Five Mercs Held For Green Zone Slaying Of Yank Contractor

This is not gonna come out well, if I may be permitted to predict:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Five American security contractors (i.e., mercenaries. W) have been detained in connection with the killing of another American contractor last month inside Baghdad's Green Zone, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad confirmed Sunday morning.

The five men work for Corporate Training Unlimited, sources with knowledge of the investigation told CNN Saturday.

The company was founded by a former member of the Delta Force elite anti-terrorist unit and has been operating in Iraq since 2003, according to its Web site.

Among those detained are the founder of the company and his son. Iraqi and U.S. personnel took the five into custody in an operation inside the Green Zone before dawn on Friday, according to an Iraqi official involved in the investigation into the killing of James Kitterman.

The five, who have not yet been charged, were being held by Iraqi security forces Sunday at a jail inside the heavily protected zone, he said.

The troops also confiscated weapons during the raid on the suspects' firm at about 4 a.m. Friday, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Video Watch the men held in connection with their colleague's death »

Four of the detainees were identified by multiple sources as Donald Feeny, the founder and chairman of the company; his son, who shares the same name; Micah Milligan; and Mark Bridges. The name of the fifth detainee was not immediately clear.

The U.S. Embassy would not confirm the names of the detainees, citing privacy laws. But a spokesman said consular officials have visited with them and "they appeared well." Embassy officials have been visiting them frequently, an Iraqi security source said.

The U.S. State Department and the Iraqi government will negotiate to determine what happens next, according to the Iraqi security source close to the investigation, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. Iraqi jail workers are treating the five contractors very well and with respect, he said.

Kitterman was found bound, blindfolded and fatally stabbed in a car in Baghdad's Green Zone, formally known as the International Zone, on May 22. The 60-year-old Houston, Texas, resident owned a construction company that operated in Iraq.

The Iraqi security souce said three of the men being held are allegedly involved directly in Kitterman's death.

Both the Iraqi and the Green Zone sources noted that the FBI has been involved in the investigation from the start.
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Once the suspects are charged and referred to trial, the case would be sent to Iraq's Central Criminal Court, the Iraqi official said.

If that happens, it would mark the first time U.S. citizens go to trial in Iraq since the United States returned the country's government to the Iraqis.

This will test the limits of the Status-of-Forces agreement, I reckon.

Open-Mindedness: Not All That Meets The Eye?

Materialists are often accused of being "closed-minded." This seems an apt and apposite reply:

Good Investment!

It's a truism in 'bidness': You don't let your meat loaf. Money that's not MAKING money is LOSING money.

So, you presumably knew, or guessed, and were't too alarmed that Citi, Goldman, BoA, and the rest of the banksters who extorted trillion$$$$$ in Bushevik and Obamanista largess had thereupon relied upon the 'plausible deniability' conferred by the fungibility of kapital to conceal the fact that they were using tax-payers' money to speculate in--and not incidentally to drive UP the price of--OIL? And they stand to make a fucking KILLING!!! So saith Ravi Bhatra, a widely heralded, critical economist, last week, on the Thom Hartmann radio show. No problem, right? Nuttin poisunul, yous know dat, right? Jus' bidness,?

So, guess WHAT the Health Insurance Parasites (HIP-sters) are investing their obscene profits in?

No really. Guess....

Think: LSMFT! What you'd walk a mile for.

Yeah! You gottit! Tobacco! According to Susie Madrak, posting on Suburban Guerilla:

Of course their top priority is making money! That’s the problem, right? That’s why we shouldn’t have a for-profit healthcare industry:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Major US, Canadian and British life and health insurance companies have billions of dollars invested in tobacco companies, a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine said.

Wesley Boyd, the study’s lead author, found that at least 4.4 billion dollars in insurance company funds are invested in companies whose affiliates produce cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco.

“Despite calls upon the insurance industry to get out of the tobacco business by physicians and others, insurers continue to put their profits above people’s health,” said Boyd, a faculty member of Harvard Medical School.

“It’s clear their top priority is making money, not safeguarding people’s well-being,” he wrote.

Of course, what else would one expect in a culture which, on EVERY level--from safety, to regulation, to taxation, to policy--always subordinates the health of its people to the wealth of its elites.

And really, shouldn't we consider the humanistic work tobacco consumption does in keeping the population down. We always forget that, if the 5-6 million people tobacco kills every year were to live, and such, they'd raise demand and therefore prices.

So, smoke 'em if ya got'em...

The "Two-State Solution": A (Water) Pipe-Dream

"The Jordan River Entering The Sea Of Galilee"
Here's EXACTLY why Israel cannot permit there to exist a permanent, legitimate, sovereign Palestinian state, (via Alternet):

Report Warns of Armed Conflict in the Middle East Over Water

Agence France Presse. Posted June 3, 2009.

Climate change threatens to reduce the availability of scarce water resources, increase food insecurity and hinder economic growth.

