SOURCE: BestGayBlogs.com
Why They Support Equality!
Freedom to Marry recently sat down with prominent politicians from across the country to hear why they support marriage for all loving and committed couples. We captured never-before-heard stories of how political leaders’ faith, their family and friends, and their understanding of core American values impact their support for marriage equality.
Taylor Barnes, The Christian Science Monitor: “The entire 2,000-mile US-Mexico border will be monitored by drones starting Wednesday when a new Predator drone begins flying from Corpus Christi, Texas, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said. There are already three drones operating along portions of the border. Aside from the new drone launched today, money for two more was included in $600 million legislation President Barack Obama signed earlier this month, which ramps up border security ahead of midterm elections on Nov. 2 and as Mexico’s heated drug war gains more attention. Meanwhile, Napolitano calls the border safer than ever.”
Tuesday 31 August 2010
Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co.: “Lately, the hysteria over deficits in the United States has definitely brought back memories of that march to war [in Iraq]…. If the Iraq parallel is any guide, and deficits become intolerable for everyone, years from now, when the American economy is mired in a deflationary trap – long after most people will have conceded that austerity was a mistake – only those who went along with the mistake will be considered ‘serious,’ while those who argued strenuously against a disastrous course of action will still be considered flaky and unreliable.”
Religious Directive May Thwart Living Wills
Jimmie Erwin
An article in the Tulsa World last April, Catholic directive may hamstring living wills, reported on a local conflict between a patient’s advance directive and a Catholic hospital’s doctrine.
An elderly woman taken last year to St. John Medical Center had suffered a massive stroke and could no longer speak, eat or drink.
Although she had an advance directive specifying no artificial hydration or nutrition if she weren’t going to recover, local health officials said, her nephew insisted the local bishop’s directive on use of feeding tubes required the Catholic hospital to install one.
“If family members believe they know what mom or dad wants but get the message from hospital or nursing home staff that it’s sinful and wrong, that’s a pretty hard thing for a grieving family to deal with,” said Barbara Coombs Lee, President of Compassion & Choices.
Thanks in part to the GOP’s failed policies, America is such a hard place to raise a family that many people are delaying getting married and having kids.
Taxpayer cash is flowing to subcontractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, who engage in shady, illegal practices with few repercussions.
From a Slogan to a Movement: “Bring the War Money Home”
by Mike Prokosc
A theme is appearing on peace flyers across the country:
We’ve seen the “cost of war” theme before. But it is appearing more regularly and it has new urgency and resonance. More and more peace activists are realizing that the Great Recession has shoved the wars off center stage. In 2006 or 2008, Iraq could make or break a national candidate. Today, people are angry about jobs and service cuts. The energy that pervaded antiwar marches and rallies a few years ago is now showing up in demonstrations targeting Wall Street and bank bailouts – and not all of those are led by progressives.
In this new context, the issue of the military budget is beginning to surface in a new way. And no wonder. War spending is rising at rates not seen since the Korean War. The Obama administration is planning to spend more on war from 2010 to 2017 than the Bush administration did from 2002 to 2009. President Obama ruled military spending cuts off the table when he called for a freeze on spending this year, and again when he set up his deficit commission.
Meanwhile our states, cities, communities, and families are in the grip of a jobless recession. Some communities of color report joblessness above 50%. State budget deficits may total $187 billion this year, forcing states to cut jobs, education and public services exactly when our communities need them most.
The moment is ripe for a movement that:
(NOTE: The only way to stay the largest bully of the world, the USgov must put terror in all those who question their power……which is a perfectly accurate description of the USgov that the rest of the world will freely state, while most Americans are too stupid or embarrassed to: The US government is the largest terrorist organization ever known to mankind. Until that stops, most likely by an attack by one or more country, the USgov will continue on its path until it successfully takes over every inch of the earth.)
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Our empire does not enhance our power, it squanders it and leaves us bankrupt.
By Andrew Feldman / Foreign Policy in Focus
Will the powerful military-media complex allow Obama to remove ‘all US troops from Iraq’ by the end of next year?
By Rory O’Connor / RoryOConnor.org
Washington’s Wars and Occupations:
Month in Review #64
August 31, 2010
By Maryam Roberts & Alicia Garza, War Times/Tiempo de Guerras
Countless monsters lurk in the shadows of the U.S. empire. But U.S. militarism may be the biggest, most elusive, of them all – a shape-shifter. The nature of a shape-shifter is to be unreachable, unknowable, to change its way of being in order to accomplish its own goals, its own missions. While vampires, werewolves and shape-shifters fill the collective pop-culture consciousness in shows like Twilight or True Blood, there is a real-life shape-shifter playing out its bloody agenda across the globe. Shape-shifting U.S. militarism maneuvers to keep its opponents and victims guessing, to occupy our attention in one direction while executing a different tactic in another part of the world.
