Monday, August 31, 2009
My Dog Just Watered Your "Tree of Liberty"
I have some advice for all of us. Stop trying to get these people to realize how wrong they are and how right you are. Stop trying to apply reason to the profoundly unreasonable. Stop trying to mitigate or explain their collective temper tantrum. Stop trying to curry their favor, their votes, their attention. They don't care about truth, right and wrong, good or bad. They care about stomping feet, crying victim, and pointing fingers. Barney Frank had it exactly right, it's like arguing with a dining room table. Enough is enough. Fuck Kumbaya.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-seitzman/my-dog-just-watered-your_b_268288.html
Nick Turse, From My Lai to Lockerbie
On this one-way planet of ours, it's hard sometimes to imagine things any other way, but for a moment let's try. Imagine, for instance, that in recent years the director of Iranian intelligence oversaw a program of "extraordinary rendition" aimed at those who were believed to be prepared to commit acts of terror against that country's fundamentalist regime. Practically speaking, what this often meant was kidnapping suspects -- some quite innocent of such aims -- off the streets of Middle Eastern or South Asian cities and transporting them secretly to Iran, to "black sites" set up abroad, or to allied regimes known for their torture practices.
Imagine that these suspects, once in the hands of his agents -- the Geneva Conventions having been declared not applicable to them -- were then tortured, abused, and sometimes murdered. Imagine that, for this, the director, in a public ceremony with great hoopla, was awarded the Ayatollah Khomeini Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the land, and on retiring honorably wrote a bestselling memoir about his years in office. Imagine as well that, to help Iranian interrogators, lawyers close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had rewritten the law so that acts which the world had long agreed to be torture were now redefined as not so, and on that basis, they were instructed to do such things as waterboarding suspects, even as the fundamentalist regime regularly announced that, on the basis of its own definitions, it did not condone torture.
If such a scenario had occurred, we know what we would think of such people. We know what our media would say about such people. We know what we would demand as a fate for such people -- that they be brought to justice. The present regime in Iran has proven itself quite capable of committing its own set of horrors and tortures. The above description, however, could not be mistaken for the recent history of any agency but the CIA and associated outfits under the purview of the top officials and lawyers of the Bush administration. Indeed, George Tenet, CIA director from 1997-2004, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor possible, by George W. Bush in December 2004, when much of the above was already on the public record (and the president certainly knew far more). Tenet did then write At the Center of the Storm, a bestselling memoir, and so on.
Now, a new administration is in power and it has decided to investigate CIA interrogations -- but only those acts by Agency operatives (and its private contractors) that went beyond the bounds of Bush administration extremity, beyond the bounds, that is, of that administration's pretzled definitions of what was not torture. The rest gets a pass.
On the day that decision made headlines, another report, "U.S. Says Rendition to Continue, but With More Oversight" by David Johnston in the New York Times, barely got noticed, even though it indicated that a now-notorious program of the Bush years would be continued in the Obama era. In other words, the U.S. will go right on turning terror suspects over to third countries for incarceration and interrogation (something criticized by Barack Obama in his presidential campaign), only with undoubtedly meaningless "diplomatic assurances" of no-torture policies. (Johnston did not even mention the kidnapping part of the process.) I'm still waiting for someone to ask the question: Why turn suspects over to seedy regimes if you don't expect them to act seedily?
Had China announced that it was going to turn rebel Uighurs captured outside the country over to Uzbekistan, or Myanmar made it clear that it was planning to send dissidents kidnapped in Thailand to Syria, we would denounce such policies to the skies. But it's us, and as Nick Turse, TomDispatch associate editor and author of the remarkable book on American militarism, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, points out, we are the great exception. If we do it, it essentially doesn't count -- and perhaps more remarkably, it never dents our urge to stand on the highest moral ground around and accuse others of heinous acts. Of course, when you still want to think of yourself as the planet's sole superpower, you naturally feel you have license to do such things, and leave yourself out of the equation. It's evidently the global equivalent of James Bond's license to kill, or Monopoly's get-out-of-jail-free card. Tom
Apologies, Anger, and Apathy
My Lai and Lockerbie Reconsidered
by Nick TurseA week ago, two convicted mass murderers leaped back into public consciousness as news coverage of their stories briefly intersected. One was freed from prison, continuing to proclaim his innocence, and his release was vehemently denounced in the United States as were the well-wishers who welcomed him home. The other expressed his contrition, after almost 35 years living in his country in a state of freedom, and few commented.
When Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan sentenced in 2001 to 27 years in prison for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was released from incarceration by the Scottish government on "compassionate grounds," a furor erupted. On August 22nd, ABC World News with Charles Gibson featured a segment on outrage over the Libyan's release. It was aired shortly before a report on an apology offered by William Calley, who, in 1971 as a young lieutenant, was sentenced to life in prison for the massacre of civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.
After al-Megrahi, who served eight years in prison, arrived home to a hero's welcome in Libya, officials in Washington expressed their dismay. To White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, it was "outrageous and disgusting"; to President Barack Obama, "highly objectionable." Calley, who admitted at trial to killing Vietnamese civilians personally, but served only three years of house arrest following an intervention by President Richard Nixon, received a standing ovation from the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Georgia, the city where he lived for years following the war. (He now resides in Atlanta.) For him, there was no such uproar, and no one, apparently, thought to ask either Gibbs or the president for comment, despite the eerie confluence of the two men and their fates.
Part of the difference in treatment was certainly the passage of time and Calley's contrition, however many decades delayed, regarding the infamous massacre of more than 500 civilians. "There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," the Vietnam veteran told his audience. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry." For his part, al-Megrahi, now dying of cancer, accepted that relatives of the 270 victims of the Lockerbie bombing "have hatred for me. It's natural to behave like this... They believe I'm guilty, which in reality I'm not. One day the truth won't be hiding as it is now. We have an Arab saying: 'The truth never dies.'"
