Would you still sign the 9/11 Truth petition?

We ask signatories of the statement that helped drive Van Jones from office if they stand by it. Updated

By Vincent Rossmeier

• Sept. 11, 2009 | Thanks in large part to his association with the 9/11 Truth movement, Van Jones is no longer a member of the Obama White House. Jones resigned last week amid a swirl of controversy -- prodded on largely by Fox News' Glenn Beck -- that included the former "green jobs" advisor's signing of a petition put out by the 9/11 Truth movement urging a further investigation into the World Trade Center attacks. Most controversially, the petition wondered darkly that "unanswered questions ... suggest that people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war," before drifting into a list of wild and dubious speculation. (You can read the petition right here.)

Initially, Jones said that he hadn't fully reviewed the statement before he signed. But that didn't stop the onslaught of bad publicity that ultimately led to his exit.

The statement was released in October 2004 and has been signed by nearly 200 people, including many relatives of those who lost someone in the attacks. It called for an investigation into 9/11 but also directly questioned the government's conclusions about the plane crashes.

In the wake of Jones' departure, Politico's Ben Smith contacted two other signatories of the statement, Rabbi Michael Lerner and historian Howard Zinn. Smith found that both men felt they had signed a petition of more limited scope than the one that appears at the 9/11 Truth Web site, one that asked only for an investigation into the attacks and not one questioning President Bush's prior knowledge of 9/11.

Salon contacted nearly 30 of the petition's signatories to see if they felt, as did Lerner, Zinn and Jones, that the document didn't reflect their views on 9/11. We asked a simple question: If you had to do it all over again, would you still sign the statement?

Salon has not heard back from two of the statement's most famous signatories: actor Ed Asner and comedian Janeane Garofalo. (Updated: We have received and added  Asner's response to the list below.) But many did respond and most -- though not all -- expressed their full-fledged support for the petition. Their responses are below:

Ed Asner (through his company, Quince Productions): Mr. Asner would sign the petition again without the slightest hesitation.

Gray Brechin, historical geographer and visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Department of Geography: Until recently, I thought that I (like Van Jones) live in a country with a First Amendment that permits freedom of speech, thought and petition without fear of reprisal. I had that pleasant illusion despite growing up in the dark shadow of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, of red scares, blacklists and witch hunts, of the John Birch Society (and worse), which the Old Guard of the Republican Party then considered zanies. The ideological descendants of those wackos have since taken over that party. I suspect that you did not grow up at that time.

Since when did Salon permit Glenn Beck and the almost equally loony WSJ editorial page to set the terms of discussion, calling those who want answers to so much that remains unexplained about 9/11 "truthers" and thus giving them equivalence with "birthers," "deathers" and "tea baggers"? Since when was Van Jones a "czar" rather than an advisor? Since when was he not entitled to his opinions, past or present? Was it when he was born black and inexcusably smart? Jones is the kind of visionary with whom Franklin Roosevelt surrounded himself but of which the Obama administration is almost entirely bereft, and now that administration has shamefully thrown him to the sharks.

Have you contacted the widows and other family members who lost loved ones on that terrible day and asked them if they recant wondering why, for example, New York City and the Pentagon -- the fucking Pentagon! -- were defenseless on that morning more than a month after the would-be president was informed that Osama bin Laden was determined to attack the United States? Have you asked them if they are as disloyal, or as nuts, as Van Jones for signing that petition? Have you an answer for that and other questions on that petition, which were never discussed by the mainstream media when it piled on Jones at Beck's behest?

Van Jones was not only flayed for once signing a petition but for jokingly calling Republicans "assholes." Why is that "extreme" speech when Glenn Beck freely advocates violent overthrow of the U.S. government, gives an exegesis of the Communist/Fascist messages that "progressive" John D. Rockefeller Jr. insidiously inserted in the art of Rockefeller Center, and fantasizes killing Michael Moore and the speaker of the House on air to millions? When will the men with butterfly nets take this man away so that he does not hurt others or himself, rather than journalists allow him to take them down into his rat-infested sewer with him?

I keep hoping that, like Joe McCarthy, Mr. Beck (and O'Reilly, Coulter, Malkin, "Savage," etc.) will go too far, but -- with the wreck of public education and its replacement by entertainment -- Americans have so lost any moral compass that "too far" no longer exists as long as one is to the right of Dick Cheney.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/11/truth_petition/index.html

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Gone.

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Amid noisy health care debate, free clinics struggle to keep up

By Leila Fadel

FREDERICK, Md. — One recent Monday, the line in the Church of the Brethren parking lot began to form at around 2:30 a.m. when a husband and wife arrived. They came almost 8 hours early in the hope of seeing a dentist — for free.

They soon watched the headlights of other cars as they pulled into the lot. Some would-be patients laid out blankets and sat on the pavement to wait for hours so they'd make the top of the walk-in list to see a doctor or dentist at the Mission of Mercy traveling clinic.

By the time the clinic, a converted recreational vehicle, opened its doors and the church's multi-purpose room became a waiting room, a nursing station and a dental office with blue dividers and folding chairs, more than 100 people had assembled.

At the check-in table, new patients were asked one question: "Are you insured?"

The Mission of Mercy, a group of traveling clinics that circulate through towns in Maryland , Pennsylvania , Texas and Arizona , is one of more than 1,200 free clinics across the nation that are feeling the effects of the economic downturn.

Their patient lists are growing as Americans lose their jobs and their health insurance, but as demand grows with rising unemployment, their donations are dwindling. This year, Mission of Mercy has $350,000 less than it did last year; it takes no government funds for its services.

"People are so afraid to give now, because they're thinking they could lose their job next," said Linda Ryan , the executive director of Mission of Mercy. "We're squished because we have more people in need; we need to grow now more than ever — who knows what will happen with health care?"

Over the past year, free clinics across the country have seen a 20 percent decrease in donations and a 40 percent to 50 percent increase in patients, said Nicole D. Lamoureux , the executive director of the National Association of Free Clinics . Last year, the clinics the association represents — which largely have been excluded from the health care debate — treated 4 million people. This year, Lamoureux expects, they'll serve some 8 million, 83 percent of whom come from homes in which at least one person works full time.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20090906/pl_mcclatchy/3303609

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GLENN BECK’s WEIRDEST EVER

 

This video is so odd, so unhinged, so . . . well, it's one of the strangest rants you'll ever see.  But one thing is clear.  A lot of it has to do with a guy "holding a hammer" –  Beck points directly at a long-handled shovel, not a hammer, and then you get a close-up of the shovel, which Beck keeps calling a hammer.  And because the guy's holding a hammer (but . . . it's . . . a . . . shovel) and another guy's holding a sickle, it must prove that the depression-era art that oil-tycoon Rockefeller commissioned is a precursor to today's communist/fascist progressives because it's all "hiding in plain sight" in and around the lobby of NBC.  Huh?