U.S. combat operations are supposedly over in Iraq – but U.S. casualties in Afghanistan under Obama have now surpassed those under Bush and continue to climb. A majority of U.S. people think that war is not worth fighting, but General David Petraeus is leading other senior military commanders in a campaign to undermine Obama’s July 2011 timeline for U.S. troops to “begin leaving” Afghanistan. In the last month, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger sent National Guard Troops to the U.S/Mexico border saying that the troops will help protect the American people. Military recruiters still target youth in people of color and poor communities: amid today’s “jobless recovery” the U.S. military is the biggest jobs program going. A generation of veterans and active duty servicewomen and men, their families and friends, have sacrificed and paid too high a price for the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while the drawdown of troops in Iraq makes the front pages, there is an unpublicized military build-up of another kind on a small island in the Pacific far from the Middle East.
MORE: Month in Review August 2010: Shape-shifter: The Many Faces of U.S. Militarism (http://www.war-times.org/)
Or
DOWNLOAD FULL ARTICLE PDF: http://www.war-times.org/pdf/WT-MiR-Aug10.pdf
By Chuck Collins and Sam Pizzigati
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the most ‘radical speech’ an American ex-President has ever delivered.
Ex-Presidents almost always follow a small number of well-worn scripts. Some rush to cash in on their celebrity. Some do charitable good deeds. Some just lay low.
Exactly one century ago, on August 31, 1910, we had an ex-President who took a brash and bold leap that took him far beyond these narrowly circumscribed roles. On that day, in the middle of Middle America, a former President — Theodore Roosevelt — essentially called on his fellow citizens to smash the nation’s rich down to democratic size.
We need, Roosevelt told a massive assembly of 30,000 listeners, to “destroy privilege.” Ruin for our democracy, he warned, will be “inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few.”
Those listeners — in Osawatomie, Kansas — roared their approval. Back East, apologists for grand fortune would be aghast. Editorial writers would label Roosevelt “frankly socialistic,” even “anarchistic.” A later historian, George Mowry, would call TR’s talk, soon to be known as his “New Nationalism” address, ”the most radical speech ever given by an ex-President.”
by Chauncey DeVega on @ 1:41 pm
URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/08/30/how-glenn-becks-perversion-of-dr-kings-vision-is-proof-positive-of-orwells-wisdom/
I am lucky to have smart friends. My circle includes historians, philosophers, economists, psychologists and biologists–just enough high headed folk to make a fun salon. After watching Glenn Beck’s abuse of history on Saturday I had to ring up a historian. Specifically, one who can connect the dots from Beck, to Hitler’s Germany, and America at the end of Empire in ways that I could not. For your enjoyment, my colleague Werner Herzog’s Bear (of the great blog I Used to be Disgusted, Now I Try to be Amused) shares his thoughts on Glenn Beck’s most recent abuse of history.
BP is the company people love to hate. There may be good reason for that. A textbook case i greed, careless,
and corruption. NOTE; This one is not about the oil spill.
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/925.html
There are lots of large, complex and hazardous industrial installations out there. How well are their managed and maintained? Here’s the answer from one company.
By Kevin Bogardus and Barbra Kim
The wealthiest members of Congress grew richer in 2009 even as the economy struggled to recover from a deep recession.
The 50 wealthiest lawmakers were worth almost $1.4 billion in 2009, about $85.1 million more than 12 months earlier, according to The Hill’s annual review of lawmakers’ financial disclosure forms.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) tops the list for the second year in a row. His minimum net worth was $188.6 million at the end of 2009, up by more than $20 million from 2008, according to his financial disclosure form.
While the economy struggled through a recession during much of 2009 and the nation’s unemployment rate soared to 10 percent, the stock market rebounded, helping lawmakers with large investments. The S&P 500 rose by about 28 percent in 2009.
Corporations, UAW continue campaign against Indianapolis GM workers
By Jerry White and Andre Damon
31 August 2010
The campaign by General Motors, the United Auto Workers and investor Justin Norman to force workers at the Indianapolis stamping plant to take a 50 percent wage cut moved ahead Sunday with a meeting between Norman and a small group of GM workers and their families.