American Exceptionalism
Calley was charged in the deaths of more than 100 civilians and convicted in the murder of 22 in one village, while al-Megrahi was convicted of the murder of 270 civilians aboard one airplane. Almost everyone, it seems, found it perverse, outrageous, or "gross and callous" that the Scottish government allowed a convicted mass murderer to return to a homeland where he was greeted with open arms. No one seemingly thought it odd that another mass murderer had lived freely in his home country for so long. The families of the Lockerbie victims were widely interviewed. As the Calley story broke, no American reporter apparently thought it worth the bother to look for the families of the My Lai victims, let alone ask them what they thought of the apology of the long-free officer who had presided over, and personally taken part in the killing of, their loved ones.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175108
Sphere: Related Content
Iraq bombers were recently freed by US: official
Two truck bombers who killed 95 people in devastating attacks on the Iraqi finance and foreign ministries were recently released from US custody, a senior interior ministry official said on Sunday.
"The suicide bomber who blew himself up at the ministry of foreign affairs was released three months ago from Camp Bucca," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity, referring to the US jail near Basra.
"The suicide bomber who blew himself up outside the ministry of finance was also released a few months ago from the same jail."
The August 19 attacks in Baghdad also wounded 600 people in the worst day of violence to hit the country for 18 months.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090830/twl-iraq-bombers-were-recently-freed-by-3cd7efd.html
Cindy Sheehan's Lonely Vigil in Obamaland
The Silence of the Antiwar Movement is Deafening
By JOHN V. WALSH
Cindy Sheehan will be at Martha's Vineyard beginning August 25 a short way from Obama's vacation paradise of the celebrity elite but very far from the Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq where the body bags and cemeteries fill up each day as Obama's wars rage on. She will remain there from August 25 through August 29 and has issued a call for all peace activists to join her there. For those of us close by in the New England states and in New York City, there would seem to be a special obligation to get to Martha's Vineyard as soon as we can.
A funny thing has happened on Cindy Sheehan's long road from Crawford, Texas, to Martha's Vineyard. Many of those who claim to lead the peace movement and who so volubly praised her actions in Crawford, TX, are not to be seen. Nor heard. The silence in fact is deafening, or as Cindy put it in an email to this writer, "crashingly deafening." Where are the email appeals to join Cindy from The Nation or from AFSC or Peace Action or "Progressive" Democrats of America (PDA) or even Code Pink? Or United for Peace and Justice. (No wonder UFPJ is essentially closing shop, bereft of most of their contributions and shriveling up following the thinly veiled protest behind the "retirement" of Leslie Cagan.) And what about MoveOn although it was long ago thoroughly discredited as principled opponents of war or principled in any way shape or form except slavish loyalty to the "other" War Party. And of course sundry "socialist" organizations are also missing in action since their particular dogma will not be front and center. These worthies and many others have vanished into the fog of Obama's wars.
Just to be sure, this writer contacted several of the "leaders" of the "official" peace movement in the Boston area – AFSC, Peace Action, Green Party of MA (aka Green Rainbow Party) and some others. Not so much as the courtesy of a reply resulted from this effort - although the GRP at least posted a notice of the action. (It is entirely possible that some of these organizations might mention Cindy's action late enough and quickly enough so as to cover their derrieres while ensuring that Obama will not be embarrassed by protesting crowds.) We here in the vicinity of Beantown are but a hop, skip and cheap ferry ride from Martha's Vineyard. Same for NYC. So we have a special obligation to respond to Cindy's call.
However, not everyone has failed to publicize the event. The Libertarians at Antiwar.com are on the job, and its editor in chief Justin Raimondo wrote a superb column Monday on the hypocritical treatment of Sheehan by the "liberal" establishment. (1) As Raimondo pointed out, Rush Limbaugh captured the hypocrisy of the liberal left in his commentary, thus:
"Now that she's headed to Martha's Vineyard, the State-Controlled Media, Charlie Gibson, State-Controlled Anchor, ABC: 'Enough already.' Cindy, leave it alone, get out, we're not interested, we're not going to cover you going to Martha's Vineyard because our guy is president now and you're just a hassle. You're just a problem. To these people, they never had any true, genuine emotional interest in her. She was just a pawn. She was just a woman to be used and then thrown overboard once they're through with her and they're through with her. They don't want any part of Cindy Sheehan protesting against any war when Obama happens to be president."
Limbaugh has their number, just as they have his. Sometimes it is quite amazing how well each of the war parties can spot the other's hypocrisy. But Cindy Sheehan is no one's dupe; she is a very smart and very determined woman who no doubt is giving a lot of White House operatives some very sleepless nights out there on the Vineyard. Good for her.
TED KENNEDY…and then some!
By Taylor Jones
Here's the only "nice" caricature I've ever drawn of Ted Kennedy. Can't publish the nastiest one.
Don't get me wrong: Like nearly everyone else, I regarded Edward Moore Kennedy as the greatest legislator of our time — ranking right up there in American history with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.
…You know, ordinary citizens could present a eulogy, as a group, at Ted Kennedy's funeral, and simply recite the titles of dozens of pieces of major legislation the late senator authored and guided into law. Among them: the Voting Rights Act; the Americans with Disabilities Act; immigration reform laws; the Clean Water Act; the Family Leave Act; No Child Left Behind. (Well, some children left behind).
Then there was Title IX, which inspired the sports bra. And the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 (and which most 18-year-olds have ignored). Kennedy also cosponsored ratification of the United Nations, the G.I. Bill, and creation of the Interstate Highway System. Not to mention the Missouri Compromise and the Magna Carta. These last sponsorships have only recently come to light.
But Ted Kennedy knew. He'd mastered them all!
Why, then, have I been relentlessly mean to the late senator and the members of his extended family over so many years? Well, because the First Amendment of our Constitution allows me to be a snot. A professionally snarky s.o.b. A small-minded meanie. In other words, an editorial cartoonist.