 

http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/090909.html

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Can a mere domain name be defamation? Glenn Beck says yes

Hugely popular conservative talker Glenn Beck has sicked his lawyers on a satirical website that's been up for a week, but the attorneys may have a point on this one. The site, called glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com, toes the line on defamation—and may have stepped across it.

By Nate Anderson

When someone registers a domain like glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com, they probably expect to hear from Glenn Beck's lawyers. In this case, it took two days. The site's anonymous operator tells Ars that the whole thing is satire—but that may not be enough to avoid charges of defamation.

Gilbert Gottfried, what have you started?

The controversy started a week ago in the Fark forums, where someone picked up on an old Gilbert Gottfried roast of the "comedian" (scare quotes fully intended) Bob Saget. During the roast, Gottfried repeatedly said (watch the video) that Saget had "not raped and killed a girl in 1990." The Fark forums took the joke about the power of insinuation and applied it to right-wing talk show host Glenn "Obama is a racist" Beck.

One of the Fark readers then took the forum meme to the next level, registering a domain name and launching a web site in order to make a point about talking head TV demagoguery. "Why won't Glenn Beck deny these allegations?" asks the site. "We're not accusing Glenn Beck of raping and murdering a young girl in 1990—in fact, we think he didn't! But we can't help but wonder, since he has failed to deny these horrible allegations. Why won't he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?" At the very bottom of the page was a small text disclaimer saying that the site was satirical.

I spoke to the anonymous owner of the site, who tells Ars that launching it "just felt right"—it flipped the "birther" non-falsifiable conspiracy theories about Obama's birth and citizenship around and applied the same tactics to one of the biggest talking heads (no pun intended?) on cable news. It's just "using Beck's tactics against him" and is a small way of "directing all this frustration" with Beck and others into action.

The site went up on September 1 and had a huge spike of initial interest—it served more than 120,000 page loads in the first 24 hours. By September 3, lawyers for Beck's media company, Mercury Radio Arts, had contacted the domain registrar demanding that the "highly defamatory domain name" glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com be deleted, that the WhoisGuard privacy protection service be revoked, and that the owner's contact information be turned over to the lawyers.

Registrar NameCheap didn't do this, of course, and Beck's lawyers sent another letter the next day, making the same demands. They also showed that they were reading the website: "We also note that it appears you contacted the individual, as he states on his website hosted on the Defamatory Domain that 'my webhost is taking some flak over this website, so if he gets shuts me down, it may take a bit to get rehosted.'"

The registrar did change the site's nameservers without alerting the owner, but allowed him to change them back once he contacted the company, and the site remains up. The owner also registered additional backup domains, such as "DidGlennBeckRapeAndMurderAYoungGirlIn1990.com" (form of a question!) and "gb1990.com" (inoffensive!).

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/can-a-mere-domain-name-be-defamation-glenn-beck-says-yes.ars?utm_source=microblogging&utm_medium=arstch&utm_term=Main%20Account&utm_campaign=microblogging

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What were you doing on Sept. 11, 2001?

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Michael Moore's 'Capitalism' Flick Rips into Crimes of Wall Street

By Xan Brooks

Moore's latest documentary drew tumultuous applause at the Venice film festival, suggesting that the veteran tub-thumper has lost none of his power to whip up a response.

The bankrobbers caught on camera at the start of Capitalism: A Love Story are a forlorn and feeble bunch. We see a bedraggled old man in a Hawaiian shirt, and what looks to be a 12-year-old boy wearing a balaclava. For all their flailing efforts, they've got nothing on the real crooks: the banking CEOs who recently absconded with $700bn of public money, no strings attached. That's what's known as a clean getaway.

Michael Moore's latest documentary drew tumultuous applause at the Venice film festival, suggesting that the veteran tub-thumper has lost none of his power to whip up a response. If the film finally lacks the clean, hard punch provided by the record-breaking Fahrenheit 9/11, that can only be because the crime scene is so vast and the culprits so numerous.

Undeterred, Moore jabs his finger at everyone from Reagan to Bush Jr, Hank Paulson to Alan Greenspan. He drags the viewer through a thicket of insurance scams, sub-prime bubbles and derivative trading so willfully obfuscatory that even the experts can't explain how it works.

The big villain, of course, is capitalism itself, which the film paints as a wily old philanderer intent on lining the pockets of the few at the expense of the many. America, enthuses a leaked Citibank report, is now a modern-day "plutonomy" where the top 1% of the population control 95% of the wealth. Does Barack Obama's election spell an end to all this? The director has his doubts, pointing out that Goldman Sachs – depicted here as the principal agent of wickedness – was the largest private contributor to the Obama campaign.

Capitalism: A Love Story is by turns crude and sentimental, impassioned and invigorating. It posits a simple moral universe inhabited by good little guys and evil big ones, yet the basic thrust of its argument proves hard to resist.

Crucially, Moore (or at least his researchers) has done a fine job in ferreting out the human stories behind the headlines. None of these is so horrifyingly absurd as the tale of the privatised youth detention centre in Pennsylvania, run with the help of a crooked local judge who railroaded kids through his court for a cut of the profits. Some 6,500 children were later found to have been wrongly convicted for such minor infractions as smoking pot and "throwing a piece of steak at my mom's boyfriend". The subsequent bill for their incarceration went directly to the taxpayer.

Moore's conclusion? That capitalism is both un-Christian and un-American, an evil that deserves not regulation but elimination.

http://www.alternet.org/movies/142496/michael_moore%27s_%27capitalism%27_flick_rips_into_crimes_of_wall_street/

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Anniversary

See Cartoons by Cartoon by Jeff Parker - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

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The Road to Area 51

After decades of denying the facility's existence, five former insiders speak out

Area 51. It's the most famous military institution in the world that doesn't officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada's high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground.

Then again, maybe not-- the U.S. government refuses to say. You can't drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted--all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades.

It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened--that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be "out there," but more likely it's concealed inside Area 51's Strangelove-esque hangars--buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge.

The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk--in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh "Slip" Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in "What Plane?" in LA's March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world's most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton "T.D." Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base's half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels. Here are a few of their best stories--for the record:

On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51's restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.

Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: "Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane." Until that moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. "I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board." The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in official records.

As for the guys who picked him up, they were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As part of Collins' own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to take truth serum. "They wanted to see if there was anything I'd for-gotten about the events leading up to the crash." The Sodium Pento-thal experience went without a hitch--except for the reaction of his wife, Jane.

"Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word." The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. "Boy, was she mad," says Collins with a chuckle.

At the time of Collins' accident, CIA pilots had been flying spy planes in and out of Area 51 for eight years, with the express mission of providing the intelligence to prevent nuclear war. Aerial reconnaissance was a major part of the CIA's preemptive efforts, while the rest of America built bomb shelters and hoped for the best.

"It wasn't always called Area 51," says Lovick, the physicist who developed stealth technology. His boss, legendary aircraft designer Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, called the place Paradise Ranch to entice men to leave their families and "rough it" out in the Nevada desert in the name of science and the fight against the evil empire. "Test pilot Tony LeVier found the place by flying over it," says Lovick. "It was a lake bed called Groom Lake, selected for testing because it was flat and far from anything. It was kept secret because the CIA tested U-2s there."