DAMASCUS (AFP) -- Some 160 villages in northern Syria were deserted by their residents in 2007 and 2008 because of climate change, according to a study released on Tuesday.

The report drawn up by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) warns of potential armed conflict for control of water resources in the Middle East.

"The 2007/8 drought caused significant hardship in rural areas of Syria. In the northeast of the country, a reported 160 villages have been entirely abandoned and the inhabitants have had to move to urban areas," it said.

In Syria and also in Jordan, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, "climate change threatens to reduce the availability of scarce water resources, increase food insecurity, hinder economic growth and lead to large-scale population movements," the report said.

"This could hold serious implications for peace in the region," the Canada-based institute said.

The study, financed by Denmark, predicts a hotter, drier and less predictable climate in the Middle East, "already considered the world's most water-scarce and where, in many places, demand for water already outstrips supply."

Oli Brown, who co-wrote the report with Alec Crawford, said: "Climate change itself poses real security concerns to the region. It could lead to increased militarisation of strategic natural resources, complicating peace agreements."

"Israel is already using climate change as an excuse to increase their control over the water resources in the region," he said.

In the study's conclusions, Brown and Crawford said: "As a region, the Levant produces a tiny fraction of global emissions -- less than one percent of the world total.

The exception among Levant countries is Israel, "whose emissions -- 11.8 metric tonnes per capita -- exceed the European average of 10.05 tonnes," they said.

"This may exacerbate the existing deep mistrust of the West, including Israel, which would be seen as causing a problem that it is unable or unwilling to resolve," they said.

Israel cannot tolerate an independent, sovereign, Palestinian State within its boundaries, with which it would be compelled by international law and custom to fairly share the region's resources. Can ANYONE foresee an Israeli prime-minister turning water OUT of kibbutz fields and into Arab olive orchards (assuming any survive)? And to admit failure and accept a one-state solution, where Arabs and Jews participate in full equality is also an historic non-starter. So except for killing and/or completely expelling the Arabs, the only solution appears to be some sorts of "reservations" for the Arabs, like the bantu-stans the Boers set up for the blacks around the borders of (white) South Africa; or, like the reservations the USers set up to give our displaced, dispropriated, dispossessed indigenes the appearance of sovereignty.

Maybe "we" can teach the Arabs to do quaint handicrafts? Pottery? Jewelry? Baskets? Kitchy poster-art?

A Banner Day: New Stuff From Naomi Wolf and Max Blumenthal

Max, the indefatigable, first, on the disproportionate influence of Israeli "settlers" on Israeli national and international policy.

You/we should know, by now, that Israel is NOT interested in a 'two-state solution.' Settlers are the thin end of the 'ethnic-cleansing' wedge. Israel cannot tolerate a competing, independent state within its borders, unless they are (in effect) Bantustans such as the Boers set up for the South African Blacks, to keep them isolated and segregated; or establish reservations on which nominally coherent "nations" preserve a useful fiction of autonomy, as is the case with indigenous peoples in the US and Canada.

Meanwhile, Naomi Wolf asks the (musical? rhetorical?) question, viz the withheld torture/abuse fotos from Iraq: Why No Investigation?

Last week, I blogged here on The Huffington Post with evidence rebutting the Pentagon's denials of Taguba's confirmation to the British newspaper the Telegraph that male-on-male rape and male-on-female rape are pictured in the detainee abuse photos that Obama has suddenly decided to suppress. All weekend, though, I had an uneasy feeling -- that feeling you have when you've had a nightmare while you were sleeping that you can't quite recall.

As I was researching this story today, I remembered what it was: think back to 2005. We were still in shock after the Abu Ghraib photos came out. The Bush White House -- oddly, it seemed to me at the time -- invited scores of lawmakers from both parties to a private screening of the abuse photos and even four videos that did not get released at that time. They emerged, to a man and a woman, shocked. They spoke in public, on the record, by name, of having witnessed scenes of rape, sodomy, and violent sexual assault against children.

I even wrote about this screening in The End of America; I had interpreted the motivation for showing these scenes as being one of intimidation.

Now I am not so sure -- now I think the motive was to implicate any potential opposition. If Bush et al showed these images, and the Congresspeople did nothing -- a damn good bet -- well, the Bush team would have taken the wind out of any prosecutorial impulses.

Why are the Congressional leadership of both parties bizarrely silent now, when the American people are demanding an investigation and prosecution of the crimes represented in just two of 87 of those scenes?

Because they were there then -- saw it -- all of it -- at a weirdly perverse, practically red-carpet, private snuff-film screening -- and they evidently went along with it. Read this quote, which appears again below, carefully:

The military later screened some of the images for lawmakers, who said they showed, among other things, attack dogs snarling at cowed prisoners, Iraqi women forced to expose their breasts, and naked prisoners forced to have sex with each other.

It would seem that the lawmakers, having personally witnessed these same images, did nothing. Pursued nothing. Investigated nothing. Accepted a whitewash. Called to prosecute nothing.

