Caliphate, Bush's timeline, and the 500 year war.

As a few of you may know, I'm an active duty NCO in the USAF. I don't like to bring that up much, since it might seem that I'm trying to argue from authority rather than making my point through analysis of facts. But in this case, it's a crucial detail to what I'm writing about today.

Yesterday we had an "all hands call" here at Andersen AFB for junior NCOs (E-5 & E-6) to be briefed by the senior enlisted advisor of USSTRATCOM, Command Master Chief William N. Nissen and the senior enlisted advisor of USPACOM, Command Sergeant Major William T. Kinney (USMC) about long term strategy. Cool, I thought. Maybe I might learn something here.

Boy did I, but not the way I expected. The first half with CMCPO Nissen was informative, if a bit dry. He talked about how DoD structure worked in times of war vs. times of peace and what the functions of braches are vs. the functions of combatant commands. It was interesting, but I was getting a bit drowsy toward the end of it.

The second half was a different story. CSM Kinney got up and spoke, and his speech could not have been more blatantly partisan if he'd been wearing a GOP button. He mentioned "uneducated liberals", talked about Democrats as "quitters" and said that the enemy had influenced the election in their favor this past November. He said that people who voted for Democrats were voting from emotion vice intellect and that we needed to "educate" our loved ones back home or people we ran into in the airport about the nature of our enemy. He had a number of doozies, like referring to Saudi Arabia as a "moderate Muslim country", referring to people telling Israel to give up Jerusalem, and stating that the Iraq War is nothing like the Vietnam War because "when we left Vietnam, it ended! This is gonna keep going!" I still don't know what a "state-sponsored country" is, and I snickered out loud when he at his Freudian slip when he said that the terrorists had already gotten rid of a secular government in "Iraq... er, Iran".

He talked about how the Taliban said that we may have all the weapons, but they have all the time. That struck me as obvious, since it's sort of their fucking country and we're going to have to leave some day. Then he went into the Caliphate and how this apparently is the greatest threat to mankind since Nazi Germany. The Caliphate is a pipe dream of some Islamists to form a unified Muslim nation and institute Islamic law over half the eastern hemisphere. Frankly, most of the countries covered are already Muslim nations, and if it gets them to stop blowing each other (and us) up, I'm all for it. But that presumes that these Islamists have the means of carrying their dream out, which they don't. Philosophical views aside, most Muslims (like most Americans) simply want to be left the fuck alone to live their lives and only engage in terrorism under extreme duress or desperation. It hardly seems like the sort of thing around which we should be forming our long-term foreign policy and military strategy.

And how long term is it? Sgt Maj Kinney told us about the "Long War", which is what the Bush Administration now calls the Global War on Terror (GWOT). They've never offered a timeline in the past, but they apparently do have one. Sgt Maj Kinney let it slip with this one:

"We're entering into a 500 year war here, people."

Let that sink in for a bit. It took me almost a day before I said, "Wait, what!?" I initially ignored the remark because so much else of what he said was just complete bullshit, but he said this in the context of talking about how this was going to be a long war that Americans don't have the patience for because it's not the kind of short war that our MTV generation (and Sun Tzu, if you've ever read Art of War; he wrote, "No country has ever profited from protracted warfare." But I digress.) prefer. He was saying that we have to have the "will" to outlast them. On top of that, he's in a very influential position as the senior enlisted advisor for PACOM.

So it's not that the administration doesn't have a timeline. They do. It's just that they don't want to tell anybody what it is:

500 years.

I'm going to write some letters. I suggest you do the same.

Gulfnews: Soldier grins and confesses to rape

http://www.gulfnews.com/world/U.S.A/10083150.html

Fort Campbell, Kentucky: One of four US soldiers accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl last spring showed little remorse and even smiled during a confession to charges he conspired to kill her and her family.

Even before the hearing on Wednesday to announce a plea agreement, James P. Barker, 23, slapped hands with other soldiers and grinned as he smoked a cigarette in the rain. A bailiff scolded him.

And when he described for the judge the assault in his own words, he gave vivid details of the rape with a deadpan delivery.

"That's pretty much all I have to say," Barker muttered with a shrug after describing raping the screaming girl. Barker agreed to plead guilty to the charges to avoid the death penalty, his civilian attorney David Sheldon said.

In case you were thinking about looking at the occupation of Iraq from an academic point of view, I submit Exhibit A in my case of how this war is going to impact us for a generation. Think these guys are the only ones who think this way? No, they've dehumanized an entire population to the point that soldiers now think it is not only acceptable to rape a 14 year-old girl and kill her family, but praise-worthy. These guys are every bit as bad as the SS storm troopers in Nazi Germany, and they're all coming home eventually.
I posted on this back on 7 August 2006. You can find that post in my Archives if you want to get a feel for the whirlwind we're about to reap.

And for all you limousine liberals who pooh-pooh my unwillingness to support Democratic candidates who support this occupation as some sort of unreasonable moral purity, I'd like to ask you: do you think that killing people for fun or sport is wrong? That's what we have our soldiers doing over there right now. Do you think that killing people for political or economic gain is wrong? That's why our politicians sent them over there.

If you cannot agree that killing people for no reason is wrong and should be stopped immediately, then I don't know what else to say to you.