 

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-mag-april052009-backstory,0,5104077.story

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How long should we delay?

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Sick and Wrong

How Washington is screwing up health care reform – and why it may take a revolt to fix it

by MATT TAIBBI

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

It's a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that's what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players — from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus — found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.

We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrong

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Joe Wilson’s opponent raises $41,000 on ActBlue within hours of Obama’s speech

Bloggasm

by Simon Owens

 

UPDATE: I now have the official fundraising numbers for how much has been brought in since last night.

"You lie!"

The words were shouted during Obama's healthcare speech by South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, and progressives were not happy with the disrespect his words showed toward the presidential office.

So they took action, with literally thousands of twitter users linking to the Act Blue fundraising page for Joe Wilson's opponent, Rob Miller.

So how much money have they raised so far? It's now 11 p.m., mere hours after Obama's speech, and so far $11,507 $41,000 has been raised in that short span of time.

Tomorrow morning I'm scheduled to speak with a representative of ActBlue and I'll be able to find out more concrete numbers — where all that traffic was coming from and how quickly the money poured in after the speech.

UPDATE: Less than an hour and a half after I wrote this article, the fundraising numbers are up over $25,000 and climbing.

UPDATE 2: It's 4:06 a.m. and it's up over $41,000

UPDATE 3: I'm told that he has raised somewhere around $100k. I'll get an official number when I speak to the ActBlue spokesman later this morning.

http://bloggasm.com/joe-wilsons-opponent-raises-11000-on-actblue-within-hours-of-obamas-speech-on

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A New Movement: Health Care as a Civil Right

By Dennis Kucinich

Dear Friends,

There is only one true health care public option: Single payer. It covers everyone, all basic health care needs, with doctor of choice. No more premiums, co-pays or deductibles. All health care assets in America would become not-for-profit. The bill already exists. It is HR 676. Congressman John Conyers and I wrote the bill. Our bill has the support of 85 co-sponsors in the House. And it is backed by a growing national movement of labor, doctors, and nurses. The movement needs you. Please join me for tomorrow's national conference call at 10:00pm EDT. Please call toll-free 1-800-230-1096.

The hour has arrived to begin anew the Civil Rights Movement, this time for Health Care for All. I am calling upon you to become a force in this movement. Go to Health Care as A Civil Right at Kucinich.us to learn how you can circulate a single-payer petition and organize in your community. Please help fund this effort. Go to Kucinich.us now, contribute.

The Preamble to the United States Constitution and Article One, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution both describe an originating purpose of our United States: to promote the general welfare. Health care is a legitimate function of our government. Health care is a basic right in a Democratic society. It is no more a privilege based on ability to pay than is the right to vote, which was once accorded only to property owners.

Health care is also a moral imperative. Forty seven million Americans are uninsured. Fifty million Americans are underinsured. People are losing their homes, their jobs, their life's savings, their retirement security and their financial health because they cannot pay medical bills, and despite this calamity Washington looks another way. We must not avert our eyes to this human suffering and this economic injustice.

Let's prepare a response which Washington will long remember as the time when the people reclaimed their government from the insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Join us. Contribute. Together, we can initiate an action plan to intervene and provide health care for all.

1. A National Health Care for All Conference Call from Washington, DC, at 10 pm EDT, Thursday, September 10th at 1-800-230-1096. Join us, so that we can discuss our new beginning and ways in which we can all help. Pre-registration is necessary in order to reserve sufficient phone lines. Please RSVP here. rsvp@kucinich.us When you call in and the operator asks, "what conference call?" tell the operator, "Health Care for All."
2. On-line petition. Please contact your lists, your family and friends. Please sign the petition for a single payer system. I will deliver the petitions directly to your Congressperson.
3. Petition to download, print and circulate among friends and neighbors - including an instruction sheet.
4. Health Care Meet-Ups. Coming Thursday September 10 2009.
5. Tell A Friend. Every email forwarded will make a difference? Please use the "Forward Email" link below to circulate up to 5 emails at a time to your friends.

I need your help to initiate this action.

 

http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-New-Movement-Health-Car-by-Dennis-Kucinich-090909-152.html

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Ronald Reagan's Torture

Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995

 

Lost amid the attention given George W. Bush's "war on terror" torture policies was the CIA's cryptic admission that it also engaged in interrogation abuses during Ronald Reagan's anti-leftist wars in Central America, another era of torture and extra-judicial killings.

By Robert Parry

The 2004 CIA Inspector General's report, released last month, referenced as "background" to the Bush-era abuses the spy agency's "intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals whose interests are opposed to those of the United States." The report noted "a resurgence in interest" in teaching those techniques in the early 1980s "to foster foreign liaison relationships."

The report said, "because of political sensitivities," the CIA's top brass in the 1980s "forbade Agency officers from using the word 'interrogation" and substituted the phrase "human resources exploitation" [HRE] in training programs for allied intelligence agencies.

The euphemism aside,  the reality of these interrogation techniques remained brutal, with the CIA Inspector General conducting a 1984 investigation of alleged "misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in interrogations and the death of one individual," the report said (although the details were redacted in the version released last month).

In 1984, the CIA also was hit with a scandal over what became known as an "assassination manual" prepared by agency personnel for the Nicaraguan contras, a rebel group sponsored by the Reagan administration with the goal of ousting Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.

Despite those two problems, the questionable training programs apparently continued for another two years. The 2004 IG report states that "in 1986, the Agency ended the HRE training program because of allegations of human rights abuses in Latin America."

While the report's references to this earlier era of torture are brief – and the abuses are little-remembered features of Ronald Reagan's glorified presidency – there have been other glimpses into how Reagan unleashed this earlier "dark side" on the peasants, workers and students of Central America.

http://consortiumnews.com/2009/090809.html

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Punk Rock Opera

 

Green Day electrifies musical theater at the Berkeley Rep with American Idiot.

By David Downs

Global superstar and Green Day vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong had somewhat one-dimensional ideas about musicals before green-lighting American Idiot, the amped-up rock opera debuting at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre on Friday, September 4.

The musical American Idiot came about when Tony Award-winning director Michael Mayer casually told an interviewer that he wanted to stage it. Soon he was meeting with Billie Joe Armstrong and the other members of Green Day.

"I mean, I've taken my kid to see The Lion King before," says the mid-thirtysomething, who's been married fifteen years. "And it's like we might as well be going to a Jonas Brothers concert or something."

For a band that's made its millions on speed, pot, masturbation, paranoia, teen angst, and suicide, the world of chorus lines and saccharine, sappy arias just didn't seem to fit. Thanks to Mamma Mia, it doesn't have to.

