Hot Potato Mash

Timeline: John McCain Does NOT Support The Troops

BUSHED! Ignoring the Constitution-Gate & FISA-Gate

Technorati Tags: Bushed!, Don Siegelman, FISA, Karl Rove, Rachel Maddow

This Is Just Sick

John McCain takes credit for a new GI Bill that he opposed!

Technorati Tags: John McCain, GI Bill

SUPPORTING OUR TROOPS-GATE

Problem: Thousands of soldiers are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and brain injuries that will cost billions of dollars to treat over the lives of the soldiers.

Solution: Discharge these soldiers claiming that they had pre-existing mental illnesses or are guilty of misconduct in order to get rid of "problem" soldiers quickly and without the treatment and benefits to which they are entitled.

More at NOW on PBS

PBS

A DAY AT THE BEACH WITH HEROES OF PEACE

"A Day at the Beach with Heroes of Peace" was a special live KPFK/Pacifica broadcast that took place at Arlington West in Santa Monica on Sunday. The top video is a short mashup (5:45) I made of some of the event highlights and videos of most of the speakers follow.

YouTube Barracks Video Prompts Call For Change

From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — Backed-up plumbing, peeling paint and other corrosive conditions in aging barracks at Fort Bragg prompted U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole to propose changing the way maintenance is handled on U.S. Army bases.

The North Carolina Republican said Friday she wants a pilot program that was tested at Fort Hood in Texas to be expanded Army-wide.

Called the First Sergeant's Barracks Initiative, it transfers responsibility for daily maintenance of barracks to a beefed up team dedicated solely to maintenance that would report directly to the base commander.

Now, the units that occupy the barracks must do much of the work themselves, and they often face delays when requesting help from base work crews on more complicated jobs.

Dole introduced a bill late Thursday to expand the pilot program to all Army installations.

“Anything less than safe and clean housing is unacceptable,” Dole said in a phone interview.

Problems at some of the 1950s-era barracks at Fort Bragg in central North Carolina came to light last week when Sgt. Jeff Frawley's father videotaped the conditions and posted them on YouTube.com.

Ed Frawley said he was disgusted that troops with the 82nd Airborne, who had been serving in Afghanistan, came home to such an environment.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that he'd watched the video and found the conditions “appalling.”

“Soldiers should never have to live in such squalor,” he said, adding that “current needs must not be sacrificed to future capabilities.”

Read the rest of the article here

UPDATE: An indictment of our Army's competence:

The latest outrage is a father’s video of a U.S. Army barracks at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, the home of the famed 82nd Airborne Division.

It shows the quarters where his soldier son and other soldier sons were sent to live upon their return from combat. Mold and mildew and peeling paint are bad enough, but what about a big barracks bathroom ankle-deep in raw sewage?

Scandals like this latest one and an earlier eruption of public outrage over the miserably maintained quarters where wounded soldiers were warehoused at Walter Reed Army Hospital are an indictment of the core competency of our Army.

If the Army cannot afford to maintain minimally decent standards of housing and feeding our soldiers — and treat them with the best medical care and all the loving attention they deserve when they're wounded in combat — then, by God, the Army doesn’t deserve to have ANY soldiers at all.

Read the rest of the commentary

Technorati Tags: citizen media, Frawley, YouTube

Anyone Know If We Are Still At War?

It appears that Hot Potato Mash has more Iraq war coverage than the mainstream media. From today's New York Times:

The three broadcast networks’ nightly newscasts devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 2004, before leveling off at about 2,000 a year, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the broadcasts and posts detailed breakdowns at tyndallreport.com. And by the last months of 2007, he said, the broadcasts were spending half as much time on Iraq as earlier in the year.

Since the start of last year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center, has tracked reporting by several dozen major newspapers, cable stations, broadcast television networks, Web sites and radio programs. Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year. (emphasis is mine)

The policy debate in Washington that dominated last year’s Iraq coverage has almost disappeared from the news. And reporting on events in Iraq has fallen by more than two-thirds from a year ago.

Clearly the MSM just doesn't care about our soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq. Soldiers like Tomas Young seen in the two videos below and the soon to be released documentary “Body of War”. For more on Young see my post at Brad Blog.