Wolf's outrage is, if anything, too modest. However, I've maintained since the very beginning that the Obamanistae would do absolutely NOTHING to hold the Busheviks to account for their crimes, mal- and misfeasances. I stand by that prediction. There are no 'innocents' in this. The whole government conspired, collaborated, contributed to commit the wholesale violations of human rights, international and national law, and the 'best' USer (mythological) traditions. THAT'S why there will never be ANY investigations, tribunals, commissions, or anything else: Everybody is covered in shit.

"It's The Money, Stupid!"

To those folks who 1) thought Obama's popular appeal and citizens' donations "won" the election, or 2) wonder why Obama's privileging the bakksters and butt-fucking the workers, or 3) cannot figure out why Obama swings to far to the right, the answer's in the hed, and here: "The Banks Own Congress"

How much did President Barack Obama receive in contributions from those employed in the financial sector?

$69,823,872 if you include real estate, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. (Sen. John McCain got $60,605,254, with the total between the two exceeding $130 million). (That works out about a dollar per vote, and just about perfectly maps the margin of victory. W)

The biggest donor to the presidential campaigns? The banks. Followed by lawyers and lobbyists, at $95 million. The banking and financial services industry have their own lobbyists, so the total donations of the industry are undercounted.

All told, according to the New York Times, financial sector employees gave $152 million in political donations from 2007 to 2008. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Credit Suisse gave $22.7 million and spent a combined total of $25 million on lobbying activities — in a single year.

For their investments, the same actors have collected over a TRILLION dollars in bail-outs and other considerations. Easy Money!

Grand Theft Auto (Pensions): How Obama Fucked GM, And The Rest Of Us

Greg Palast is not the gentlest of critics. One of his signature moves it to connect dots most folks don't even see. In this essay, posted on BuzzFlash (and elswhere), he connects the Obama admin's mandated corporate seppuku for GM with the bail-outs of the banksters, and their glad, greedy, venal participation in the debacle. He describes what he sees in the plainest of language. For simplicity's sake, I just c&p'd the whole thing:

Screw the autoworkers.

They may be crying about General Motors' bankruptcy today. But dumping 40,000 of the last 60,000 union jobs into a mass grave won't spoil Jamie Dimon's day.

Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank. While GM workers are losing their retirement health benefits, their jobs, their life savings; while shareholders are getting zilch and many creditors getting hosed, a few privileged GM lenders -- led by Morgan and Citibank -- expect to get back 100% of their loans to GM, a stunning $6 billion.

The way these banks are getting their $6 billion bonanza is stone cold illegal.

I smell a rat.

Stevie the Rat, to be precise. Steven Rattner, Barack Obama's "Car Czar" -- the man who essentially ordered GM into bankruptcy this morning.

When a company goes bankrupt, everyone takes a hit: fair or not, workers lose some contract wages, stockholders get wiped out and creditors get fragments of what's left. That's the law. What workers don't lose are their pensions (including old-age health funds) already taken from their wages and held in their name.

But not this time. Stevie the Rat has a different plan for GM: grab the pension funds to pay off Morgan and Citi.

Here's the scheme: Rattner is demanding the bankruptcy court simply wipe away the money GM owes workers for their retirement health insurance. Cash in the insurance fund would be replaced by GM stock. The percentage may be 17% of GM's stock -- or 25%. Whatever, 17% or 25% is worth, well ... just try paying for your dialysis with 50 shares of bankrupt auto stock. (Emphasis supplied.)

Yet Citibank and Morgan, says Rattner, should get their whole enchilada -- $6 billion right now and in cash -- from a company that can't pay for auto parts or worker eye exams.

Preventive Detention for Pensions

So what's wrong with seizing workers' pension fund money in a bankruptcy? The answer, Mr. Obama, Mr. Law Professor, is that it's illegal.

In 1974, after a series of scandalous takedowns of pension and retirement funds during the Nixon era, Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. ERISA says you can't seize workers' pension funds (whether monthly payments or health insurance) any more than you can seize their private bank accounts. And that's because they are the same thing: workers give up wages in return for retirement benefits.

The law is darn explicit that grabbing pension money is a no-no. Company executives must hold these retirement funds as "fiduciaries." Here's the law, Professor Obama, as described on the government's own Web site under the heading, "Health Plans and Benefits."

"The primary responsibility of fiduciaries is to run the plan solely in the interest of participants and beneficiaries and for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits."

Every business in America that runs short of cash would love to dip into retirement kitties, but it's not their money any more than a banker can seize your account when the bank's a little short. A plan's assets are for the plan's members only, not for Mr. Dimon nor Mr. Rubin.

Yet, in effect, the Obama Administration is demanding that money for an elderly auto worker's spleen should be siphoned off to feed the TARP babies. Workers go without lung transplants so Dimon and Rubin can pimp out their ride. This is another "Guantanamo" moment for the Obama Administration -- channeling Nixon to endorse the preventive detention of retiree health insurance.

