be patient; the morgue had taken in more than 1,000 bodies since the Samarra bombing, and was way behind on […]
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Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
LAURI LEBO, - rd Magazine
Stephan: Please go into the SR archives and take a look again at my essay on the Denier movements. This is all an example of Willful Ignorance.
The New York Times had an interesting, but unsurprising, article last week on the fact that Tea Partiers don’t accept the validity of man-made climate change. As I said, hardly surprising, especially in light of the fact that from the beginning, the oil industry has set up the Tea Party movement to use its supporters as the front-line infantry in their battle against anything approaching even a modicum of increased regulation. I noticed how ingrained this was in September 2009, when I attended the first 9/12 Rally in DC. Protesters spoke at length about the socialistic evils of the market-based reforms of cap-and-trade-a rather wonkish topic I thought for a group that loves to rail about the educated elites.
From the Times article:
Those who support the Tea Party movement are considerably more dubious about the existence and effects of global warming than the American public at large, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted this month. The survey found that only 14 percent of Tea Party supporters said that global warming is an environmental problem that is having an effect now, while 49 percent of the rest of the public believes that it is. More […]
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Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
FIONA HARVEY, Environmental Correspondent - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: This is what should have happened in the U.S. We should have created infrastructure projects -- wind, solar, fast railroads, highspeed internet -- that employed hundreds of thousands of middle class people who would, in turn, have spent money buying goods and services, thus reinvigorating the American economy. Instead, we chose to make a few thousand very rich people very very rich.
Offshore wind will create 70,000 ‘green jobs
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Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
Stephan: The U.S. and Iran are both shovelling money into the Hamid Karzai kleptocracy. I thought the image -- which they admit to --of getting the money literally as bags full of cash was particularly defining. For the kleptocrats of Afghanistan it must be Christmas everyday -- even though they are Muslims -- for the country as a whole, not so good.
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has said that his office receives cash in bags from Iran.
The Afghan leader said on Monday that this method of aid distribution is transparent and helps cover government expenses. He also said that the US makes similar cash payments.
The comments came after a report on Sunday that Karzai’s chief of staff, Omar Dawoodzai, receives covert bagfuls of money – possibly as much as $6 million in a single payment – sent by neighbouring Iran in a bid to secure influence.
Karzai said the money was used for palace expenses, salaries and for ‘people outside,’ but gave no further details.
The New York Times, citing an unnamed Afghan official, said that millions of dollars in cash channelled from Iran are used to pay Afghan parliamentarians, tribal elders and Taliban commanders.
US concern
Bill Burton, a White House spokesman, said world leaders should have ‘every reason to be concerned about Iran trying to have a negative influence on Afghanistan.’
He added Iran had a responsibility to exert ‘a positive influence on the formation of a government there, and to ensure that Afghanistan is not a country where terrorists can find safe harbour, or where attacks can be planned on […]
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