…And, well, because the flip side of Ted Kennedy (and so many members of his enormous extended family) was so darn flawed. Like the rest of us — only more so, and played out on the public stage. This weekend, as politicians, civic and religious leaders, and Kennedy family friends hail Uncle Ted's profound achievements, and share poignant stories, I'll fondly remember the Ted who wandered around the family beach house in Florida…sans his pants.
In fact, the personal failings, antics, alleged crimes and misdemeanors, and often just the faces of the entire Kennedy clan have given caricaturists and editorial cartoonists a priceless gift for two generations. In this regard, the Roosevelts, the Bushes and the Adamses just can't compare.
Take Caroline Kennedy-Schlossberg, a dedicated public servant who lives in New York and says, "you know," a lot.
There's Patrick, who serves in Congress and wobbles a bit when he drives at night.
And Joe Kennedy II, who pitches heating oil for Hugo Chavez.
There's Maria Shriver, once a strikingly beautiful news anchor, and now an extreme caricature of herself. Married to the personification of a walking caricature, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
…And then there's William Kennedy Smith.
I've caricatured President Kennedy a few times, all of them long after his assassination. I was but a kid a couple of weeks shy of my eleventh birthday at that tragic time. I don't have a scan of my best caricature of JFK, done for a book featuring caricatures of all the presidents from Washington to Reagan. I no longer possess the original, for that matter. But it, too, was irreverent. It portrayed JFK with a halo over his head, and a scrap of note paper protruding from his jacket pocket — scribbled with Marilyn Monroe's phone number.
http://blog.cagle.com/jones/2009/08/28/ted-kennedyand-then-some/
Storming Camelot: Sen. Kennedy's death brings out worst from the right
Following Wednesday's early-morning news that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy had lost his battle with brain cancer, Media Matters posted the following statement from president Eric Burns at 3:51 a.m. ET on the County Fair blog:
"Ted Kennedy was a true American statesman. The values that he so eloquently and tirelessly championed represent the best of our American ideals. He reached across the aisle to get hard work done but never sacrificed principle. Though he is gone, the dream will forever live on. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Vicki Kennedy, the Senator's family, his loyal staff and the millions of lives he touched throughout his historic life and career."
Far from letting Kennedy rest in peace, many media conservatives savagely attacked the Senate's last liberal lion. Leading the charge was radio host Rush Limbaugh, who began his broadcast Wednesday morning eulogizing Kennedy by calling him "the lion of the Senate" before noting that "we were his prey." Hardly finished, El Rushbo would go on to say that "Kennedy screwed up everything he touched." He said Kennedy's opposition to Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination was "the beginning of the dawn of the age of the current hate." He claimed Kennedy "used the government to take money from people that work to give it to people that don't work" and that "most of Senator Kennedy's plans ended up damaging the people he seeks to help." Finally, Limbaugh marveled at the fact that "the Constitution is still there, even after Ted Kennedy in the Senate for 52 [sic] years." All that and more led MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Politico's Patrick Gavin to agree that "Limbaugh showed great restraint" in discussing Kennedy's death. Can you imagine what Rush would have said had it not been for such "restraint?"
Limbaugh was hardly alone in his disgusting attacks on Kennedy. Radio host and Fox News political analyst Tammy Bruce kept it classy, claiming on Twitter that Fox News Sunday's Chris "Wallace noted the last great act of Kennedy's career was to endorse [President] Obama. I agree: he left a woman to drown and now he's left us to drown."
Eric Sanger, a director at Premiere Radio Networks, ABC Radio/Citadel Media and The Sean Hannity Show, said on Facebook (emphasis added), "The irony is that the media is already positioning Ted as a champion for the little man against wealth and privilege. This piece of garbage was the poster child for wealth and privilege. Hopefully, this event will mark the end of this repugnant family and all the endless crap, entitlement, personal indulgences and collateral damage (Kopechne, Bessette, Bowman, Moxely, etc.)."
Wesley Pruden, a Washington Times columnist, wrote that Kennedy's death was "a good career move" and that Democrats "are smiling through their tears," while Andrew Breitbart, a fellow Times columnist, called Kennedy a "villain," a "duplicitous bastard," and a "prick" on Twitter, as noted by Politico. Riehl World View, a right-wing blog, came to Breitbart's defense, claiming that liberals criticizing him were "hypocrites" because when Dick Cheney dies, they're going to do the exact same thing. That's right, liberals today are hypocrites because of what they might do in the future. Now that's some crazy fortune-telling.
Fox News host Sean Hannity told his audience that "out of respect for his family," he had decided not to "bring up Mary Jo Kopechne" or Kennedy's "radical socialism." Seriously.
Lynching of Cynthia McKinney urged by ‘journalist’ trained and paid by FBI
Hal Turner called her 'a violent, black, racist, bitch' whose lynching would teach other Blacks that 'white people are tired of your bullshit, behave or die'
by David Swanson
Visiting the Bay Area on a five-day fundraising tour for the SF Bay View, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney joins Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff at a gathering Friday, Aug. 21, at the Black Dot in West Oakland. Two days later, on Aug. 23, she learned that a "journalist" who had called for her lynching in 2006 was working at the time for the FBI. – Photo: Kamau Amen-Ra
Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney sent an email around on Sunday in which she wrote:
"[I]t has just now come to my attention that a 'journalist' who suggested that I be lynched was actually being paid by our own government to say that. Now, when I reported it to the FBI, how in the world was I to know that he was at that time on the FBI's payroll?"
"Hate blogger" Hal Turner's lawyer said last week, and prosecutors agreed, that Turner was "trained by the FBI on how to be deliberately provocative" and "worked for the FBI from 2002 to 2007 as an 'agent provocateur' and was taught by the agency 'what he could say that wouldn't be crossing the line.'"