Filching GM's pension assets doesn't become legal because the cash due the fund is replaced with GM stock. Congress saw through that switch-a-roo by requiring that companies, as fiduciaries, must

"...act prudently and must diversify the plan's investments in order to minimize the risk of large losses."

By "diversify" for safety, the law does not mean put 100% of worker funds into a single busted company's stock.

This is dangerous business: The Rattner plan opens the floodgate to every politically connected or down-on-their-luck company seeking to drain health care retirement funds.(Emphasis supplied.)

House of Rubin

Pensions are wiped away and two connected banks don't even get a haircut? How come Citi and Morgan aren't asked, like workers and other creditors, to take stock in GM?

As Butch said to Sundance, who ARE these guys? You remember Morgan and Citi. These are the corporate Welfare Queens who've already sucked up over a third of a trillion dollars in aid from the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve. Not coincidentally, Citi, the big winner, has paid over $100 million to Robert Rubin, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary. Rubin was Obama's point-man in winning banks' endorsement and campaign donations (by far, his largest source of his corporate funding).

With GM's last dying dimes about to fall into one pocket, and the Obama Treasury in his other pocket, Morgan's Jamie Dimon is correct in saying that the last twelve months will prove to be the bank's "finest year ever."


Which leaves us to ask the question: is the forced bankruptcy of GM, the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs, just a collection action for favored financiers?

And it's been a good year for Señor Rattner. While the Obama Administration made a big deal out of Rattner's youth spent working for the Steelworkers Union, they tried to sweep under the chassis that Rattner was one of the privileged, select group of investors in Cerberus Capital, the owners of Chrysler. "Owning" is a loose term. Cerberus "owned" Chrysler the way a cannibal "hosts" you for dinner. Cerberus paid nothing for Chrysler -- indeed, they were paid billions by Germany's Daimler Corporation to haul it away. Cerberus kept the cash, then dumped Chrysler's bankrupt corpse on the U.S. taxpayer.

("Cerberus," by the way, named itself after the Roman's mythical three-headed dog guarding the gates Hell. Subtle these guys are not.)

While Stevie the Rat sold his interest in the Dog from Hell when he became Car Czar, he never relinquished his post at the shop of vultures called Quadrangle Hedge Fund. Rattner's personal net worth stands at roughly half a billion dollars. This is Obama's working class hero.

If you ran a business and played fast and loose with your workers' funds, you could land in prison. Stevie the Rat's plan is nothing less than Grand Theft Auto Pension.

It doesn't make it any less of a crime if the President drives the getaway car. (Emphasis supplied.)

Michael Moore To Barack Obama: Open Letter, On The Occasion Of The Demise of GM

Moore implores Obama to, just this once, really be Rooseveltian:

...(A)s GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking (him) to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:

After delivering a list of 9 things that the Government, the Corporats, and the People could do to utilize the bones of GM to attack the climate crisis, including retooling to produce climate- and environment-friendly vehicles, mass transport, and other energy-efficient devices (pipe-dreams, of course, because Michael Moore is still fat), Moore concludes:

Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.

100 years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Hwy. 1. And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.

Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.

So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.

With a common purpose, a common goal, and a common ownership ("commons?" What a bizarre notion!), "we" could hardly do worse than the oligarchs who have forced the whole country to the brink of national bankruptcy.

Wretched Excess. Only $639K

Vid by Jim, the Realtor, via Calculated Risk (DOTOF™)

Talk About Your Basic Chilling Effect? Kill Somebody

Dr. George Tiller, the Wichita (KS) physician who operated an abortion clinic there, was shot to death while participating in services in his (Lutheran) church this morning. Will this be reported as "domestic terrorism?"

Via KansasDotCom

George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. Witnesses and a police source confirmed Tiller was the victim.

No information has been released about whether a suspect is in custody.

Homicide detectives and Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston have arrived at the church.

Members of the congregation who were inside the sanctuary at the time of the shooting were being kept inside the church by police, and those arriving were being ushered into the parking lot. Witnesses are being transported downtown for interviews and other members of the congregation are slowly being released from inside the sanctuary.

Tiller has long been a focal point of protest by abortion opponents because his clinic, Women's Health Care Services at 5701 E. Kellogg, is one of the few in the country where late-term abortions are performed.

Protesters blockaded Tiller's clinic during Operation Rescue's "Summer of Mercy" protests during the summer of 1991, and Tiller was shot by Rachelle Shannon at his clinic in 1993.

Tiller was wounded in both arms, and Shannon remains in prison for the shooting.

Tiller's clinic was severely vandalized earlier this month. According to the Associated Press, his lawyer said wires to security cameras and outdoor lights were cut and that the vandals also cut through the roof and plugged the buildings' downspouts. Rain poured through the roof and caused thousands of dollars of damage in the clinic. Tiller reportedly asked the FBI to investigate the incident.

