Why Soldiers Rape

by Helen Benedict

Jennifer Dyer, in an interview with 60 Minutes, explains the pressure of reporting rape in the military. (Photo: CBS News)

    Culture of misogyny, illegal occupation fuel sexual violence in military.

    An alarming number of women soldiers are being sexually abused by their comrades-in-arms, both at war and at home. This fact has received a fair amount of attention lately from researchers and the press - and deservedly so.

    But the attention always focuses on the women: where they were when assaulted, their relations with the assailant, the effects on their mental health and careers, whether they are being adequately helped, and so on. That discussion, as valuable as it is, misses a fundamental point. To understand military sexual assault, let alone know how to stop it, we must focus on the perpetrators. We need to ask: Why do soldiers rape?

    Rape in civilian life is already unacceptably common. One in six women is raped or sexually assaulted in her lifetime, according to the National Institute of Justice, a number so high it should be considered an epidemic.

    In the military, however, the situation is even worse. Rape is almost twice as frequent as it is among civilians, especially in wartime. Soldiers are taught to regard one another as family, so military rape resembles incest. And most of the soldiers who rape are older and of higher rank than their victims, so are taking advantage of their authority to attack the very people they are supposed to protect.

    Department of Defense reports show that nearly 90 percent of rape victims in the Army are junior-ranking women, whose average age is 21, while most of the assailants are non-commissioned officers or junior men, whose average age is 28.

http://www.truthout.org/article/why-soldiers-rape

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The Biggest Story of Our Lives

by Jim Lampley

At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.

People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.

And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.

Many of the participants in this blog have graduate school educations. It is damned near impossible to go to graduate school in any but the most artistic disciplines without having to learn about the basics of social research and its uncanny accuracy and validity. We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, thaty's why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush's favor. Coincidence? Of course not.

Karl Rove isn't capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-lampley/the-biggest-story-of-our-_b_576.html

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Nope

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No blood for oil

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Is Laura Leaving Bush After he Leaves Office Because He's Been Hitting the Sauce Again?

by Mark Karlin

Okay, don't tell me you don't look at the tabloids on the sly when you are in the supermarket checkout line. I do. Sometimes, yes, I even buy one, if there is a timely potentially believable political scandal story.

Most of the time, the tabloids focus on Britney and Paris (now also of John McCain ad fame), but when they go after a political figure, we have found that some of them have about a 50% chance of being onto something. For instance, The National Enquirer had such specific details of the Edwards trip to the hotel in Beverly Hills that he could have sued them for libel if it weren't true. And as sleazy as these publications are, The Enquirer was credited with being one of the more accurate sources on the Lewinsky scandal.

The main reason that the mainstream press looks down on them on political stories is that they pay for information if they need to, not to mention that "real" reporters look down on their tabloid brethren.

So it's not surprising that there's been a persistent tabloid story that the corporate establishment media has been ignoring: allegations that Laura Bush has basically decided to part company with Junior after his term of office is over again.

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorblog/112

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Persian diplomat

Iranian comic Maz Jobrani tries to help
Americans think beyond the idiot box

SCHOOLING THE WEST ON THE EAST: Jobrani

by NARCEL X

Nursing a broken ankle and eagerly awaiting the birth of his son, Maz Jobrani, the Persian element of the Axis of Evil comedy quartet, is no stranger to multi-tasking. From starring alongside Sean Penn in The Interpreter to being a staple voice at the world famous Laugh Factory, Maz is at his best under pressure.

From making fun of his heritage by saying Iranians refuse to be called anything but Persian (like the cat, he says) to teaching the crowd how to pronounce the current president's name (Ahmed I'mma-need-a-job), Jobrani serves as a light-hearted diplomat in the ever-growing gap between the East and West. Hitting the stage for this year's Just for Laughs, he spoke to me from his Los Angeles home about future plans, political misconceptions and his knack for Iranian spiced humor.

Mirror: With all the rhetoric and finger pointing at Iran in the last couple of months, what do you feel your role as a comedian is?

Maz Jobrani: It's to educate and shed light on the origin of my people. A lot of Americans don't think beyond the idiot box. Iran has been demonized and definitely simplified—there are 75 million people there. I think it's important to humanize my people, and make the advocates of war realize the cost of war. Before war, there is diplomacy. That's what I do, a form of diplomacy. I try to make people laugh and leave with a different perspective on Iran.

http://www.montrealmirror.com/2008/071008/comedy3.html

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30 years later...

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Back on the bottle?

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How to blow it

It's the most winnable presidential election in American history - but the Democrats are old hands at losing. Michael Moore offers some helpful hints on how they might gift it all to the Republicans.

by Michael Moore

"Let's snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."
"We never met an election we'd like to win."
"Why get elected when you can be defeated!"

These have been the mantras of the Democratic Party. Beginning with their stunning inability to defeat the most detested politician in American history, Richard Nixon, and continuing through their stunning inability to defeat the most detested politician in the world, George II, the Democrats are the masters of blowing it. And they don't just simply "blow it" - they blow it especially when the electorate seems desperate to give it to them.