Part 1 (9:03)

Part 2 (5:30)


(h/t Dredd)

Technorati Tags: iraq, msm, Tomas Young

VIDEO: US Soldiers From Iraq And Afghanistan Testify About The Horrors Of War At Winter Soldier

Amy Goodman's introduction to Democracy Now's coverage of “Winter Soldier”:

JON MICHAEL TURNER: 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines.

KEVIN AND JOYCE LUCEY (Part 1): Parents of Corporal Jeffrey Lucey

KEVIN AND JOYCE LUCEY (Part 2):

JASON LEMIEUX: Marine sergeant served three tours in Iraq

Technorati Tags: Winter Soldier

VIDEO INTERVIEW EXCLUSIVE: Peace Activist Start Loving

Start Loving is a peaces activist and humanitarian who finds the spread of empire through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq immoral. As such, he feels a duty to wake the conscience of the American people. And in an effort to draw more attention to his cause, Start Loving is now camping out 24/7 in front of the House Office Buildings across the street from the Capitol. When I interviewed him on October 22, 2007, Start Loving was three weeks into a hunger strike.

Part 1 (1:49)

Start Loving: “There needs to be a shift on Capitol Hill from a focus on stuff to a focus on people. We in these Houses [Congress] couldn't really care less about the 50,000 lives of our children of the United States that have been destroyed in Iraq so far. I mean some tiny sliver of each of the Congressmen cares but it is certainly not at the forefront of their minds and that's a crime of humanity. The two million people in Iraq that have been killed, before the war and after the war, should be central to our agenda -- figuring out how to ameliorate that, but it's sideline. So, I'm here to be a vote that our priorities need to shift from stuff, careers, corporate profits to a focus on what's priceless which is human life.”

Part 2 (4:54)

Start Loving: The third unmentioned party is the group that I think are the true patriots of this country, the men and women in uniform, that have been brainwashed into thinking that they're fighting for freedom and democracy in Iran and all they are fighting for are corporate profits for Cheney, Bush and their cronies. My proof of that is who would doubt that if people on Capitol Hill, to keep the war going, had to send their children to the war, it would stop in a nanosecond. Or, the other proof, I think, most people would agree if they thought about it, if the war corporations were told they could continue supplying armaments but there would be no profit - all their profit would be stopped - it would stop in a heartbeat. This is not a patriotic war, this is a war of profit and greed.“

Part 3 (3:09)

Why does Congress care so little about our troops in Iraq?

Start Loving: ”Whereas nobody understands the phenomenon exactly, it's fair to say the human being can become intoxicated on things other than substances. That the spirit of empire, the spirit of power, the sense of power, the sense of power over others, is tremendously intoxicating and like any intoxication it changes your mind. It disables certain parts of your nervous system and empowers other parts. It disables conscience, humanity, heart, compassion and it empowers self-engrandizement, and lust, and desire for more more more. It really dehumanizes us, the spirit that dehumanizes us. Our culture is optimized for that because that is how you get people to buy stuff, by ignoring people in need benignly, of course, thinking that we are great people. But, in fact, ignoring people in need and more and more looking out for me and hiding behind the rationale that I'm taking care of my biological children. But that's really just license to ignore everybody else.

And it took me a long time to understand this about people like Dr. King. He was always as pained about the agony of the oppressor as of the oppressed. And if they ever woke up, he seemed to think and realize, to their inhumanity, they would be horrified and they would never want to be that way. Well, that's how I think it is with Congress.“

Part 4 (1:58)

Why haven't the American people galvanized to put a stop to the Iraq war?

Start Loving: ”The analogy of how fire starts. It starts with a match but it can become a huge blaze. And to start that blaze you need dry wood. I think that the American populous may be going from being really wet wood, just totally in the grip of empire and selfishness, may be drying out a little bit. With the issues that are confronting them.“

Part 5 (3:05)

Would you label yourself an optimist or a pessimist?

Start Loving: ”Facing the truth of your current situation, and if it's a horrible truth facing that squarely, and at the same time developing a vision of how things should be and need to be. And if you can hold both of those within you, it is the ultimate release of energy, and power, courage, commitment.