Sgt. Bart Brunscheen of the Wichita Police Department said there has been no activitiy today at Tiller's clinic, although security crews were being brought in to make sure the building was secure. Officials also were going to check the clinic's security cameras to see if there was any activity over night.

Tiller and his clinic have faced continuous threats and lawsuits. A Wichita jury ruled in March that he was not guilty of illegal abortion on 19 criminal charges he faced for allegedly violating a state law requiring an "independent" second physician's concurring opinion before performing later term abortions. Immediately following the ruling in this criminal case, the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts made public a similar complaint against Tiller that was originally filed in December 2008. Tiller's medical license could eventually be suspended or revoked by the board on the basis of the complaint.

Um. the police do not report that a suspect is in custody? My only hope, in that case, is that the suspect is dead, because if the killing goes to trial, I do not trust the good people of Wichita (KS) (home of "Rev. Fred Phelps, the anti-gay, homophobic crusader who attends funeral services of soldiers killed in Iraq to claim their deaths are divine retribution for USer "tolerance" of homosexuality) to convict the "baby-killer's" killer.
===========================================================
UPDATE:It was just another "bad apple," a "lone gunman," an "isolated individual." Ain't it ALWAYS?

Cosmogeny

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz tells the story (though it is probably apocryphal) of interviewing a Mahout in Bali about the local cosmogeny. He asked the mahout how was the earth suspended in the heavens.

The mahout, an elephant trainer, said the world rested on the back of an enormous elephant.

Geertz then asked "well, where does the elephant stand?" And the mahout explained, patiently, that the Elephant stood on the back of the mother of all water Buffaloes.

When Geertz, then asked where the Buffalo stood, it was on the back of the biggest Crocodile in the universe.

"And where," Geertz persisted, "does the Crocodile stand?"

The mahout countered that everyone knew the Crocodile stood on the back of the the biggest Turtle you ever knew, and anticipating the anthropologist's next question, he continued "After that, sahib, it's Turtles all the way down."

NYPD SOP: When Two Negroes Are Running, Shoot The Negro With The Gun First

Well, in truth, it's SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) just about everywhere.
Via Raw Story:

Off-duty officer Omar J. Edwards of the New York Police Department was shot and killed by officer Andrew Dunton Thursday night in Harlem what authorities are calling an accident.

Commissioner Ray Kelly said Dunton apparently mistook Edwards for a criminal. Edwards was black and Dunton is white.

Dunton, 30, a four-and-a-half-year veteran of the force, saw off-duty Edwards, a “rookie” with about two years experience, chasing a man who had broken into his car. He and two other officers in an unmarked vehicle followed the men.

Edwards had his gun drawn as he was chasing the burglar, according to reports.

At some point during the pursuit, Dunton fired six rounds. Edwards was struck in the back, arm and hip and died later. It was unclear whether Dunton declared that he is a police officer.

Rev. Al Sharpton said he and civil rights leaders “are completely concerned of a growing pattern of black officers being killed with the assumption that they are the criminals.”

The Washington Posted noted that “in recent years there have been several cases of off-duty policemen in the New York City area being shot and killed by other officers.”

“While we don’t know all the details of what happened tonight, this is a tragedy,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg at a press conference. “Rest assured that we will find out exactly what happened here, and we will learn from it so it doesn’t happen again.”

There's a news-vid with all the official excuses on the RS site.

Zionist Attack On UCSB Prof Claims Criticizing Israeli Acts In Gaza Is "Anti-Semitism"

Anyone occupying ANY kind of public position who expresses ANY criticism of the "State of Israel," or its official representatiives (i.e., the IDF) is liable to be singled out for harrassment as an anti-Semite. Nobody's safe, anymore. These ADL fuckers are thugs and bullies, period. We've known this for a long time, but in case you'd forgotten, consider the following case of Prof. William Robinson.

Mark Crispin Miller's News From Underground carried the first news I've heard of this latest Zionist-inspired propaganda attack on freedom to speak in a nation which allegedly values freedom of speech. This case is the latest example, which occurred at one of the gem-stones of the UCal system, Santa Barbara, a school with which I have a certain personal affinity. (Did you know Habermas taught there in the '70s?) Here's the outline of the case against Prof. William Robinson:

Toward the end of February 2009, Sociology and Global Studies Professor William Robinson received notice from the Academic Senate’s Charges Committee that two of his students had filed charges against him. The students alleged that course material Prof. Robinson had circulated to his class via the course listserv, criticizing Israel’s then-ongoing siege on Gaza, comprised anti-Semitism. Professor Robinson also received a letter from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to this effect. The student complaints (Complaint 1 & Complaint 2) included claims and rationales that exactly mirrored those included in the ADL letter. The course material at issue in the complaints included an editorial written by a Jewish journalist condemning Israel’s invasion of Gaza and images of the bloody consequences of the siege on Gaza juxtaposed with congruent images from Nazi concentration camps in the 1930s (a not uncommon understanding of Israel-Palestine relations, as this 2003 Haaretz article and recent ADBUSTERS piece demonstrates). Alleging that the circulation of this course material caused them to drop his class, the students in their complaints claimed the subject of the email was not relevant to the course. The course title was “Sociology of Globalization” and the course curriculum covered contemporary, global conflicts and struggles.