Turner is being charged with making death threats against Connecticut legislators and Illinois judges and is apparently going to claim that his actions were legal because he did the same sort of thing when employed by the FBI. In an Associated Press story published Aug. 18, Katie Nelson writes:
"Prosecutors have acknowledged that Turner was an informant who spied on radical right-wing organizations, but the defense has said Turner was not working for the FBI when he allegedly made threats against Connecticut legislators and wrote that three federal judges in Illinois deserved to die.
Big Brass Bull: Pentagon Deceit on Media Manipulation Confirmed
| Written by Chris Floyd |
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Contrary to the insistence of Pentagon officials this week that they are not rating the work of reporters covering U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Stars and Stripes has obtained documents that prove that reporters' coverage is being graded as "positive," "neutral" or "negative."
"The purpose of this memo is to provide an assessment of [a reporter from a major U.S. newspaper] … in order to gauge the expected sentiment of his work while on an embed mission in Afghanistan," reads the preamble to one of the reporter profiles prepared for the Pentagon by The Rendon Group, a controversial Washington-based public relations firm.
But the Rendon profiles reviewed by Stars and Stripes prove otherwise. One of the profiles evaluates work published as recently as May, indicating that the rating practice did not in fact cease last October as Whitman stated.
"For me, a tool like this serves no purpose and it doesn't serve me with any value," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters as some of the affected war correspondents began demanding to see their secret military profiles...."I haven't seen anything that violates any policies, but again, I'm learning about aspects of this as I question our folks in Afghanistan," Whitman said. "If I find something that is inconsistent with Defense Department values and policies, you can be sure I will address it."
Whitman told Pentagon reporters that he was inquiring about the issue, but he added that the Pentagon is not launching any formal inquiry to the matter.
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A few days agoArchbishop Tutu: "Arabs paying the price of Germany's crimes"
In an Interview with Haaretz newspaper, Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated that Israel must learn from the Holocaust that it cannot gain security through fences, walls and guns.
by Saed Bannoura
The Nobel Prize laureate made his statement to Haaretz in Jerusalem and "The Elders" concluded their tour in Israel and Palestine, except the Gaza Strip. The Elders are hoping to be able to visit Gaza in the future.
Archbishop Tutu added that the west was consumed with the guilt for what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust, "and they should be, but the people who are paying the price for that are that Palestinians".
He also referred to a meeting he had in the past with a German ambassador who told him that Germany is guilty for two wrongs; what it did to the Jews, and the current suffering of the Palestinians.
Archbishop Tutu criticized some Jewish groups in the United States who intimidate any person who criticizes the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and accused them of being anti-Semite.
He said that such groups pressured many universities in the United States into cancelling his appearance on their campuses.
Tutu added that this is a very unfortunate issue, and that his opinions are derived from the Torah.
"God created us on his own image", he said, "God is always in favor of the oppressed".
THE GUNS OF AUGUST
by Ted Rall
INDIANAPOLIS--No wonder President Obama won't stand up for us. He won't even defend his personal safety!
Two weeks ago, a right-wing man protested outside the president's healthcare meeting in New Hampshire wearing a gun strapped to his leg. Lest we miss his point, he carried a sign that called for the shedding of blood in a new revolution.
A week later, a dozen men appeared outside Obama's appearance in Phoenix brandishing loaded guns. "We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote," said one, who carried an AR-15 military-style automatic rifle. You read that right--they threatened to use guns to annul the results of the last election.
Cops stood by and watched. The Secret Service did nothing. Strictly speaking, these mooks are allowed to openly carry guns. Which is fine with me. I'm a big fan of the Second Amendment.
It is, however, horrifying to watch goons threaten to assassinate the President of the United States and get away with it. Make no mistake: guns don't have anything to do with healthcare. This is a revival of Klannism. A black man is president, and the good ol' boys don't like it. That's what this is about: putting him in his place. Which, if they or someone they inspire has their way, will be six feet under.
God. The smirks those turds wear! Run a Google Image search on "Klansmen" or "lynching." Same ones.
(Doubt this is about race? Bill Clinton's 1993 healthcare proposal would have gone farther than Obama's. And he wasn't nearly as popular. Yet he didn't face gun-toting loons at his public appearances.)
Friday, August 28, 2009
Barack Obama on brink of deal for Middle East peace talks
by Ewen MacAskill
• US to adopt much tougher line over Iran's nuclear ambitions
• Israel to freeze construction of settlements on West Bank
• France and Russia offer to host Middle East peace conference
Palestinians walk through a door in a section of the barrier between Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Barack Obama is close to brokering an Israeli-Palestinian deal that will allow him to announce a resumption of the long-stalled Middle East peace talks before the end of next month, according to US, Israeli, Palestinian and European officials.
Key to bringing Israel on board is a promise by the US to adopt a much tougher line with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons programme. The US, along with Britain and France, is planning to push the United Nations security council to expand sanctions to include Iran's oil and gas industry, a move that could cripple its economy.
In return, the Israeli government will be expected to agree to a partial freeze on the construction of settlements in the Middle East. In the words of one official close to the negotiations: "The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not."
Details of the breakthrough deal will be hammered out tomorrow in London, where the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is due to hold talks with the US special envoy, George Mitchell. Netanyahu met Gordon Brown today in Downing Street, where the two discussed both settlements and the Iranian nuclear programme.
Although the negotiations are being held in private, they have reached such an advanced stage that both France and Russia have approached the US offering to host a peace conference.
Obama has pencilled in the announcement of his breakthrough for either a meeting of world leaders at the UN general assembly in New York in the week beginning 23 September or the G20 summit in Pittsburgh on 24-25 September.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/25/barack-obama-middle-east-peace
Sphere: Related ContentThe media can't handle the truth
Media sheep facing truth-hungry Internet wolves
By Gene Lyons
So yet another Bush administration Cabinet-level official has petitioned to get his conscience and reputation back. This time, it's Tom Ridge, former secretary of Homeland Security. The one-time Pennsylvania governor admits in a new book that he felt political pressure from the White House to issue bogus terror alerts before the 2004 presidential election.Big surprise, right? By 2004, anybody who didn't grasp that crying wolf was the Bush/Cheney administration's basic game plan was probably also astonished last January when the "Texas cowboy" who's never been seen on a horse chose a Dallas mansion over his beloved ranch. Golly, who's doing all that brush-cutting?
Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of the Ridge revelations has been a flame war that's broken out between establishment Washington pundits and less-reverent bloggers. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder started it by observing in smug inside-the-Beltway fashion that he and like-minded colleagues were actually right to be wrong about fake terror warnings.
People who smelled a rat, see, "based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." Whereas, sober-sided thinkers like him credited the Bush administration's good intentions.
Confronted with ample contemporaneous evidence of Bush administration flimflams by Salon's Glenn Greenwald and the scholarly Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake.com, Ambinder apologized for the "gut hatred" part. But he alibied: "Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit."
Yeah, sure. Purely with regard to terrorism and national security, by 2004, Bush/Cheney had already gotten caught deceiving the public about having "no warning" before the 9/11 attacks, not to mention about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. If skepticism was still inappropriate, would it ever be warranted?
Yet people who found the timing of terror alerts suspect, such as then-Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, were dismissed as crackpots.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/08/27/lyons/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/feature
Very murky waters indeed
For a start, despite the speculation, nobody has produced clinching evidence to show the British government did a backstairs' deal with Colonel Gaddafi for the bomber's return. On the other hand, it is now quite clear that London was anxious to normalise relations with Tripoli as quickly and as best it could -- and that Gaddafi had made it clear that could not happen unless the bomber was sent back.
As a result, attention has moved away from the Scottish government's decision to free the bomber on controversial "compassionate" grounds to London and the role the British government might have played in facilitating the Lockerbie bomber's release. And here we enter very murky waters indeed.
Official and unofficial British government contacts with Libya have been extensive. Last night we learned that three government ministers have made trips to Tripoli in the last 15 months: the then trade minister Digby Jones (May 2008), Health minister Dawn Primarolo (November 2008) and Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell (February 2009).
We do not know what was said in any of these Tripoli talks. But remember this: Saif Gaddifi, the Libyan dictator's favourite son and a key figure in the bomber's release, has averred that "in all commercial contracts for oil and gas with Britain, Megrahi [the now-released bomber] was always on the table." So it's reasonable to assume the ministers had their ears bent.
But not them alone. In recent years two British prime ministers, a Russian oligarch, the scion of a European banking dynasty, a Prince of the Realm, a leader of Big Oil and our very own "Prince of Darkness" (aka Business Secretary Peter Mandelson) have all had walk-on parts, if not more, in events that preceded the release of the Lockerbie bomber. It's a cast of characters that would do justice to a Bond film.
At the centre of this possible web of intrigue is Saif, the shaven-headed, London School of Economics-educated son of the Libyan dictator. Turns out he is a good friend of Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminium baron, and Nat Rothschild, of the eponymous banking dynasty.
Saif invited both to his 37th birthday party in June in Becici in Montenegro, into which Deripaska and Rothschild have poured around $1 billion to create a sort of St Tropez in the Balkans. Saif is also pumping Libyan money into Montenegro from his country's vast investment fund, reason enough for Rothschild last year to host a party in his honour in New York.
Mandelson claims the meeting was only "fleeting" but officials admit they did discuss the Lockerbie case. A week later it became public that the bomber might be released on "compassionate" grounds though, of course, there may be no connection. It was then revealed that Mandelson had previously met Saif at a reception in London in May.
The Business Secretary maintains that any suggestion that a deal was being cooked up is not just wrong but "offensive", which we should accept at face value until facts suggest otherwise.
But we have it from Saif's own mouth that there could be no real progress in British-Libyan business co-operation unless the matter of the Lockerbie bomber was dealt with.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/dailypolitics/andrewneil/2009/08/very_murky_waters_indeed.html
CIA Documents Provide Little Cover for Cheney Claims
Documents Fail to Exonerate 'Enhanced Interrogation' Techniques
"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."
Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here. Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney's claims that the "enhanced interrogation" program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney's contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA's interrogations.
In response to questions about [al-Qaeda's] efforts to acquire [weapons of mass destruction], [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] revealed that he had met three individuals involved in [al-Qaeda's] program to produce anthrax. He appears to have calculated, incorrectly, that we had this information already, given that one of the three — Yazid Sufaat — had been in foreign custody for several months.
This is a far cry from torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into revealing such information. It would be tendentious to believe that the torture didn't have any impact on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — he himself said that he lied to interrogators in order to get the torture to stop — but the document itself doesn't attempt to present a case that the "enhanced interrogation" program was a factor, let alone the determinant factor, in the intelligence bounty the document says he provided.
http://washingtonindependent.com/56344/cia-documents-provide-little-cover-for-cheney-claims
Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess
by Gary Wolf
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.
The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? In a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even usernames. Millions of people apparently believe that love awaits here, but it is well hidden. Is this really the best we can do?
Odd perhaps, but no odder than what you see at the most popular job-search site: another wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Subject to a highly unpredictable filtering system that produces daily outrage among people whose help-wanted ads have been removed without explanation, this site not only beats its competitors—Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo's HotJobs—but garners more traffic than all of them combined. Are our standards really so low?
But if you really want to see a mess, go visit the nation's greatest apartment-hunting site, the first likely choice of anybody searching for a rental or a roommate. On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can't easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent. Customer support? Visit the help desk if you enjoy being insulted. How much market share does this housing site have? In many cities, a huge percentage. It isn't worth trying to compare its traffic to competitors', because at this scale there are no competitors.