The rock opera adaptation of Green Day's multiplatinum 2004 smash American Idiot is going to challenge the very definitions of punk, theater, and musical. The 75-plus-minute performance with a cast of 19 tells a Fight Club-esque story of self-discovery through death and destruction, yet it uses no words outside of the lyric content of the album. The hit album is played from beginning to end live by a band (not Green Day) and intercut with B-sides as well as three songs from the band's new album 21st Century Breakdown, including the hit "21 Guns."

After eight albums and almost twenty years together as a band — a near impossible feat these days — Green Day has undertaken its ballsiest and most experimental project yet. Taken with the unprecedented press shine now on the forty-year-old Berkeley Rep, as well as the fact that the project employs dozens of local artists amid a searing arts recession — and this musical might be the most boundary-violating, "punk" thing Green Day has ever done.

The story of trio Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt, and drummer Tre Cool has ascended to the status of legend. Emerging from the East Bay's punk rock scene of the early 1990s, they played fast, simple, snarling jams cut with melody and a cleverness that helped them break out from the pop-punk pack at the time. (Blink-182, anybody?) Kerplunk in 1992 and the single "Welcome to Paradise" softened up the beachhead for 1994's major-label debut Dookie on Reprise, which did fifteen million in global sales. Insomniac in 1995, Nimrod in 1997, and Warning in 2000 propelled the band far from the punk rock ghetto and set the stage for 2004's gargantuan American Idiot.

"It was something that I've always wanted to do, hoping that I had the guts to be able to do it," Armstrong said. "You have to take everything you learned and take a huge risk. You just evolve as a person and figure out what's important to you. Being a rock star can be a really positive thing. It just kind of depends on the way you go about it."

Armstrong says Idiot was the band accepting stardom, ditching the shackles of punk's rules and risking everything on a decades-old form, the rock opera. After an aborted attempt to make a more traditional album called Cigarettes and Valentines, Green Day channeled The Wall, Tommy, and maybe a little of the Broadway musical Oliver!

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/news/punk_rock_opera/Content?oid=1186065

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Robert Reich Public Option Video

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Money and Health

"Let's face it folks, if health care was manufacturing or Walmart, the jobs and services would already have been outsourced to the cheapest foreign competitor."

by John Cory

    The media tells me that health reform is a very complicated issue, that it is hard to understand and even harder to explain to simple-minded and politically unsophisticated people like me. It is about money and costs and free-market and big government socialists versus real America, or something like that.

    So, I ask: How can the majority of other industrialized nations manage to provide affordable health care to their citizens?

    The fabulous media roll their eyes and show me the following Organization for Economic Development (OECD) report:

    Total health care spending per person as of 2007:

    US: $7,290

    UK: $2,992

    Japan: $2,581

    Canada: $3,895

    France: $3,601

    The average OECD expenditure: $2,964

    Now, this health care spending gives the US a sort of neutral bang-for-the-buck result. We do better in some areas and not so good in others.

    O.K., got it.

    Next question: If other countries spend less than half of what the US spends (on average) with good results, where does all our money go?

    This is where my neat-o media suddenly points across the room at the man jumping up and down about wanting his country back or the lady hollering about the Muslim socialist in the White House. Look, look they say, Jerry Springer politics is so entertaining!

    But I still want to know where all that money goes. Don't you?

    We spend twice the money on health care as most other countries and we are supposed to just accept this as the cost of a free market, the price of being American? Let's face it folks, if health care was manufacturing or Walmart, the jobs and services would already have been outsourced to the cheapest foreign competitor.

    I'm not a journalist or a particularly educated guy, but golly, gee whiz Batman, it seems to me that somebody is getting ripped off here - and that somebody is, us.

    Here's more figures I hear tossed around without examination: The administrative costs of Medicare run about 3 percent while the corporate health insurance industry administrative costs hover at 30 percent.

    How can that be? I thought the government was really bad at managing anything while private enterprise is expert at cost containment. But the businessmen require ten times as much overhead costs as big government politicians?

    Whatever happened to the old adage "follow the money?" Who in our media or journalist-pundit class is willing to give up the ratings gold of raucous town hall meetings to investigate where our money is going?

    How much of that $7,290 per person in the US goes to exorbitant CEO salaries? How much goes to lobbyist funding to deregulate the insurance industry? How much is waste and fraud? How much of that money is actual medical treatment?

    This is America, the greatest nation with the best health care in the world. I know, because my TV tells me so. But something is not right here. Something is off.

http://www.truthout.org/090909A?n

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Advocacy Group Shows Their Disgust as Malaysian Cannabis Trafficker Sentenced to Death

 

By Alun Buffry

 

Members of the UK campaigning group The Legalise Cannabis Alliance (LCA) expressed outrage on reading that the sentence of death by hanging has been given on a 24-year-old man for just over half a kilo of the plant. Image Alun Buffry, a spokesperson for the Alliance, said "Today I read about a self-confessed supplier to be hanged for about 650 grams of cannabis.

 

"Lim Kok Yong, 24, is to be hung by the neck in agony until he dies, for under 650 grams of cannabis plant material. "Cannabis is a plant that grows both wild and cultivated around the world, and the very vast majority of the half a billion users (as estimated by World Health Organisation) claim to benefit from it.

 

"The plant has many uses - as well as easing the symptoms of some dreadful ailments - it can be used to produce environmentally safe fuels, foods, fibre for building materials, papers and clothing, and oil for lubrication and light.

 

"In this the 21st century, it is indeed sad to read that Malaysia, a developed country of world-wide importance, still adopts such an unjust sentencing policy, whilst countries like Portugal, Argentina

 

and Mexico have recently decriminalised cannabis possession, and for over 30 years The Netherlands have operated a highly successful system of allowing "Coffeeshop" to sell cannabis in limited amounts to adults, and patients can get the plant through their doctors.

 

"I urge the Malaysian Government to step in and save this man's life."

 

The LCA are urging people to write to the newspaper editor and also Malaysian Embassies around the world.

 

"PLEASE send a comment to the Editor expressing your outrage - mark the subject Letter to the Editor and quote the headline (above) and date (Sept 2nd) and send your email to shyong@bernama.com.

 

"This is a start - just imagine if they get thousands of letters of outrage - they would be bound to print an article - then maybe we can target our outrage at the Government and Embassies of Malaysia - this can save lives"

 

Tyre Shop Assistant To Hang For Trafficking Cannabis http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsgeneral.php?id=437542

 

http://pr.cannazine.co.uk/200909091170/green/eco-news/malaysian-cannabis-trafficker-sentenced-to-death.html

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Tyranny! Tyranny! Everywhere!

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GOP lawmaker 'protecting' Georgians from non-existent threat

by Stephen C. Webster

Georgia State Senator Judson Hill and his fellow Republicans are so determined to fight health insurance reform that they are promoting a bill in the state's legislature which would prohibit the federal government from enforcing pending reforms on insurers in the state.

Hill is doing this, he told Fox News on Sunday, to "protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of all Georgians to be able to choose a health care provider, if they want, or choose their own health insurance plan."