Norman, a 34-year-old former stockbroker, is insisting that workers accept a reduction in pay from $29 an hour to $15.50 as precondition for his purchase of the factory, which GM plans to close next year. On August 15 workers shouted down and drove out UAW International executives from their local union meeting for agreeing to the concessions and defying their vote barring any talks with Norman.
By Ed Hightower, 30 August 2010
The US army is investigating accusations by soldiers that a commanding officer banished them to their barracks when they refused to attend a Christian rock concert at Fort Eustis, Virginia in May of this year.
Army spokesperson Colonel Thomas Collins told the Associated Press that the allegations against the officer, if true, would be contrary to Army policy. They also represent a clear violation of the separation of church and state and serve as the latest evidence of the impunity with which Christian fundamentalism is supplanting constitutional governance of the American military.
The first report of the concert and punishment of those who did not attend came from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s (MRFF) web site. The group said multiple soldiers contacted them complaining about the incident, including those who suffered punishment for refusing to attend the concert. Mikey Weinstein, president of the MRFF, told the AP that Christian-themed events were “ubiquitous” in the military.
The concert was one of the “Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concerts,” and featured the band Barlow Girl. According to the band’s web site, BarlowGirl is “tender-hearted, beautiful young women [they are three sisters] who aren’t afraid to take an aggressive, almost warrior-like stance when it comes to spreading the gospel and serving God.”
Major General William E. Chambers, a self-described born again Christian, created the Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concert series at Fort Eustis when he was the commanding general there. MRFF reports that the Department of Defense has spent at least $300,000 on Christian musical acts for the series.
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Concerning the Pentagon’s investigation of the reprisals, one can be fairly sure a whitewash is forthcoming. This is precisely what happened in the Air Force’s report on rampant Christian fundamentalist bigotry at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in 2005.
The United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) and its highest teachers and administrators were implicated in condoning and promoting evangelical Christian views in separate reports by Yale Divinity School and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Instances in the reports included an academy-wide email from the commanding officer in 2003 calling attention to the national day of prayer, the promotion of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ in February 2004 and the football coach’s hanging of a “Team Jesus” banner in the locker room.
The resulting investigation did not find a climate of “overt religious discrimination.”
Nor did any section of the ruling elite, Republican or Democratic, seriously oppose these brazenly unconstitutional efforts to evangelize the officer corps and soldiery.
The revelations from Fort Eustis reveal that five years later, the push to convert the US military into an avowedly right-wing Christian force, has continued.
Bill Van Auken, 31 August 2010
Another 14 US troops have been killed in Afghanistan since Saturday, with the death toll so far this year already rising to the level reached for all of 2010.
A pair of roadside bombings took the lives of seven soldiers on Monday, five of them dying in a blast that tore apart a Humvee in which they were riding. Bomb blasts took the lives of four others in southern Afghanistan over the weekend, while three were killed in clashes with armed groups resisting the US-led occupation.
These latest deaths bring US fatalities for the month to nearly 50, after the record 65 killed in July.
NATO has announced that it is investigating yet another report of civilians killed in a US bombing. The air strike last Thursday hit children who were collecting scrap metal on a mountain in the province of Kunar, which borders Pakistan. A local police commander said that the six children killed by the US bombs were aged six to 12. Another child was seriously wounded.
After a much-reported decline in US air strikes, attributed to orders from sacked US senior commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal that were designed to reduce civilian casualties, such strikes are back up again. According to figures released by the Air Force, US warplanes flew 5,500 “close air support” missions in June and July of 2010, compared to 4,600 in the same months last year.
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What is required is the revival of a genuine movement against war, based on the working class and joined with the struggle to defend jobs and living standards against the onslaught being carried out by the banks and corporations and their government.
It must raise the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US and other foreign troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, and for all those in both the Bush and Obama administrations who are responsible for these wars of aggression to be held accountable for war crimes.
VR interviewed Teabaggers at Glenn Beck’s rally, and we were met with hostility and scorn, and they showed they had extremist viewpoints, and absolutely NO ideas on how to actually govern and solve the problems facing our country. It was supposedly about “God”, but I did not see one sign calling to feed the hungry or house the homeless; just “Don’t take my guns!” and other nonsense.
Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
On Sunday, one day after a fire at the site of a planned Islamic center and mosque in the Nashville suburb of Murfreesboro, Muslim community members reported hearing gunshots as they inspected the damage.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/fear-spreads-after-fire-at-tennessee-mosque-site/
SOURCE: Citizens for Legitimate Government
Critics of Labour leadership frontrunner accuse him of ‘burying his head in the sand’ over abuses
29 Aug 2010
The United States did “bad things” to terror suspects in the wake of 9/11 which Britain was too slow to realise, David Miliband acknowledges today as he brandishes his record as Foreign Secretary to bolster his Labour leadership ambitions. In an exclusive interview with *The Independent on Sunday*, the contest’s frontrunner speaks bluntly about both the behaviour of Britain’s closest intelligence ally and the failings of his predecessors at the Foreign Office in not recognising sooner the US’s unacceptable treatment of detainees prisoners.
Nugent also recently claimed during a radio interview that he’s convinced the president is a “muslim operative.”
SOURCE: Citizens for Legitimate Government
28 Aug 2010
After working for a year to redeem the international reputation of military tribunals, Obama administration officials are alarmed by the
first case to go to trial under revamped rules: the prosecution of a former child soldier whom an American interrogator implicitly threatened with gang rape. The defendant, Omar Khadr, was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan and accused of throwing a grenade that killed an American soldier.
By Adnan Sarwar
The destruction I saw made me question everything I had previously thought about religion.
SOURCE: Citizens for Legitimate Government
29 Aug 2010
The Pentagon is urging that its defense expertise be put in play beyond the .mil domain to include .gov and .com and wants policy makers to figure out how best to do that*.
26 Aug 2010
The U.S. military wants to exert more influence over the protection of power grids, transportation networks and financial network systems, a Pentagon official says in a broad-ranging essay published in Foreign Affairs.
To do so the Pentagon is urging that its defense expertise be put in play beyond the .mil domain to include .gov and .com and wants policy makers to figure out how best to do that.
The reasons are that the military relies on these networks to deal with suppliers and that these networks could become military targets, says William J. Lynn III, undersecretary of defense, in the essay called “Defending a New Domain.”
The United States on Sunday condemned remarks by the spiritual leader of Israel’s leading ultra-Orthodox party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who said the Palestinians should “perish”.
By Haroon Siddiquni
Stop being in denial that there is no connection between the wars we wage and the terrorist mayhem that they trigger, there and here.
BY JILL R. AITORO
Gilead Light, an attorney at Venable LLP, has defended numerous clients against espionage charges, which for now means he punches holes in laws that stem back to the turn of the 20th century.
Liability for those who mishandle classified digital documents is murky at best, he told Nextgov on Friday. But that view is subject to change. As evidence, he pointed to a congressional hearing in May on the need to update espionage laws, and recent comments by Sonia Sotomayor, who indicated the Wikileaks exposure of thousands of classified Defense Department documents could result in a Supreme Court case.
“This is the type of situation that moves the ball,” he said.
Light discussed with Nextgov senior reporter Jill R. Aitoro how espionage laws and the use of classified information could change.
In the summer of 2006, Maj. Walt Cooper was convinced that his Special Forces team’s work was only contributing to the violence spiraling out of control in Baghdad.
As the months passed, his cynicism and anger grew. “This place is now rotten to the core,” he concluded.
A year later Cooper was back in Iraq,
Read Full Story
Reported by Powell Gammill
In February 2009, the head of U.S. intelligence – Dennis Blair - said that the global financial crisis was the largest threat to America’s national security. All of America’s intelligence agencies apparently agreed.
The same month, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – Admiral Mullen – also agreed.
Now, Mullen is focusing on a specific economic threat. Specifically, Mullen is focusing on the debt:
The national debt is the single biggest threat to national security, according to Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tax payers will be paying around $600 billion in interest on the national debt by 2012, the chairman told students and local leaders in Detroit.
“That’s one year’s worth of defense budget,” he said, adding that the Pentagon needs to cut back on spending.
But at least war is good for the economy, right? At least spending on defense will help the economy recover and climb out of this pit of debt. no?
Actually, no.
Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has said that war can be very bad for the economy. For example, in 2003, Stiglitz wrote:
War is widely thought to be linked to economic good times. The second world war is often said to have brought the world out of depression, and war has since enhanced its reputation as a spur to economic growth. Some even suggest that capitalism needs wars, that without them, recession would always lurk on the horizon.
Today, we know that this is nonsense. The 1990s boom showed that peace is economically far better than war. The Gulf war of 1991 demonstrated that wars can actually be bad for an economy.
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Reported by Leon Felkins