Each of these sites, of course, is merely one of the many sections of craigslist, which dominates the market in facilitating face-to-face transactions, whether people are connecting to buy and sell, give something away, rent an apartment, or have some sex. With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=all
Odd perhaps, but no odder than what you see at the most popular job-search site: another wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Subject to a highly unpredictable filtering system that produces daily outrage among people whose help-wanted ads have been removed without explanation, this site not only beats its competitors—Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo's HotJobs—but garners more traffic than all of them combined. Are our standards really so low?
But if you really want to see a mess, go visit the nation's greatest apartment-hunting site, the first likely choice of anybody searching for a rental or a roommate. On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can't easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent. Customer support? Visit the help desk if you enjoy being insulted. How much market share does this housing site have? In many cities, a huge percentage. It isn't worth trying to compare its traffic to competitors', because at this scale there are no competitors.
Each of these sites, of course, is merely one of the many sections of craigslist, which dominates the market in facilitating face-to-face transactions, whether people are connecting to buy and sell, give something away, rent an apartment, or have some sex. With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=all
No Ordinary Fad
Making sense of the Beatles, whose music has been digitally re-mastered and featured in a new video game
Someone once noted that, other than Shakespeare, the Beatles may be Western culture's only instance of the best and the most popular being the same thing. It's not hard to imagine 500 years from now people questioning, as they have with Shakespeare's plays, how four young working-class guys with no training could have made so much music so varied and so consistently first-rate in less than a decade, evolving at a pace that would exhaust amoebas. It may take U2 five years to produce an album, but only 38 months (five albums, more than 70 songs) separated the Beatles' winningly naive "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and the nuclear Debussy of "Strawberry Fields Forever," which sounded like nothing else in 20th-century pop before or after. Shakespeare didn't have a digital age to bear witness, but the reissue this month—for the first time since the mid-'80s—of the Beatles' work on CD not only verifies the scope of their accomplishment but snatches it from the noisy distractions of their mystique.
Two different audiences for the Beatles exist. For anyone much over 50 the Beatles' impact was so massive, it still feels immediate; that this music was made nearly half a century ago is an invitation to mortal terror. Those under 50 must groan at the mere mention of the band let alone the oppressive cast of its shadow. It doesn't hurt, then, to remember the messy beginning, acknowledging there does seem something slightly supernatural about it, particularly when you consider that in the early '60s, the post-World War II U.K. was crawling with such bands. The Beatles themselves existed in other incarnations early on, first as the Quarrymen, then the Moondogs, erratically numbering five or six who always included John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. They were the bottom of the barrel. On the Liverpool circuit Richard Starkey, aka Ringo Starr, the seaport's hottest drummer and coveted by the Beatles until they landed him for their first album, was the bigger star. Surrounding the band is a bit of the Robert Johnson legend, having to do with a '30s Mississippi singer-guitarist of no special faculties who disappeared one night and returned at dawn the greatest blues artist of all time, a deal with the Devil in his back pocket. Not competent enough to get a gig in their hometown, the Beatles decamped to the ash heaps of Germany, playing among the strippers in depraved hellholes where pickpockets worked the crowd, then returned a few months later to Liverpool in Robert Johnson style as the greatest band of all time, to the astonishment of anyone who remembered them.
Hometown triumph notwithstanding, the band's records were released in the United States to indifference a year before a momentous television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. In retrospect the performance was less impressive than boomer memory allows. McCartney trilled songs from The Music Man, the big Broadway show of the day. So the new CD reissues are a testament to what no 21st-century skepticism can assail: If the band's second album, With the Beatles (released in England on the day of John Kennedy's assassination), was a powerhouse consolidation of their gifts, the Brit version of A Hard Day's Night just four months after the American breakthrough, timed to coincide with a witty, irrepressible movie, was the quantum leap that put any doubters in their place. It was the first album on which the band, mostly Lennon and McCartney, wrote everything, demonstrating the freshest melodic sense since Puccini. The singing was almost as spectacular.
With A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles began to assert their individual personalities as they continued cohering into a single superpersonality. This was a gestalt no other band ever has quite replicated, with talents, viewpoints, and temperaments overlapping and complementing one another. McCartney and Lennon shared the loss of orphans, McCartney's mother taken by cancer and Lennon's run over by a cop (which must have cemented his antiauthoritarian tendencies), and each responded in ways that distinguished him, McCartney with plucky opportunism, Lennon with pain and rage. Growing up the youngest of four siblings, Harrison again found himself the "kid" whose frequent dismissal by a new set of older brothers only drove him to prove something. Starr, the product of a broken marriage and a childhood of crises (in a coma at the age of six, then a sanatorium for two years of his adolescence), had learned not to take too much too seriously. What he couldn't give the band in vision he supplied in professionalism, perspective, and bonhomie. These were four psyches in the kind of lucky alignment that any Vegas slot machine pays off in millions.
Marijuana Compounds May Offset Alcohol-Induced Toxicity, Study Says
San Diego, CA--(ENEWSPF)--August 27, 2009. Compounds in cannabis may protect the human brain against alcohol-induced damage, according to clinical trial data published online by the journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology.
Investigators at the University of California at San Diego examined white matter integrity in adolescents with histories of binge drinking and marijuana use.
They reported that binge drinkers (defined as boys who consumed five or more drinks in one sitting, or girls who consumed four or more drinks at one time) showed signs of white matter damage in eight separate regions of the brain.
By contrast, the binge drinkers who also used marijuana experienced less damage in seven out of the eight brain regions.
"Binge drinkers who also use marijuana did not show as consistent a divergence from non-users as did the binge drink-only group," authors concluded. "[It is] possible that marijuana may have some neuroprotective properties in mitigating alcohol-related oxidative stress or excitotoxic cell death."
1,000 cameras 'solve one crime'
Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city's surveillance network has claimed.
In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers.
David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: "It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent."
He added: "CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness.
"It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.
"The Metropolitan Police has been extraordinarily slow to act to deal with the ineffectiveness of CCTV."