I, frankly, do not hold out much hope for Prof. Robinson, because he violated one of the cardinal rules of the modern academy.

No, it has nothing to do at all with speech. It has to do with enrollment. His temerity in addressing a controversial subject in ways critical of the "common wisdom" caused two students to drop his class. He endangered the whole school because those students might have then dropped out of UCSB entirely. And there would have gone all that lovely money.

It is of course not anti-Semiticism to criticize Israel. It is merely an accident of history that the latest wave of colonists in Palestine is "Jewish." It is not especially in the nature of their being "jewish" that the fault lies, or where they are open to criticism. It is what they are doing and how they are doing that is at issue. The fact of the matter is that the current colonizers of Palestine are behaving in ways typical of all other previous invaders, occupiers, conquerors and oppressors, and deserve condemnation for it. The fact that the murderous thugs, racist gunsels, and ravenous settlers are Jews is absolutely irrelevant. By any name, they'd be criminals.

For telling this and assorted other truths about Israel, Prof Robinson earned the enmity of the Zion Lobby, and now stands in professional jeopardy at the bloody hands of the thuggish bullies of the ADL. There's a whole site devoted to getting justice for the Professor, operated by the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom (CDAF), where you can read all the salient details, and sign a petition to the UCSB board of regents in Prof Robinson's behalf.

But beware! It's a public list and the ADL will hunt you down.

Orrin Hatch Has A Tiny Dick? Who Knew?

On the Washington Babylon blog at Harper's (please buy a subscription to Harper's, and the best general circulation magazine in the woild), Ken Silvestein examines evidence for that hoariest of gender cliches, the (inverse) relationship between the size of a fellow's package with the size of the vehicle required to transport it:

The 100 MPG Hummer: Suckers Wanted

Last week Raser Technologies announced a Capitol Hill event for its unlikely new product: an electric Hummer H3, which the company claims gets up to 100 miles per gallon. Even if this were true, and it sounds to me about as likely as turning lead into gold, it’s hard to see the social value of a fuel-efficient 5,000-pound Hummer whose prototype costs millions of dollars. Yet proving the maxim that there’s a sucker born every minute, news of the event sent the company’s stock up nearly 20 percent.

The following day, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, jumped into the driver’s seat of a red Hummer H3 and took it for a test drive. “Better watch out,” he told reporters. “Never know where I’ll be.”

This isn’t Senator Hatch’s first promo gig for Utah-based Raser Technologies. At a press conference in 2005, Hatch, having proposed a tax credit for the purchase of hybrid vehicles, said, “I have had the goal of lowering the market barriers to the mass production of the best available automotive technologies. I believe that Raser’s technology breakthrough will play an important role in achieving this goal.” And eight months ago, Hatch attended a ribbon-cutting for a geothermal power plant built by Raser in Utah.

After the Capitol Hill-generated irrational exuberance passed, Raser’s share price has settled back down to approximately its pre-test drive level.

Incidentally, Raser executives have contributed generously to Republican causes, but not to Senator Hatch. In the last election alone, they contributed $10,600, of which all but $1000 went to Mitt Romney. Which is perfect: makers of the sucker Hummer supporting the ultimate sucker candidate.

That's some purty good double-entendre-slinging, there...

What? You Expected A Brennan, A Douglas?

Via Avedon:

I am a killjoy.

I suppose I'm expected to ready myself for a fight to defend Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court nominee against an onslaught of GOP hissy-fit in which she is falsely cast as some kind of a screaming (literally) liberal rather than a mostly-conservative (though not completely insane) jurist who prefers the powerful to The People but just doesn't happen to have a bug up her ass about abortion.

She is, of course, just what we don't need - another "liberal" whose credentials as such rest entirely on the fact of not being a fire-and-brimstone anti-abortion gay-hating loony.

Because that's what it takes these days - not actual liberal commitment to personal freedom, nor any resistance to the idea that rich, powerful people should run everything at the expense of the rest of us, or even a quaint affection for the idea that an honest day's work deserves an honest day's pay.

But, friends, the GOP hissy-fit is just convenient cover for the sell-out Dem leadership sliding yet another corporate conservative in with the Supremes without most people waking up to the fact that that's what they're doing. I mean, how can we complain when the Dems valiantly confirm Obama's nominee despite the fact that, as conservatives keep pointing out, she is a flaming liberal?

We should sit back and pat ourselves on the back for our valiant resistance to all that GOP hype about how she's "too" liberal. God forbid anyone should point out that she is actually to the right of more than two-thirds of Americans. (Ah, but somebody seems to like her.)