He added: "We don't want a one-size-fits-all government plan thrust down our throat and to be penalized or forced or to have it forced upon us."

While that may indeed be the target of the Georgia legislation, it is deceptive on its face. Nothing of the sort has been proposed by the Obama administration or congressional Democrats.

A public insurance option is just that: an option, intended to be used by those who have none. Other reforms proposed would limit an insurer's ability to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, along with requirements for continued coverage if an insured person becomes ill.

Hill's argument is like insisting upon changing a state's laws to prohibit funding for public transportation -- such as light rail or buses -- because of a far-flung fear that one day it could mean everyone will be forced to give up their cars.

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/09/gop-lawmaker-protecting-georgians-from-non-existent-threat/

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“Good Billions After Bad”–One Year After Wall Street Bailout, Pulitzer Winners Barlett and Steele Investigate Where All the Money Went

It's been exactly one year since the onset of the financial crisis and the passage of the Bush administration's $700 billion dollar bailout of Wall Street. The bailout marked the single largest financial intervention by the Treasury into the banking system in American history.

But what were the factors in deciding who received bailout funds? And what happened to all the money? The answer to those two simple questions is: We don't know.

In a new article in Vanity Fair, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team Donald Barlett and James Steele try to find an answer. Poring over bank records and Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Barlett and Steele recreate what happened in late 2008, when the Bush Treasury Department, led by former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, sought to prevent a complete Wall Street meltdown by pouring billions into the banking system.

The problem is, they write, "once the money left the building, the government lost all track of it…It was hard to escape the feeling that the real strategy was less than scientific—amounting to a hope that if a massive pile of money was simply thrown at the economy, some of it would surely do something useful."

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/10/good_billions_after_bad_one_year

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Latest image from the Refurbished Hubble

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/multimedia/ero/index.html

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A Radical Solution to End the Drug War: Legalize Everything

One cop straight out of The Wire crunches the numbers with Esquire.com's political columnist to discover that America's prohibition of narcotics may be costing more lives than Mexico's — and nearly enough dollars for universal health care. So why not repeal our drug laws? Because cops are making money off them, too.

By John H. Richardson

We've heard a lot about the terrible death toll Mexico has suffered during the drug war — over 11,000 souls so far. This helps to account for the startling lack of controversy that greeted last week's news that Mexico had suddenly decriminalized drugs — not just marijuana but also cocaine, LSD, and heroin. In place of the outrage and threats that U.S. officials expressed when Mexico tried to decriminalize in 2006 was a mild statement, from our new drug czar, that we are going to take a "wait and see" approach.

Still, we've heard nothing about the American death toll. Isn't that strange? So far as I can tell, nobody has even tried to come up with a number.

Until now. I've done some rough math, and this is what I found:

6,487.

To repeat, that's 6,487 dead Americans. Throw in overdoses and the cost of this country's paralyzing drug laws is closer to 15,000 lives.

I'm basing these numbers on an interview with a high-ranking former narcotics officer named Neill Franklin. A member of the Maryland State Police for 32 years, Franklin eventually rose to the position of commander in Maryland's Bureau of Drug Enforcement. As he puts it, he was a classic "good soldier" in the drug war.

Franklin's turning point came in October of 2000. "I lost a very, very close friend of mine, a narcotics agent for Maryland State Police," he says. "His name was Ed Toatley. He was assassinated outside of Washington, D.C., trying to make a drug deal in a park. He had a wife, he had three kids. I had just spoken to him a couple of weeks prior to him getting assigned to this particular deal — he was finally going to bring this guy down, and lo and behold the guy kills him."

That got Franklin thinking. "I started doing the research and asking the questions: What progress are we making on this thing? And it turns out that not only are we losing kids who are in the game, but we are losing communities and fellow cops. We had lost a number of police officers in Baltimore alone."

Another turning point was 2002, when Angela Dawson and her five kids were murdered in East Baltimore by drug dealers she had been tying to keep from doing business in front of her house. "They fire-bombed the house late one night and the whole family perished," Franklin remembers.

So he started brooding on the drug war's body count. "Baltimore is a city of just a hair over 600,000 people. Our annual homicide rate was fluctuating between 240 and 300 every year for decades. Think about that: 240 to 300 homicides annually, and 75 percent to 80 percent are drug related. It's either gangs that are using drugs to support operations, or territorial disputes among drug dealers, or people just getting caught in the line of fire. And Baltimore is a small city compared to others," Franklin notes. "So we're not talking a handful of homicides; we're talking about the majority of the homicides in any city in the U.S. So if you add those cities up — just lowball it, take just 50 percent — I guarantee you, you'll find the numbers are quite similar to what they have in Mexico."

I took his advice. In 2007, the last year for which hard numbers are available, 16,425 people were murdered. Since our most recent Census said that 79 percent of the country is urban, I cut out the rural Americans — although there's plenty of drug use there, too — and came up with 12,975 urban homicides. Low-balling that number at 50 percent, I arrived at a rough estimate of 6,487 drug deaths. Using 75 percent, the toll rises to 9,731.

"And now we've got the cartel gangs coming up from Mexico," Franklin reminds me. "They're in over 130 cities in the U.S. already, and it's not going to get better."

Why Regulating Legal Drugs Fixes the Dead-Body Problem

Neill Franklin's solution is radical: "You have to take the money out of it. Many people talk about legalization and decriminalize — it's still illegal, but you're just not sending as many people to jail, especially for the nonviolent offenses. However, the money is still being made in the illegal sales, so you still have the drug wars. It's prohibition that's killing our people. That's why people are dying."

"So," I ask, "you want to legalize everything?"

"Yes. But I like to put it like this: I want regulation of everything. Because right now, I think they're confusing prohibition with regulation. What I'm talking about is applying standards — quality control, just like alcohol. We should have learned our lesson during alcohol prohibitions — we repealed the Eighteenth Amendment and applied standards of sale and manufacture, so it has to be a certain quality and you can't sell it to just anybody, and you still go to jail if you sell it to the wrong people. So, among other things, you'll also reduce overdoses — the majority of the overdoses we have is people who don't know what they're getting or buying because the purity level fluctuates. In addition, people are afraid to get help because they don't want to go jail, so they let their friends die."

So let's add overdoses to our death toll. In 2005, recent Senate testimony shows, 22,400 Americans died of drug overdoses. Leaving aside prescription drugs and counting only the 39 percent of overdoses attributed to cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines, I count another 8,736 deaths.

That brings us to 15,223 Americans dead from the drug war.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/richardson-report/drug-war-facts-090109#ixzz0QiVeorHL

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Mice Levitated in Lab

 

By Charles Q. Choi

A three-week-old mouse weighing about 10 grams levitated by magnetic fields, either with a magnet (a) or without (b).

Credit: Da-Ming Zhu et al.

Scientists have now levitated mice using magnetic fields.

Other researchers have made live frogs and grasshoppers float in mid-air before, but such research with mice, being closer biologically to humans, could help in studies to counteract bone loss due to reduced gravity over long spans of time, as might be expected in deep space missions or on the surfaces of other planets.