After eight years of Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, the public had seen enough. The Democrats chose Michael Dukakis as their nominee. Two months before the election, he was ahead of Bush I in the polls. Then he went to an army tank factory in Michigan, put on some kind of stupid-fitting helmet and rode around in a tank with a goofy smile on his face. Weeks later, when asked what kind of punishment he would like to see given to someone who might rape his wife, he started mumbling some sort of bleeding-heart gibberish instead of just saying what anyone would say: "I'd like to tear the bastard limb from limb!" The voters were so put off by his wimpiness, they elected an actual wimp over him, George H W Bush.

For years now, nearly every poll has shown that the American people are right in sync with the platform of the Democratic Party. They are pro-environment, pro-women's rights, pro-choice, they don't like war, they want the minimum wage raised, and they want a single-payer universal healthcare system. The American public agrees with the Republican Party on only one major issue: they support the death penalty.

So you would think, with more than 200 million eligible voters, the Dems would be cleaning up, election after election. Obviously not. The Democrats appear to be professional losers. They are so pathetic in their ability to win elections, they even lose when they win! Al Gore won the 2000 election, but for some strange reason he didn't become the president of the United States.

If you are unable as a party to get the landlord to turn over the keys to a house that is yours, what the hell good are you?

http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=1035

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Too good

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Yes, she can

By Maureen Dowd

 

WASHINGTON: While Obama was spending three hours watching "The Dark Knight" five time zones away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring "Aloha attire" and Hawaiian pupus, Hillary was busy planning her convention.

You can almost hear her mind whirring: She's amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn't eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.

Now they've made Barry's convention all about them - their dissatisfaction and revisionism and barely disguised desire to see him fail. Whatever insincere words of support the Clintons muster, their primal scream gets louder: He can't win! He can't close the deal! We told you so!

Hillary's orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.

http://iht.com/articles/2008/08/13/opinion/edowd.php

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Should Barack Obama or Cindy McCain really be in prison?

 

That's the mad logic of the 'War on Drugs'. So why the silence?

by Johann Hari

 

On January 20th 2009, either the president of the United States will be a man who used to snort coke to ease his blues, or the First Lady will be a former drug addict who stole from charity to get her next fix. In this presidential campaign, there are dozens of issues that have failed to flicker into the debate, but the most striking is the failing, flailing 'War on Drugs.' Isn't it a sign of how unwinnable this 'war' is that, if it was actually enforced evenly, either Barack Obama or Cindy McCain would have to skip the inauguration -- because they'd be in jail?

At least their time in the slammer would feature some familiar faces: they could share a cell with Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and some 46 percent of the US population.

The prohibition of drugs is perhaps the most disastrous policy currently pursued by the US government. It hands a vast industry to armed criminal gangs, who proceed to kill at least excess 10,000 citizens a year to protect their patches. It exports this programme of mass slaughter to Mexico, Colombia and beyond. It has been a key factor in reviving the Taliban in Afghanistan. It squanders tens of billions of dollars on prisons at home, ensuring that one in 31 adults in the US now in prison or on supervised release at any one time. And it has destroyed an entire generation of black men, who are now more likely to go to prison for drug offences than to go to university.

And for what? Prohibition doesn't stop people using drugs. Between 1972 and 1978, eleven US states decriminalized marijuana possession. So did hundreds of thousands of people rush out to smoke the now-legal weed? The National Research Council found that it had no effect on the number of dope-smokers. None. The people who had always liked it carried on; the people who didn't felt no sudden urge to start.

So where's the debate? The candidates have spent more time discussing froth and fancies -- how much air is in your tyres? -- than this $40bn-a-year 'war."

http://johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1354

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And then I warned Putin...

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Police seek motive in shooting of Arkansas Democratic leader

 

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Police on Thursday sought to uncover what led a gunman to burst into the headquarters of the Arkansas Democratic Party and kill the chairman, a top ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, US media said.

Bill Gwatney, 48, was shot multiple times in the upper body and died shortly afterward at the hospital, police said.

His assailant, 50-year-old Tim Johnson, was fatally shot after a police chase into a neighboring county.

He had no criminal record and had reportedly been fired earlier that morning from his job at a Target store, but it was unclear if or how he knew Gwatney, according to local news reports.
Police were called to a Target store in Conway, about 25 miles north of Little Rock, early Wednesday after coworkers complained about an agitated employee who had been fired for writing graffiti on a wall, the Arkansas News said.

The employee, Johnson, was "very agitated and shaking, and they feared for their safety," said Conway police spokeswoman Sharen Carter, who added that Johnson had departed by the time police arrived.

Several hours later, just before noon, Johnson walked in the state Democratic Party headquarters and asked for Gwatney.

A volunteer who was in the office at the time said Johnson had indicated he was "interested in volunteering, but that was obviously a lie."

Once Gwatney came out to meet him, "they introduced themselves, and at that time he (Johnson) pulled out a handgun and shot Chairman Gwatney several times. He then turned and left the business," said police lieutenant Terry Hastings.

The killing left fellow Democratic leaders in shock less than two weeks before the party's national convention in the midst of a fierce battle for the White House.