The Dems don't fight back against the fake right-wing outrage because it serves their purposes. They don't care that the right-wing are liars and they don't even mind most of the lies. They don't like being personally targeted by the right (because their friends can be bloody dangerous), but the lies actually serve their purposes.

You never hear them complain, for example, that right-wingers consistently lie about what the President's job is, because they don't particularly want anyone to do the President's actual job ('protecting the Constitution,' which could get ugly in the age of predatory capitalism. W.).

In fact, an overwhelming amount of the current public debate is about pretending that the President's real job does not exist - his real job, it is now averred, is to be "the Commander-in-Chief", and the discussion is about how he can do that job much better if he can just, y'know, ignore that Constitution thing. It must be true, because even Obama seems to agree, and I remember hearing all about how he is a Constitutional scholar throughout the campaign.

No wonder Kristol is always smiling. Oh, we've destroyed the conservative movement. The country is with us. No one likes the Republicans anymore. And yet even my favorite outraged lefty blogospheric voices are right where he wants them - defending a conservative president's choices as he destroys liberal America once and for all.

Lovely work. Mme. touches ALL my buttons: the "protect-the- country" myth, "Commander-in Chief" myth, the "too-liberal" myth, etc. I'd only disagree with one assertion: that we've "destroyed the conservative movement." That's not true. They've been driven underground, but like cockroaches (of which there seem to be an excessive number in the house this spring), they never REALLY go away.

7 REALLY GOOD Reasons Why A "Christian" US Military Is An EXTREMELY BAD IDEA

PZMyers/Pharyngula posted this yesterday. I think it's important enough to share with BOTH my readers. He c&ps a column from the Boston Globe in which the author citing the extreme militant Xianity peddled to occupation troops in Afghanistan, lists 7 reasons why it is a bad idea that the military has become wrapped up in religious jingo.

1. Single-minded religious zealotry bedevils critical thinking, and not just about religion. Military and political thinking suffers when the righteousness of born-again faith leads to self-righteousness. Critical thinking includes a self-criticism of which the "saved" know little.
2. Military proselytizers use Jesus to build up "unit cohesion" by eradicating doubt about the mission, the command, and the self. But doubt - the capacity for second thought - is a military leader's best friend. Commanders, especially, need the skill of skepticism - the opposite of true belief.
3. Otherworldly religion defining the afterlife as ultimate can undervalue the present life. Religion that looks forward to apocalypse, God's kingdom established by cosmic violence, can help ignite such violence. Armageddon, no mere metaphor now, is the nuclear arsenal.
4. Religious fundamentalism affirms ideas apart from the context that produced them, reading the Bible literally or dogma ahistorically. Such a mindset can sponsor military fundamentalism, denying the context from which threats arise - refusing to ask, for example, what prompts so many insurgents to become willing suicides? Missing this, we keep producing more.
5. A military that sees itself as divinely commissioned can all too readily act like God in battle - using mortal force from afar, without personal involvement. An Olympian aloofness makes America's new drone weapon the perfect slayer of civilians.
6. A bifurcated religious imagination, dividing the world between good and evil, can misread the real character of an "enemy" population, many of whom want no part of war with us.
7. The Middle East is the worst place in which to set loose a military force even partly informed by Christian Zionism, seeing the state of Israel as God's instrument for ushering in the Messianic Age - damning Muslims, while defending Jews for the sake of their eventual destruction.

PZ concludes, and I agree (obviously):

I read that and agreed with it all…except for one thing. Those criticisms don't just apply to the military, they also apply to our civilian population. Maybe #5 is a bit of a stretch — most of us don't have military drones at our disposal — but scale it down a bit, and picture a religious fanatic with a rifle aimed at an abortion doctor. It's the same principle.

Strip away the specific references to the US military, and that whole thing is an argument that could have come straight from the keyboard of a New Atheist criticizing American culture in general.

(P.S.: I Hope the author of the cartoon, Horsey, formerly of the Rocky Mountain News, finds a new gig soon. He was ALWAYS one of the best.)

Liz Cheney: How Does She Know What She Knows and When Did She Learn It?

Darth Cheney's septic spawn, Liz Cheney, has been out on the cabloid hustings sprinkling lye on her papa's still-damp scat,, extolling the policies of the dearly departed Bushevik regime, and casting spurious doubts profligately on Obama "national security policies": generally, what they call "talking shit."

She seems very well informed.

Even TOO well informed, given the ONLY legitimacy she has on these issues is the family name.

Yes, she was a (political, nepotistic) appointee in some PR/Propaganda branch at the State Department, or the Pentagon. So? What? Junior Special Assistant To The Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary For Internal Propaganda and Disinformation? Speaks with the kind of authority which compels the CorpoRat press to respect her opinions?

C'mon. She's talking authoritatively about stuff she has no reason to know anything about or, knowing which, she has any business talking about.

I mean, are you comfortable that the former Vice/Co-President's daughter seems to be so conversant in the intimate workings of the very state-craft of the now-gratefully-departed regime's inner workings? It makes me both nervous and curious.