Scientists working on behalf of NASA built a device to simulate variable levels of gravity. It consists of a superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals, with a space inside warm enough at room temperature and large enough at 2.6 inches wide (6.6 cm) for tiny creatures to float comfortably in during experiments.

Disoriented

The researchers first levitated a young mouse, just three-week-old and weighing 10 grams. It appeared agitated and disoriented, seemingly trying to hold on to something.

"It actually kicked around and started to spin, and without friction, it could spin faster and faster, and we think that made it even more disoriented," said researcher Yuanming Liu, a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. They decided to mildly sedate the next mouse they levitated, which seemed content with floating.

A plastic cage was also designed by physicist Da-Ming Zhu at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, to keep the mice in during levitation. Its top remained open to let in air, food, water and video surveillance, and its bottom was filled with small holes to allow waste removal.

From time to time, mice would kick the walls of the cage, causing it to briefly drop off from the levitation zone before re-entering it and floating again.

http://www.livescience.com/animals/090909-mouse-levitation.html

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Batshit-crazy

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Dick Cheney's He Man Monthly

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Hairstylists Can Help Identify Older Clients Who Need Health Services

Hairstylists may have a unique opportunity to help steer their elderly clients to needed health services, according to a small, exploratory study.

More than 80 percent of 40 Columbus-area stylists surveyed said that older clients often or always shared their problems during appointments.

"Hair stylists are in a great position to notice when their older clients are starting to suffer from depression, dementia, or self-neglect," said Keith Anderson, co-author of the study and assistant professor of social work at Ohio State University.

"While not expecting too much beyond the scope of their jobs, we may be able to help stylists direct elderly people in trouble to community services."

Anderson conducted the study with Andrea Cimbal and Jeffrey Maile, graduate students in social work at Ohio State. Their results appear in the current issue of the Journal of Applied Gerontology.

Anderson said he decided to do the study after reading sometimes-joking references in the popular press to "salon therapy," in which clients discussed their relationship, family and health problems to their stylists, who act as sympathetic ears and sometimes as pseudo-therapists.

"I wondered if stylists really did have these close relationships with their clients," Anderson said.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090908193521.htm

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Oh my God! Now Obama wants to indoctrinate Congress!

by Lewis Grossberger

 

President Obama's plan to address a joint session of Congress on health-care reform Wednesday has set off a revolt among conservative Americans, who have accused the President of trying to indoctrinate their senators and representatives with socialist ideas.

"I don't want my legislators exposed to political propaganda," said Karen Bigelow, a housewife from Nacogdoches, Texas. "I did not send them to Washington to have them brainwashed by a liberal Nazi from the executive branch. Whatever happened to the separation of powers?"

In Washington, thousands of conservatives demonstrated in front of the Capitol. Some held signs reading "Congress Is For Congresspeople!" and "First They Come for Our Children and Now Our Representatives!" One woman who chained herself to a fire hydrant wailed, "To think it would come to this in my America! My father fought in Grenada."

The Utah State Legislature unanimously passed a resolution calling for a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit Presidents from appearing before Congress, especially if they're Democrats and/or African-Americans.

http://trueslant.com/lewisgrossberger/2009/09/07/right-wing-furor-growing-over-obama-speech-to-congress

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First Buddhist Army chaplain is from Tennessee

Spiritual diversity challenges military

by Bob Smietana

When Thomas Dyer heads to Afghanistan in December, the former Marine and one-time Southern Baptist pastor won't take a rifle with him. He won't take a Bible, either.

Instead, Dyer, a Tennessean National Guardsman from Memphis and the first Buddhist chaplain in the history of the U.S. Army, hopes to bring serenity and calm, honed by months of intensive meditation.

That preparation, he says, will help him bring spiritual care in the midst of a war zone. "We're going to put it to the test," Dyer said.

Dyer's deployment is another step in the U.S. military's attempt to meet the diverse spiritual needs of America's fighting forces. It's no easy task. For one thing, the military chaplaincy is facing all the complications that have affected American religion over the past 40 years. The decline of mainline Protestants and their aging clergy. The ongoing Catholic priest shortage. The explosion of religious diversity. The emergence of people with no faith. The ease with which people move from one faith to another.

The military is trying to adapt to these changes, while trying to find ministers willing to serve in a war zone, and who can minister to American troops without offending Muslim allies.

Chaplains say they are up to it, saying their "cooperate without compromise" approach allows them to serve soldiers of any faith. But critics wonder if the whole enterprise is doomed to fail.

Military chaplains have cared for the souls of American troops since at least the 1700s. In 1775, the Continental Congress agreed to pay chaplains $20 a month. Gen. George Washington told his commanders to find chaplains of good character and exemplary lives to care for the souls of their troops.

The first chaplains served a mostly Protestant military. Chaplains today serve in a remarkably diverse environment.

The latest report from the Defense Department tracks 101 faiths for active-duty personnel, from 285,763 Roman Catholics to the one member of the Tioga River Christian conference. In between are Baptists, Jews, Buddhists, Bahai's, Mormons and Wiccans. About a half a million active personnel are evangelicals. Almost 281,710 claim no religion.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20090908/NEWS01/909080348/First+Buddhist+Army+chaplain+is+from+Tennessee

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Blogger Asks for Payment From a Newspaper

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Plans to expand US embassy prompt rumors and concern amid anti-US sentiment in Pakistan

by Nahal Toosi

US embassy plans spur rumors, concern in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD — America's plans for a major expansion of its diplomatic presence in Pakistan, including the possible takeover of a bombed luxury hotel near the Taliban heartland, have heightened tensions and bred rumors in a population rife with anti-U.S. sentiment.

Among the tales being floated: that 1,000 U.S. Marines will land in the capital, that Americans will set up a Guantanamo-style prison and that the infamous security contractor once called Blackwater will come in and wreak havoc.

The frenzy, much of it whipped up by the media and Islamist political parties, shows the difficulties for the U.S. as it seeks to increase its engagement in a country where a flourishing militant movement is threatening the war effort in neighboring Afghanistan.

The U.S. says it needs to expand mainly to disburse billions of dollars more in aid to Pakistan, an impoverished nation of 175 million people.

Pakistanis tend to view U.S. motives with suspicion, pointing to a history of American support for the country's past military rulers and involvement in its internal affairs, which they say has stunted the economy and democratic aspirations.

Others believe the U.S. is out to end Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, a source of domestic pride.

"Even an illiterate person knows that the Americans are against our nuclear program, and they will not miss any opportunity to destroy" the nuclear facilities, said Humayoun Qaiser, 23, a student at an Islamic university in Islamabad.

In recent weeks, several newspapers have published unconfirmed reports that 1,000 U.S. Marines will be posted at the U.S Embassy in Islamabad — which would be a significant jump from the nine there now. U.S. officials say at most the number may reach 20. Marine security guards are routine at U.S. missions abroad.