Nationwide, the government has spent £500m on CCTV cameras.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8219022.stm
Sphere: Related ContentChina admits death row organ use
 China executes more people than any other nation |
China is trying to move away from the use of executed prisoners as the major source of organs for transplants.
According to the China Daily newspaper, executed prisoners currently provide two-thirds of all transplant organs.
The government is now launching a voluntary donation scheme, which it hopes will also curb the illegal trafficking in organs.
But analysts say cultural bias against removing organs after death will make a voluntary scheme hard to implement.
Thriving black market
About 1.5 million people in China need transplants, but only about 10,000 operations are performed annually, according to the health ministry.
The scarcity of available organs has led to a thriving black market in trafficked organs, and in an effort to stop this the government passed a law in 2007 banning trafficking as well as the donation of organs to unrelated recipients.
But in practice, illegal transplants - some from living donors - are still frequently reported by the media and the Ministry of Health.
Democratic Health Care Bill Divulges IRS Tax Data
One of the problems with any proposed law that's over 1,000 pages long and constantly changing is that much deviltry can lie in the details. Take the Democrats' proposal to rewrite health care policy, better known as H.R. 3200 or by opponents as "Obamacare." (Here's our CBS News television coverage.)
Section 431(a) of the bill says that the IRS must divulge taxpayer identity information, including the filing status, the modified adjusted gross income, the number of dependents, and "other information as is prescribed by" regulation. That information will be provided to the new Health Choices Commissioner and state health programs and used to determine who qualifies for "affordability credits."
Section 245(b)(2)(A) says the IRS must divulge tax return details -- there's no specified limit on what's available or unavailable -- to the Health Choices Commissioner. The purpose, again, is to verify "affordability credits."
Section 1801(a) says that the Social Security Administration can obtain tax return data on anyone who may be eligible for a "low-income prescription drug subsidy" but has not applied for it.
Over at the Institute for Policy Innovation (a free-market think tank and presumably no fan of Obamacare), Tom Giovanetti argues that: "How many thousands of federal employees will have access to your records? The privacy of your health records will be only as good as the most nosy, most dishonest and most malcontented federal employee.... So say good-bye to privacy from the federal government. It was fun while it lasted for 233 years."
I'm not as certain as Giovanetti that this represents privacy's Armageddon. (Though I do wonder where the usual suspects like the Electronic Privacy Information Center are. Presumably inserting limits on information that can be disclosed -- and adding strict penalties on misuse of the information kept on file about hundreds of millions of Americans -- is at least as important as fretting about Facebook's privacy policy in Canada.)
A better candidate for a future privacy crisis is the so-called stimulus bill enacted with limited debate early this year. It mandated the "utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014," but included only limited privacy protections.
Section 431(a) of the bill says that the IRS must divulge taxpayer identity information, including the filing status, the modified adjusted gross income, the number of dependents, and "other information as is prescribed by" regulation. That information will be provided to the new Health Choices Commissioner and state health programs and used to determine who qualifies for "affordability credits."
Section 245(b)(2)(A) says the IRS must divulge tax return details -- there's no specified limit on what's available or unavailable -- to the Health Choices Commissioner. The purpose, again, is to verify "affordability credits."
Section 1801(a) says that the Social Security Administration can obtain tax return data on anyone who may be eligible for a "low-income prescription drug subsidy" but has not applied for it.
Over at the Institute for Policy Innovation (a free-market think tank and presumably no fan of Obamacare), Tom Giovanetti argues that: "How many thousands of federal employees will have access to your records? The privacy of your health records will be only as good as the most nosy, most dishonest and most malcontented federal employee.... So say good-bye to privacy from the federal government. It was fun while it lasted for 233 years."
I'm not as certain as Giovanetti that this represents privacy's Armageddon. (Though I do wonder where the usual suspects like the Electronic Privacy Information Center are. Presumably inserting limits on information that can be disclosed -- and adding strict penalties on misuse of the information kept on file about hundreds of millions of Americans -- is at least as important as fretting about Facebook's privacy policy in Canada.)
A better candidate for a future privacy crisis is the so-called stimulus bill enacted with limited debate early this year. It mandated the "utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014," but included only limited privacy protections.
Obtained: The RNC’s Health Care Survey
By David Weigel
I just chatted with Raymond Denny, the 64-year-old La Center, Wash., man who received the RNC's "2009 Future of American Health Survey," which alleged that President Obama's health reform plans might discriminate against Republicans. Here's the survey question:
"I've been getting these things for years," said Denny, who opened the letter with his wife Louise, "getting them from the Republicans, getting them from the Democratic Party, usually with the wrong name on it. This thing says I'm a sustaining member. They word these things to solicit the answer they wanted. This one here we looked at and said, "Wow, that's way beyond the pale of what should be done."
Denny confirmed that he's a "lifelong independent" who became a Democrat last year to vote for Obama. "I'm a fiscal and constitutional conservative," he said, although he hasn't made up his mind on the health care debate yet. "I don't know why I got this. Maybe something in my demographic or something convinced them that I was a lifelong Republican."
Click on the pages below to see larger .jpg images of them.
http://washingtonindependent.com/56844/obtained-the-rncs-health-care-survey
Health Care Reform: lessons from Sicko
by Kathleen Kelly
You're denied.
You don't qualify for health care insurance. What do you do now? Or you have health insurance but once you become ill, your insurance company's loopholes can and will negate your coverage.
Medical bills are now the number one cause of bankruptcy and homelessness in America. These daunting statistics are what keep me running circles (literally) on the elliptical at the gym. Is is that I enjoy running and going nowhere? No, I'm fearful. Scratch that, I'm petrified that I will become ill--that like my father I will become obese, have Type II diabetes, and experience complications from high blood pressure. It's maddening since there are illnesses (cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's) and accidents for that matter that I have no control over. If the current healthcare system in the United States was about providing acute, quality care for patients, I could rest easy. But let's be honest, it's about the bottom line, it's emblematic of capitalism--it's about money and the millions that health insurance and pharmaceutical companies earn each minute of the day on the pain and suffering of average Americans.
