The shadow army

Anyone who has more than a Fox News-level understanding of the ongoing quagmire in Iraq should not be suprised that mercenaries from the huge paramilitary group Blackwater USA have gotten themselves into, um, a little bit of trouble for murdering iraqi civilians.

These guys are ruthless and answer to virtually no one, and they've been doing the "dirty work"in iraq for quite a while.

The iraqi government tried to kick them out, and then, presumably chided by their puppetmasters in washington, thought better of asserting their independence.

But the wingnuts are going to have a hard time spinning this one-- they've got video.

Remembering Adam Smith

El Cabrero has an excellent post up at progressivehistorians on the appropriation of Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations author and free trade advocate, by the corporatist/capitalist global elite.

Smith, as any right wing hack will tell you, was an advocate of independent businesses, unregulated by the government; he argued that with unfettered competition, the

public good is often promoted as if by "an invisible hand."

Sounds like a great icon for global capitalism-- except that, as always, the people who quote Adam Smith seem to be picking and choosing pretty carefully from Smith's body of work. Get this: he believed workers deserve a living wage, that the rich should pay more taxes, and he didn't trust capitalists or monopolies.

A different kind of Christian

Just ran across an old favorite of mine, freewayblogger.com. Back in 2002 and 2003, when no one in the mainstream press were nothing more than cheerleaders on the Iraq war, the freeway bloggers were out there, putting up signs like this one and this one.

But my new favorite, which I'd never seen before, is this:
'Quit Bombing My Children' --God."

Makes me remember when 'Christian' and 'Right' didn't automatically go together...

"Sorry W, I'm the Decider; Dems in '08"

I've never liked James Carville. I don't trust people who claim to be hard-core Democrats-- and then marry Bush Repbulicans. Nor do i think he's a very good actor. But i do like this slogan. It's a lot less wimpy than those the Dems generally come up with; it attacks Bush directly; and it doesn't tie us down to one particular signature issue this far before the election.

Cheers to the DSCC for actually asking Democrats what they think.

"Giuliani's Princess Bride"

Vanity Fair has a blistering
article about Rudy Giuliani's third wife, Judith.

If it weren't so horrible, it'd be hilarious.
This is a woman who, quite literally, reserves a seat on her private jet for her handbag.

Pathetic.

So long, sucka.

Alberto Gonzales is gone.

This man was the orchestrator of the Law(lessness) for the Bush Administration, and the perfect example of our 1984 America: The top prosecutor in the country, the top cop for all American crimes-- who also happens to be a Perjurer, a Torturer, a Liar, and a political stooge willing to fire DAs not willing to toe the (Republican) party line and investigate Democrats.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Falwell is dead.

He was the father of the moral majority, a hater of (gay!) teletubbies, a lover of apartheid, a rampant, unrepentant homophobe, and a racist, sexist, prejudiced pig.

Not that I like to speak ill of the dead. But I certainly won't miss him.

As Shannon O'Connor of Atlanta, Georgia comments on CNN.com:

As a committed Christian, I think Falwell's legacy can already be seen in the negative attitudes so many people have toward Christianity. His intolerance and hate-filled rhetoric drove people away from God, rather than drawing them closer. I know that wasn't his intent, but you know what they say about good intentions.

A sad day in America

I'm not quite sure how to start this post. Abortion rights have never been an issue I've followed intently, mainly because i felt that Roe v. Wade was solidly entrenched in American jurisprudence and that, despite the rantings of the Wingnut right, American popular opinion would not support a supreme court decision that would force American women to go back to using coat hangers (see the horrifying photo at the bottom of MSOC's diary) to save their lives.

Once again, I was wrong.

"Dilation and Extraction," or, as its detractors call it, "Partial Birth Abortion," is now officially banned by SCOTUS fiat. Why is this a problem?

Well, as Maryscott O'Connor notes, people who wait that long to have an abortion aren't just having 'abortions as birth control.' They're having procedures done because they're medically necessary. So the Supreme court of the United States has just ruled that the (theoretical) health and well-being of unborn fetuses, which may or may not have overwhelmingly catastrophic health issues, take precedence over the health of an (alive, breathing, functioning, rational-decision-making) pregnant woman.

Mind you, under the current system, a pregnant woman undergoing a difficult pregnancy could very well choose to have a baby anyway. (And they often do-- there was a NY Times article a few weeks ago about women who choose to carry to term fetuses who will die immediately at birth.)

What this ruling accomplishes is the beginning of the end for independent choice--not just in this arena, but in others as well. Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy are legislating a contrived morality from the bench-- imposing religious beliefs on the uteruses of American women.

To underscore this point, go read wiscmass's heartbreaking diary of his family's experience with partial - birth procedure -- an experience which saved his pregnant mother's life.