The head of the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami, which has demonstrated against the expansion, recently claimed that the U.S. also plans to build a Guantanamo-like prison, according to a newspaper report. The U.S. denies the claim.

Rumors aside, the embassy does plan to reconstruct the buildings on its 38-acre (15-hectare) compound and acquire an additional 18 acres (7 hectares), much of which will be used for apartments, embassy spokesman Richard Snelsire said.

About 1,450 employees work for the embassy: 1,000 Pakistanis, 250 Americans posted to the site and another 200 Americans on short-term assignments. The plan is to add around 400 people, including about 200 more posted U.S. staffers, Snelsire said.

The major reason for the growth is a proposal in Congress to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan, he said.

http://blog.taragana.com/n/plans-to-expand-us-embassy-prompt-rumors-and-concern-amid-anti-us-sentiment-in-pakistan-162288/

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Health Care Cartoons

By John Jonik











http://www.opednews.com/articles/Health-Care-Cartoons-II-by-John-Jonik-090907-989.html

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Back to School: Military Recruiters Increasingly Targeting High School Teens

As millions of students prepare for the start of another school year, we focus on an issue that concerns many parents: the increasing presence of military recruiters in the nation's high schools and the military's ability to gather information about students. We speak with journalist David Goodman about his Mother Jones article "A Few Good Kids?" and with the New York Civil Liberties Union's Ari Rosmarin, who works on the organization's Project on Military Recruitment and Students' Rights.

Guests:

David Goodman, contributing writer for Mother Jones. His most recent article is titled "A Few Good Kids?: How the No Child Left Behind Act Allowed Military Recruiters to Collect Info on Millions of Unsuspecting Teens."

Ari Rosmarin, Senior Advocacy Coordinator at the New York Civil Liberties Union, where he works on the organization's Project on Military Recruitment and Students' Rights.

JUAN GONZALEZ: As millions of students prepare for the start of another school year, we turn to an issue that concerns many parents: the increasing presence of military recruiters in the nation's high schools and the military's ability to gather information about students.

Journalist David Goodman writes in the new issue of Mother Jones, quote, "Using data mining, stealth websites, career tests, and sophisticated marketing software, the Pentagon is harvesting and analyzing information on everything from high school students' GPAs and SAT scores to which video games they play. Before an Army recruiter even picks up the phone to call a prospect, the soldier may know more about the kid's habits than do his own parents."

To talk more about this, David Goodman joins us on the phone. He's a contributing writer at Mother Jones magazine. His latest article is titled "A Few Good Kids." He's also the co-author, with his sister Amy, of three books. We're also joined by Ari Rosmarin, senior advocacy coordinator at the New York Civil Liberties Union. He works on the organization's Project on Military Recruitment and Students' Rights.

Welcome to the both of you. I want to start with David. It's not just No Child Left Behind. You talk in your article about all kinds of other ways that the government has been and the military has been getting information on America's youth.

DAVID GOODMAN: That's right, Juan. You know, as families and students around the country are about to return to school this week, and New York starts next week, what they may be unaware of is that in the pack—you know, my daughter, who's in high school, along with every high school student—comes this sheaf of papers that you get in a week or two before. Buried in that sheaf is a letter informing them that all information about every high school junior and senior in the country is being sent to military recruiters by default, unless you happen to notice this letter and choose to opt out.

Oddly enough, this letter comes as a result of President George Bush's signature education law, the No Child Left Behind Act, which in 2002 included a provision, slipped in by then-Representative, now-Senator David Vitter from Louisiana, requiring all high schools to provide directory and contact information to recruiters. It effectively transformed this supposed education law into the most aggressive military recruitment tool that the armed services have had to date.

But that, as you point out, is not the only way that information is being gathered. At the same time as the No Child Left Behind law began harvesting this kind of directory information, which the military has not had before—you know, the sight of recruiters at malls and hanging around at high school football games and such has been the more typical scene that we are accustomed to with the all-volunteer Army. They go out, and they try and meet young people wherever they think they'll hang out. Having emails, cell phone numbers and home phone numbers is a whole new level for, you know, what—how recruiters can access young people. But there's more.

We found out, in 2005 privacy advocates were amazed to discover that the Pentagon had been amassing an extraordinary number of names, at this point 34 million names of young people, which is said to be "the largest repository of 16-25–year-old youth data in the country"—those are the military's own words—in something called the JAMRS database. That's the Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies program of the Defense Department. This is where all information has now been centralized, from Selective Service to the No Child Left Behind directory info.

But also it's from commercial data brokers. These are—include groups such as the Student Marketing Group and American Student List. The Pentagon is currently spending about $600,000 a year on these data brokers. Now, what's of concern here, these data brokers are getting information from when you buy a yearbook, when you buy a student ring, when you take any number of, you know, just commercial purchases. However, both of these large commercial data brokers have been accused of using deceptive practices to gather the information. So the New York Attorney General—

JUAN GONZALEZ: David, you actually mention one website, marchtosuccess.com, which you say the Army spent $1.2 million backing this, and it supposedly helps to—provides tips to young people on standardized test taking, and only at the very bottom is it mentioned that it's sponsored by the US military?

DAVID GOODMAN: That's right, marchtosuccess.com is being used by teachers all around the country. They send students to this website, ostensibly to provide them with free standardized test taking tips. And this is designed by the top test prep firms—Kaplan, Princeton Review. Peterson's is the current contractor providing the information. And yet, this is in fact a website run by the Army. You wouldn't know that unless you notice the little tagline in the lower right corner that links to goarmy.com, which is the Army recruiting website. And by the Army's own words to me, one of their most effective recruiting vehicles is goarmy.com.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/4/back_to_school_military_recruiters_increasingly

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HR 3200 from a systems design perspective (Part I)

By bfwebster

[Part II is now up.]

On the occasions where I have reviewed the actual text of major legislation, I have been struck by the parallels between legislation and software, particularly in terms of the pitfalls and issues with architecture, design, implementation, testing, and deployment. Some of the tradeoffs are even the same, such as trading off the risk of "analysis paralysis" (never moving beyond the research and analysis phase) and the risks of unintended consequences from rushing ill-formed software into production. Yet another similarity is that both software and legislation tend to leverage off of, interact with, call upon, extend, and/or replace existing software and legislation.  Finally, the more complex a given system or piece of legislation is, the less likely that it will achieve the original intent.

But there are some critical differences that make legislation design both harder and higher-risk than systems design. (More after the jump.)

Software vs. Legislation

First, software is designed for a target or reference system; you can in theory predict or constrain its behavior, and its behavior is largely repeatable.

Legislation, by contrast, is executed by humans, with wide latitude for interpretation and implementation, as well as misunderstandings, disagreements on meaning, and on-the-fly modifications.

Second, software typically has several layers of independent (non-human) syntactic, semantic, and integration checking that it of necessity goes through before deployment (though plenty of defects can and do  slip through).