This does seem really to have become Famiglia Cheney, doesn't it? And Liz's the new "consigliere." There's vid and chatter at C&L.

Comes close to confirming, once and for all, that the Executive branch--for at least the last 8 years, and probably since 1968 or so--really HAS been best understood and interpreted as a vast, global criminal enterprise.

Record-Setting Day

Woody's bloggy, bloggy enterprises took 610 hits yesterday, according to Sitemeter. This constitutes the largest number of hits on the (accumulated) sites, ever, in a single day.

The vast majority of them were hits on the post directly below this one:Testing Faith and Mercy: Fail, which is a C&P, with comments, to which which I had linked on Pharyngula and Balloon Juice, primarily.

The post was quite cryptic: "The Red State guys are dripping dicks. These fuckers are the ones you gotta worry about…"

I suppose there's a lesson in there:

You're nobody til somebody links you. You're nobody til somebody clicks...

Ah, sing it, Dean-o!!!

Testing Faith and God's Mercy: FAIL

Yesterday, Religion Clause (no, not Santa's wordier brother) had this item:

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Wisconsin Jury Convicts Mother Who Relied on Faith Healing of Homicide

The Chicago Tribune and the Wausau Daily Herald report that yesterday in Wausau, Wisconsin, a state court jury found Leilani Neumann guilty of second-degree reckless homicide in the death of her 11-year old daughter, Kara, whose diabetes went untreated. Instead the girl's parents, relatives and friends prayed for her as her health deteriorated and she finally went into a coma.

In closing arguments, the prosecutor described Neumann as a religious zealot who let her daughter die as a test of faith. Defense counsel responded that Neumann did not realize her daughter was so ill and did all she could consistent with her family's belief in faith-healing. Neumann faces a possible sentence of 25 years in prison, and her attorney says an appeal is planned based on the trial court's refusal to allow a faith-healing expert to testify at trial.

Neumann's husband, Dale, will be tried separately on similar charges in July.

The case seems relevant in view of the similar case of the 13-year-old son of religious wack-job/fanatics in Minnesota who has non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but who refuse to permit him to have the chemotherapy that would at least extend his life past his 15th birthday.

I don't know about anybody else, but I know I sure wish there were a question of the marriage license application which asked if the prospective "parents" harbored beliefs which would endanger their children's health or prohibit their getting care in case of illness or injury.

Actually, what I really wish was that people who had to test their own faith, or "God's mercy" would use themselves as the crash-test dummies and leave their kids (and everybody else) out of it. You wanna test your faith, or your God's love, go take a fucking stroll on Lake Michigan; or if your faith is dubious, Lake Erie (which has more particulate matter).

Dick Cheney: "The Hand Inside The Sock" Speaks

Can someone reliably inform me when was the last time that really senior members of a previous 'administration' arose so quickly and so aggressively to attack the policies of their replacements?

Nominally the Chimp's Vice-President, Cheney was in fact and function at least Co-President. He was the brains behind the outfit. He's the one who had the impenetrable bunker and the man-sized safe. Many (y'r ob'd't s'v't included) peg Cheney and the PNAC as the initiators of the Chimp's ascension to the Oval Office. Far from Bush choosing Cheney who chose Cheney, rather it was the Cheney/PNAC cabal choosing an easily manipulable "brand," and managing it into the White House. What ensued was a disaster from which I doubt the country will EVER actually emerge, in any shadow of the condition it was, when the Busheviks were installed to such conservative ecstasy in '92.

The truth of the matter is this: Obama's basically a one-termer, a distraction, a convenient dupe selected to be the scapegoat for the last 8 years of chaos and clusterfucks. He'll end up being blamed for the consequences of policies he didn't author but lacked the real power to suspend. Though he's no "liberal," he is non-white, and the plan is to--if not explicitly cause, at least not to intervene to prevent--blame his administration for all the ills set in train by Cheney's pack, and use the 'failure' to discredit the people and the agenda that, ironically, Obama does not champion, but can be "seen"--as a "non-white"--to represent.

Even recognizing that, doesn't it strike you as a BIT excessive--slightly over the top, perhaps; at LEAST a little unseemly--to have the former "power inside the sock" out in public bad-mouthing the new guys so soon? I remember #34 (Eisenhower) and since. Stephenson was always the gentleman. I don't think he ever criticize Eisenhower until after Ike was out of office. Did Ike (or even Nixon) take to the hustings to chide Kennedy? Did Humphrey attack Nixon, ever? In my memory, Carter refrained from criticizing Reagan. Mondale kept his own council until he was nominated to run against Reagan. Even after losing, GHW Chimp kept his mouth shut for a while, and Quayle was never heard from again. Gore was exceptionally generous to the Chimp, in 2001, and was silent until nearly the 2004 elections.

So this shit from Cheney is both excessive AND unprecedented, in my memory anyway.

Memo to Dick "Darth" Cheney: Shut the fuck up, you snarling old shitwhistle.