Michael Moore's 2007 documentary "Sicko" is reminiscent of "Roger and Me"--the story of David (in this case, everyday working Americans) versus Goliath (the insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants--think Kaiser Permanente, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, and PhRMA). What Moore stresses in this provocative, captivating, and historicizing account of how the American healthcare system got "off its rails" and privatized (in 1971 while we were in the midst of Vietnam--Albert Kaiser, Richard Nixon, and the Oval Office--you get the picture) is that not only do the 48 million uninsured in this country not have access to affordable let alone effective healthcare, the insured among us are living under the false security that no matter what ailments we suffer, we are "covered"; that we have access to all tests and treatments to improve our quality of life.
Guess again. Moore casts a caustic light on the objectives and end goals of health insurance companies. In his interview with Becky Malke, a health insurance consultant, the truth of the matter is damning to say the least. It was her role to "weed out" the customers. There are a multitude of conditions--the number would wrap around Becky's house many times according to this industry insider--that would exclude you from qualifying for health insurance. And preexisting conditions--you can forget about healthcare coverage. Just ask Maria Watanabe (Maria Watanabe vs. Blue Shield of California) whose surgery cost reimbursements were denied because she had failed to disclose a previous yeast infection. If the treatment is "experimental" that will save your life, you'll denied access to this treatment. If you condition is not deemed "life threatening" as in the case of a cancer survivor, who was not insured and seeking treatment since her cancer had returned; she was told to take some ibuprofen and go home. Sarah Palin and Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) egregiously and irresponsibly speak about the nonexistent and fabricated (yes, nonexistent and fabricated) "death panels" in "Obamacare." Mrs. Palin, Mr. Grassley--look around you. Avoidable deaths are rampant in the current, broken, and yes, corrupted system. Cease and desist with your fear-mongering.
Michael Moore addresses such fear-mongering and lobbying within the throes of the 1994 President's Task Force on Healthcare headed by then FLOTUS Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hillary demanded universal health coverage, a demand that was met with fierce, wrathful and condemnatory criticisms--Hillary was trying to unleash the "red menace" into God-fearing, capitalist America. She was a Bolshevik, a statist, just call her Comrade Clintonovska. Moore's voice becomes deflated though as he relates the cautionary tale of Hillary Rodham Clinton--once feared (not loved) by the health insurance industry, in her bid for the New York Senate seat, allied herself with the very people she had opposed only years earlier. She and her political campaign profited from the unethical antics of this money-grubbing industry.
But surely even such a corrupted system would take care of our nation's heroes--heroes like the volunteer emergency responders who worked relentlessly at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks. How did the U.S. health care system and politicians honor our heroes? These volunteers were denied health care benefits and treatments for illnesses they sustained while working in the ruins of what were the World Trade Center towers. John Graham, Willam Maher, and Ms. Reggie Cervantes were first responders whose ailments are debilitating--pulmonary fibrosis, post traumatic stress, and severe respiratory illnesses. Yet these volunteers were denied health care coverage. As volunteers, the government maintains, they were not employees. Therefore, these emergency responders were ineligible for health care benefits, benefits paramount to their recovery from their individual illnesses.
Michael Moore, accompanied by Mr. Graham, Mr. Maher and Ms. Cervantes, sets out on his own "freedom flotilla" from Miami to Guatanamo Bay to acquire the same medical treatment that the enemy combatant detainees were receiving (minus the torture presumably). Denied access to Gitmo, Moore and his compadres enter the Havana Hospital (yes, that Havana--the one in Cuba). The inhalers and medications are so much cheaper in Cuba--Reggie's inhaler that costs $120 in the U.S. costs mere pocket change in Cuba. John is able to get tests and scans that he could ill afford in the U.S. and the Cuban doctors provided him with a daily regimen; and Bill, having once ground his teeth down during his PTS-induced sleep, had a new set of teeth both set and fit. His was a welcomed smile. The land of Castro had come to our heroes' rescue. Hmmm. . . . it makes you rethink those ill notions of socialized medicine, doesn't it?
Don't Get Sick!
by Gail Pellett
Now, these many years later, as I witness the health care reform "debate," my grandfather's words have returned to haunt me. He had been a pioneer farmer in Saskatchewan on the Canadian prairies. That's where Canada's universal health care system was conceived during the hard years of the depression and its aftermath.
Medicare (Canada's health care plan) was largely the brainchild of a Baptist minister turned politician, T. C. (Tommy) Douglas. He and others founded a new party in Saskatchewan (which later became the New Democratic Party) based on "humanity before private interests." Universal health care was at the top of their agenda. By 1964, Saskatchewan implemented a health care plan that treated everyone according to their needs regardless of their ability to pay. Despite a doctor's strike that tried to kill it, the farmers - including my grandfather - made sure that this new health care plan survived. Then, just as now, there were those who thought it made total sense and others who thought it was a Communist conspiracy. However, it proved so popular in Saskatchewan that within a few years the federal government adopted it for the entire country. Imagine the audacity of this during a raging cold war. The year the plan went into effect was the year of the Cuban missile crisis.
In 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation conducted a poll to determine whom Canadians thought was the greatest Canadian of all time. It was not Pierre Trudeau, Joni Mitchell, Dan Aykroyd, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Lorne Michaels, Oscar Peterson, Peter Jennings, Celine Dion, Neil Young, Keanu Reeves, nor Wayne Gretzky. It wasn't even Keifer Sutherland or his dad, Donald. No, it was Keifer Sutherland's grandfather, Tommy Douglas, who is credited with making sure that Canadians would have universal, government-funded health care. When Canadians are periodically polled and asked what they are most proud of, in addition to peacekeeping, it is their national health care system.
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