Bush keeping a national database of drug prescriptions

John at Americablog notices that the Bush administration has a database of everyone who's ever been prescribed antidepressants and, presumably, every other drug ever prescribed.

Gee, i feel really secure about my personal information now.

Jesus.

It's the muslims! It's the muslims!

So apparently a bunch of idiots in the wingnutosphere have been clamoring and screaming that Cho Seung-Hui, the Va Tech Killer, is somehow a muslim terrorist because he had "Ismail Ax" written on his arm.

The always useful Eteraz debunks the bullshit.

UPDATED: Today, the NY Times is reporting that Cho stated that

Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ...

Now, I'm not saying that Christianity had anything to do with Cho's massacre. Clearly it didn't. But imagine - stell dir vor, if you will -- that Cho had said,

I die like Mohammed

or, more plausibly,

I die like a palestinian martyr

How fast do you think that Limbaugh, Malkin, Redstate, LGF, and the rest would be all over this latest 'muslim' terrorism?

Right.

The end of Bangladesh

Mash at Doc Strangelove has a post up about how the Bangladeshi military has taken over, effectively ending any last vestiges of Democratic rule.

And in today's NY times, we learn (Warning: may be behind subscription firewall) that the Military-led government is not allowing the opposition leader (and former prime minister) Sheik Hasina Wajed to return to Dhaka.

Bush, of course, hasn't moved a muscle. You see, we're in the business of exporting freedomand democracy.

We've got priorities, see?

Obama taking funds from shady military contractors

Just saw this snippet on Obama's fundraising from a NY Times article:

Mr. Obama also drew from alternative investments, including $35,000 in contributions from employees of the Carlyle Group and the Blackstone Group.)

I'm sure that the other candidates are getting funding from these warmongering, imperialist bastards, too, but it's still pretty depressing to see from the darling of the college left.

Gunman Kills 31, including himself, at Va Tech

Horrible.

I have nothing more to say.

मेरी हिंदी बहुत अच्चा है !

Wow, this is awesome.

You can just type hindi words, in any phonetic spelling, and the script equivalent just pops up.

मैं बहुत 'अमज़द' हू!


Now i have absolutely no excuse not to brush up on my devanagri.

On War Memorials

Unitary Moonbat's excellent post yesterday at Progressive Historians about a proposed war memorial for a fallen Navy SEAL got me thinking about the politics of memory and the construction of popular history in America. Moonbat asks whether we, as left-leaning (and antiwar) historians, should support monuments to American casualites in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Here's my response:

First of all, thanks for bringing this up. You're right that this is off the radar for most progressives in this country.
To answer your question, i think it's quite useful to look at the politics of memorials in Germany, where they (obviously) are much more fraught with the ambiguity of good war/bad war than the bombastic, patriotic, and decidedly one-dimensional memorials in this country. In Germany, they actually make a distinction between monuments meant to commemorate a great event- `Denkmal', roughly `think about it', or `remember this', and memorials meant to warn about a past tragedy- `Mahnmal', from the verb mahnen, to warn.

For progressives or anti-war activists in this country, it is very hard to support a Denkmal for a criminal war we did not support. (And yes, for the record, I am talking about Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, here.) It's a question of frame-- Are we more interested in memorializing one soldier, who fought and died bravely "for his country", obeying the orders of his superiors, regardless of whether we support the war, or are we more interested in lessons for the society as a whole? (For the record, I do agree with your distinction between the motives of individual soldiers on the ground and the disastrous and evil policies of the political and military brass in Washington.)

Do I care that by memorializing a brave man who sacrificed his life for his country--- but whose life, as you said, was defined by violence, at the expense of the peoples the United States military oppresses around the world--- I'm also implicitly condoning what his idiot bosses decreed from Washington?

For me, it all comes down to the formation of public memory- what the Germans (again, sorry) call Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, "coming to terms with the past." What do we want our children and grandchildren to glean from their whitewashed, simplistic history books in 50 years about the Bush years? Do we want them to see violent monuments glorifying war and conquest, or do we want them to see a Mahnmal reminding them of the tragedy of imperial hubris and the thousands of Americans (and hundreds of thousands of non-Americans) who died because of it?

I think my answer is pretty clear from the rhetorical question. Obviously, I'd rather our children learn from our mistakes, not repeat the idiocies of manufactured patriotism and start more wars.

But to come back to your main point, that does not mean that I would necessarily oppose this particular Denkmal. Honestly, I'm pretty indifferent to it- there are much more important things for us to oppose than this. Let the town commemorate their fallen son. And the concept of portraying him without his weapon is just ludicrous-better to depict the warrior with his tools of destruction than whitewash them.

Me, I'm too worried that one of us will have to be the next Gibbon, writing the Decline and Fall of the American Empire.