Legislation, by contrast, is written in a natural (human) language, with all its gaps, faults, and ambiguities, and with nothing to force error checking in syntax, semantics, and integration; there's no way of "compiling", "linking" and doing a test run of the legislation in a limited environment before it becomes the (largely irrevocable) law of the land.

Third, because of the previous two factors, two or more software engineers can typically reach professional agreement on what a given section of source code will do; if they continue to disagree, there are standard tools and methods by which they can objectively demonstrate how the software will behave, either exactly or within general limits.

By contrast, and due to the corresponding factors with legislation, two or more people (legislators, executives, judges, and citizens) can interpret a given section of legislation quite differently, and each may well have a defensible position, due to the potentially wide latitude of and arena for interpretation.

Some Design Flaws of HR 3200

This all comes to mind as I have been reviewing HR 3200, aka the House bill on health care reform. While I am neither a legislator nor a lawyer (though I have worked closely with lawyers for a decade), I am a professional software architect/engineer, and a professional writer, who has worked in the IT field for 35 years. From that point of view, I believe HR 3200 will exhibit profound problems and unintended (or unclaimed) consequences if passed. Here are some of reasons why.

To begin with, HR 3200 suffers from all the problems listed above with legislation. It is written in English, and complex, obscure, jargon-laden English at that. Many of the sections are imprecise and/or incomplete, leaving large amounts of interpretation and implementation to unelected humans. Many of the objections to HR 3200 come from this very problem, including the concern that the ambiguity is deliberate and intended to open doors to politically unpalatable consequences.

HR 3200 is also massive and very complex — over 1000 pages in printed form, with hundreds of sections. For its sheer length alone, it is difficult to understand and interpret, but (as indicated below) there are other factors that make overall comprehension nearly impossible. It also makes after-the-fact revocation or even modification extremely difficult.

Much of HR 3200 makes piecemeal modifications to existing legislation, often with little explanation as to intent and consequences. So, for example:

SEC. 1148. DURABLE MEDICAL EQUIPMENT PROGRAM IMPROVEMENTS.

…

(c) Treatment of Current Accreditation Applications- Section 1834(a)(20)(F) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 1395m(a)(20)(F)) is amended–

(1) in clause (i)–

(A) by striking 'clause (ii)' and inserting 'clauses (ii) and (iii)';

(B) by striking 'and' at the end;

(2) by striking the period at the end of clause (ii)(II) and by inserting '; and'; and

(3) by adding at the end the following:

'(iii) the requirement for accreditation described in clause (i) shall not apply for purposes of supplying diabetic testing supplies, canes, and crutches in the case of a pharmacy that is enrolled under section 1866(j) as a supplier of durable medical equipment, prosthetics, orthotics, and supplies.

Any supplier that has submitted an application for accreditation before August 1, 2009, shall be deemed as meeting applicable standards and accreditation requirement under this subparagraph until such time as the independent accreditation organization takes action on the supplier's application.'

This happens repeatedly throughout HR 3200; in fact, one entire portion (Division A, Title IV) is labeled "AMENDMENTS TO INTERNAL REVENUE CODE OF 1986″. This makes it difficult — beyond the ambiguities of the language itself — to determine just what is being modified and what the potential implications are.

http://brucefwebster.com/2009/09/07/hr-3200-from-a-systems-design-perspective-part-i/

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MoveOn & R.E.M. Video: We Can't Afford to Wait

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Back to school homeless

There are federal mandates and some stimulus funds, but not nearly enough to keep up with this heartbreaking problem.

By Judy Lightfoot

According to a National Center on Family Homelessness (NCFH) Fact Sheet published in April 2008, there are more homeless women and children living in the U.S. than in any other industrialized nation. Even if you already knew that, it's still shocking to read in a New York Times story by Erik Eckholm, "Surge in Homeless Children Strains School Districts," that in spring 2009 more than 1 million American children were homeless.

The number is going up. Estimates are that the count of homeless children has risen by 75 to 100 percent over the past two years as a result of family job losses and mortgage foreclosures, and will continue to rise at accelerated rates. This is bad news not just for parents and children but for school districts.

The stresses of homelessness tell not only on the children and their parents, but also on schools. School districts financially strapped by the economic downturn and other factors lack resources to help a child who couldn't do his homework before falling asleep alongside his parents in the family car the previous night, or who is continually shuttled from relatives' homes to a room in a motel to a campground tent.

Under the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, first voted into law in 2001, districts are required to take specific steps on behalf of children who become homeless. The purpose is to minimize interruptions of their schooling and cut red tape that could bar or delay their entrance into appropriate programs. McKinney-Vento has "closed destructive gaps in schooling," say the sources Eckholm cites. But even with some Congressional funding to aid compliance, school districts already financially strapped by the recession and other factors are finding it harder to meet needs specified in the federal mandate as the numbers of homeless children increase.

http://crosscut.com/2009/09/09/k-12/19221/

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I got a ton of liberty

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Soldier killed in Afghanistan re-enlisted to get health care coverage for family

CNN news anchor John Roberts asks "How far would you go to get good health insurance?" A report this morning tells the heartbreaking story of a man who lost his job as a computer consultant, and along with the job went the health insurance for his family.

Army SPC Greg Missman had ended his military service 11 years earlier, but signed back on in order to provide his young son Jack with health insurance coverage.

After only one month on the ground in Afghanistan, Missman's father Jim received the news that Greg's convoy had been ambushed, and Greg was killed in the attack.

CNN reports that a "Pentagon spokesman said there is no way to count how many soldiers have joined the armed services to get health care benefits. As for Greg Missman, his son will continue to receive military health insurance so this soldier's sacrifice will live on."

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/09/soldier-killed-in-afghanistan-re-enlisted-to-get-health-care-coverage-for-family/

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Palin Sides With Obama on Afghanistan

By Peter Baker

On at least one of his major policies, President Obama is getting support, and a nudge, from an unlikely quarter – Sarah Palin.

Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska and last year's Republican vice presidential nominee, joined a group of conservatives signing a letter to Mr. Obama praising him for his management of Afghanistan and urging him to commit more troops there.

It's not as if Ms. Palin has been all that supportive of Mr. Obama in other arenas. Just last month, she referred to his health care plan as "downright evil," and she asserted incorrectly that the president's health proposals would institute "death panels" to cut off care to the elderly or infirm. She has criticized Mr. Obama's spending plans and other initiatives.

Among others who signed the letter, organized by the Foreign Policy Initiative, a newly created conservative organization, were Karl Rove, the senior adviser to Mr. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush; William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard; and Ryan C. Crocker, the former ambassador to Iraq.

The letter to Mr. Obama said its signatories "congratulate you on the leadership you demonstrated" by sending 21,000 more troops and replacing the military commanders in Afghanistan this year, and it called on him to grant an anticipated request for more troops from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. "We urge you to continue on the path you have taken thus far and give our commanders on the ground the forces they need to implement a successful counterinsurgency strategy," the letter said.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/palin-sides-with-obama-on-afghanistan/

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Puzzled

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Obama's Hypno Secrets!

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