 

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jm9DYuIE_x8ICCCwKAhyi3PneK_A

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Drill American

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Haunted by Elizabeth

A Powerful Campaigner Missed the Cold Facts of a Modern Election

By Anne Taylor Fleming

 

John and Elizabeth Edwards in Tipton, Iowa, in June 2007.

(Photo by John Edwards 2008 Campaign)

What what she thinking?

That's the question that continues to haunt the painful saga of John and Elizabeth Edwards. Not that she loves him and stayed with him after he confessed to having an affair (and possible lust child; though whether he told her about that we don't know).

If we have learned one thing watching Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, it is that marriages are complex, each and every one, with its bargains, and attachments, and wounds that run deep. After, of course, insisting she was not some little woman standing by her man, Hillary Clinton was in many respects just that. It was clearly what she needed to do, sailing on post-presidency into the Senate and her own fierce run for the White House.

No, the question in Elizabeth Edwards's case is: Why in the world did she go ahead and let him run — run with him, run hard all across the country, giving her all despite her stage four cancer and her two young children — after she knew. After she knew about his dalliance with a bouncy, blond so-called filmmaker with a penchant for New Age spirituality.

In these days of her public humiliation, one wants not to add to it. He is the cad, the creep. Looking back at his charm, his expensively coiffed hair, his caramel-voiced defense of the poor — while he built a palatial country estate. All this was a bit suspicious at the time. There were overtones of another Slick Willy.

But then there was Elizabeth Edwards. She was the moral anchoring point, the class act. So authentic, so warm, so unslick, so graceful, so brave. If a woman of such obvious depth and concern for the country, a woman who had lost a son and had faced cancer with openness and strength — sharing it all but not in a sympathy-begging way — if a woman like that loved a man like that, well then, he must be OK, too.

http://washingtonindependent.com/179/haunted-by-elizabeth

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Paying the piper

By Tom Mockaitis

Well, it has finally happened. The crisis born of unilateralism, strategic overreach and bravado has come to pass. With U.S. forces tied down in two protracted wars, American credibility on the international stage at a record low and our dependence on foreign oil painfully obvious, a revitalized Russia is on the move. And the blow has fallen where most analysts expected it would: on America's closest ally in the Caucasus, the tiny Republic of Georgia.

Traumatized by its fall from superpower status at the end of the Cold War, the Kremlin has nursed a growing resentment at a series of humiliations and needlessly provocative moves by the Bush administration over the past eight years. NATO's war against Serbia revealed the limits of Russian power after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The confrontation at Pristina Airport between British Gen. Michael Jackson's Kosovo Force and Russian troops rushed in from Bosnia ended with President Boris Yeltsin backing down, largely because NATO hopefuls Bulgaria and Romania closed their airspace to Russian aircraft that might have flown in reinforcements. The episode should have served as a poignant warning that Moscow would not take another such embarrassment lying down. Conciliation, not confrontation, should have guided American foreign policy in Eastern Europe during the past decade.

Instead, Washington continued to poke the Russian bear with a stick. The first prod came with plans for a missile defense system of dubious value in Poland, supported by radar installations in Slovakia.

The Bush administration justified the deployment as part of its global war on terrorism, assuring a skeptical Vladimir Putin that the defense system aimed to protect the U.S. from attack by a rogue state such as Iran.

Putin didn't buy it. While the White House focused myopically on Al Qaeda and bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, Putin consolidated power in Russia, dealt with Chechnya, and bided his time.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped0818georgiaaug13,0,2100829.story

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I'm typing as fast as I can

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Russia says Georgian move for South Ossetia was 'like 9/11'

Georgia's attempt to reclaim South Ossetia has been compared with 9/11 by Sergei Ivanov, the Russian Deputy Prime Minister.

By Jon Swaine
Seeking to justify Moscow's overwhelming response to Georgia's attempt to reassert itself over the breakway province, Mr Ivanov said that Russia had no choice but to take military action, just as the US felt bound to respond after the attacks by al-Qa'eda on New York and Washington in September 2001.

"We just reacted because we didn't have any other option. Any civilised country would act same way. I may remind you - September 11th, the reaction was similar. American citizens were killed. You know the reaction," Mr Ivanov said.

International condemnation for the Russian response had taken Moscow by surprise, according to Mr Ivanov. "We didn't think that we annoyed anybody," he said.

Mr Ivanov also rubbished comments by David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary. Mr Miliband earlier accused Russia of engaging in "19th Century forms of diplomacy" in its "blatant aggression" towards Georgia. He said "the sight of Russian tanks rolling into parts of a sovereign country on its neighboring borders will have brought a chill down the spine of many people, rightly".

Mr Miliband's claim that Russia was keen restore the Soviet Union was "total rubbish - to use a proper English word," Mr Ivanov said.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, earlier taunted the US and Georgia over the crisis, describing the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili as a "special project" of the Bush administration rather than a proper state.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/georgia/2556139/Russia-says-Georgian-move-for-South-Ossetia-was-like-911.html

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Distraction

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