I neither try to see things worse than they are or better. I want to see the truth of how they are so that I can mobilize myself appropriately. And it's a horrible phenomenon, I was just talking to my friend Rick about how I used to be a devotee of NPR, I can barely stand listening to them anymore. The poor guys have been destroyed by right wing elements I think. But all they want to talk about is pablum and they want to talk everything in cheery voices and how nice everything is... Well, it's not nice. Half the world is living on a dollar day. People in Palestine have been in basically concentration camp conditions for thirty-forty years. Four million people killed in Congo so that we can have cheap electronic parts. You know, Haiti, just a horror. And on and on and on and on. I don't suspect I come across as being depressive. I'm not, I'm very much alive. And that life comes from this needn't be, this shouldn't be. And I want to pay whatever price I can with my life to wake us up. Because none of us want it to be this way. None of us, if we could be awakened from our inhumanity.“

Part 6 (5:41)

What is the significance of the three crosses on your head?

Start Loving: ”The cross in the middle is the name I've adopted because nothing else I could call myself is relevant, which is 'Start Loving'. And the two on either side are 'stop starving' - and it's the active verb - it's starving others of AIDs drugs, of education, I mean, how do we have our military today? We starve these poor and middle class children of the opportunity to go to college, of decent education, so that there only option to climb is to go into the military. We've starved people around the world of AIDs drugs and other basic resources. And when that doesn't work we kill them. So the other one says 'stop killing.'“

Part 7 (1:47)

How long will you continue with the hunger strike?

Start Loving: ”Things will only change in this country when the populous stands up. If there is an honest history in the future, if we have a future, it will not blame congress and it will not blame Bush and Cheney for what's going on. It will blame the American people for being so apathetic at such a horrible time of need.“

WWIII?

Is WWIII starting?

Is Iraq War Making America Any Safer?

Is the Iraq war making America any safer?

Of course not.

GLENN GREENWALD: STOP THE DC ESTABLISHMENT

Salon's Glenn Greenwald shows how General Petraeus has been making ridiculously optimistic claims about Iraq from the start of the war. Greenwald also takes on neocon Fred Kagan, the author of Bush's “Surge” plan whom I took on a few months ago with the video mashup seen below:

Stop the war! Sign the petition at Stop The DC Establishment

Surge In Military Rape

I posted the above edited down video (3:44)  from last Friday's NOW segment about rape in the US military on Brad Blog yesterday. Shockingly, nearly 1 in 4 active duty women have been sexually assaulted. Brad Blog reader Ram summed up this horror well:

Progress in the 21st century means a return to barbarism.

I can hardly speak; I am stunned.  As someone who fought for women's rights in the military of the 1970's, I am saddened by the futility of living in an insane world.

When I used to rant about 'equality' and 'acceptance' back in the day, I was told to 'be patient' because these things are slow to change.  Thirty years later, I realize that it is me who has to learn acceptance -- just accept what John Lennon put so eloquently:  Woman is the nigger of the world.

More at PBS

Playing Politics With The Military

One more way Bush is destroying the Constitution from Yale law and political science professor Bruce Ackerman:

President George W. Bush's campaign to stay the course in Iraq is taking a new and constitutionally dangerous turn. When Senator John Warner recently called for a troop withdrawal by Christmas, the White House did not mount its usual counterattack. It allowed a surprising champion to take its place. Major General Rick Lynch, a field commander in Iraq, summoned reporters to condemn Mr Warner's proposal as “a giant step backwards”.

It was Maj Gen Lynch who was making the giant step into forbidden territory. He had no business engaging in a public debate with a US senator. His remarks represent an assault on the principle of civilian control - the most blatant so far during the Iraq war.

Nobody remarked on the breach. But this only makes it more troubling and should serve as prologue for the next large event in civilian-military relations: the president's effort to manipulate General David Petraeus's report to Congress.

Once again, nobody is noticing the threat to civilian control. Mr Bush has pushed Gen Petraeus into the foreground to shore up his badly damaged credibility. But in doing so, he has made himself a hostage. He needs the general more than the general needs him. Despite the president's grandiose pretensions as commander-in-chief, the future of the Iraq war is up to Gen Petraeus.

More

Keith Olbermann Special Comment - War Today, War Tomorrow, War Forever

So sad and so true. Olbermann catches George W. Bush in a lie that Norman Solomon warned about a month or so ago.  Mainly, lying about future drawdowns in an attempt to placate the weary masses so that they do not take to the streets and demand a change. Why go to all that trouble when even the president sees change around the corner? It's not!

If the Bush administration, the military industrial complex and the ruling elite get their way, we will have war today, war tomorrow and war forever.

And that won't change until the profit motive changes or when the people wake up and demand that the government represent them.