448,077

Thanks to Bartcop.com for bringing this to our attention:

That is the vote count for Joe Lieberman's Republican opponent Phil Giordano in 2000. It is also the vote count for Joe Lieberman's Democratic opponent Ned Lamont in 2006.

This is really, really fishy. Somebody needs to look into this.

Et tu, James Carville?

Immediately after an historic victory for the Democratic Party in the mid-term elections, Democratic strategist James Carville had his say. You'd think he'd be pleased. You'd be wrong:

Some big name Democrats want to oust DNC Chairman Howard Dean, arguing that his stubborn commitment to the 50-state strategy and his stinginess with funds for House races cost the Democrats several pickup opportunities.

The candidate being floated to replace Dean? Harold Ford.

Says James Carville, one of the anti-Deaniacs, "Suppose Harold Ford became chairman of the DNC? How much more money do you think we could raise? Just think of the difference it could make in one day. Now probably Harold Ford wants to stay in Tennessee. I just appointed myself his campaign manager."

Here are some comments from around the blogosphere:

At Daily Kos:

Dean was elected. If Carville has a master plan to stage a coup against Dean, I'd love to see it. But I doubt the state party chairs who provided Dean's margin of victory are going to get too torn up about the fact that Dean is helping fund their resurgence.

At Monkeyfister:

Look, Schuler, Emmanual, and Carville-- Put your long knives down, and STEP THE FUCK AWAY... We WON... Get it? We SWEPT THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE...

Learn to WORK TOGETHER, DAMMIT. We Democrats and Progressives are sick and fucking tired of this "Liberal Herd of Cats" mentality... Pull your shit together, and stop fucking one another while we're AHEAD... Just fucking ONCE???!!!!??? Can ya just be happy we won because we COOPERATED this time??? Your bullshit does NOTHING but LOSE elections when you act like this.

Let the GOP stab each other... It's NOT for US to do that. Put your fucking EGOs DOWN, STEP AWAY, and work on UNITY you bunch of fuckwipes. How about planning how we ALL can work together BETTER for a 2008 Presidential Victory-- THAT is your fucking job right now-- now stealing the limelight, or stabbing your Brothers and Sisters in the back.

At Blah3:

I don't have a whole lot of time here (I've got an early gig tonight), but I just wanted to say that the suggestion of replacing Howard Dean - the very architect of the 50-state strategy that opened the can of whoop-ass on the Rubber-Stamp Republican Congress - is probably the most bone-headed thing that Carville has ever said.

Yep, he's a genius, all right - right up there with that other super-genius, Karl Rove.

Sit down, James. Your time has come and gone.

Me? I think we need to take a closer look at Mr. Carville.

Carville's dedication to Democratic victory in 2004:

On election night 2004, GOP communications guru Mary Matalin was with Bush and Vice President Cheney and talking with her husband, Democratic strategist James Carville , who was close to -- but not in -- John Kerry 's campaign.

Kerry, Carville told her, was going to challenge 250,000 provisional ballots in Ohio, which could change the result there or tie things up for a long time. Matalin promptly told Cheney, and they met with Bush. The Kerry camp made the announcement shortly thereafter.

What's a little pillow talk between opposing campaign strategists, right? But was he reckless or strategic? We know where his loyalties lie. A few months ago, he wrote an article called "The Power of Hillary" talking up Sen. Hillary Clinton's (D-NY) chances in a Presidential election. Carville speaks glowingly of Sen. Clinton's political savvy, endurance, and belovedness nation-wide. It's not just that he thinks she can win; it's clear that he wants her to run.

What's the common denominator here? If Kerry won in 2004, Clinton is ruled out for 2008. If Kerry won re-election in 2008, then Vice President Edwards would be the hands-down favorite in 2012. Sen. Clinton ain't getting any younger. In the case of Dean, this historic victory gives him the clout to become a king-maker in 2008. It's not that Dean would be biased against Clinton; it's just that he wouldn't be biased for her. So who does he propose? Harold Ford, the Tennessee Democrat who continued the fine DLC tradition of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

But there's more to it than that. Carville's DLC loyalties translate into corporate loyalties. Consider some of his foreign affairs experience:

Venezuela's embattled private sector is banking on the colorful U.S. political consultant James Carville to help oust leftist President Hugo Chavez. The hire may herald an effort by the anti-Chavistas to focus more on the issues than on personality.

According to several individuals with knowledge of the matter, a group of business executives contracted with Mr. Carville this year to craft a strategy that will unify a fractious and frustrated Chavez opposition and resonate with voters in a possible recall referendum. The executives are hoping that Mr. Carvillethe folksy, 59-year-old Democratic Party consultant from Louisiana known as the Ragin' Cajunwill push a variation of his "It's the economy, stupid" theme that helped propel Bill Clinton to victory in 1992. But analysts say Mr. Carville and his clients face a formidable challenge.

http://www.casavenezuela.org/05persp/articles/economia_stupid.html

Mr. Carville is also rumored to have been involved with the unsuccessful coup against Chavez in 2002, although these rumors may be a misunderstanding of Mr. Carville's support for President Chavez's corporate opponents. Either way, it lines up with the DLC's and Mr. Carville's support of corporations ahead of Democratic principles. Carville has done as much as anybody in America to portray Chavez as a dictator, when he is, in fact a President whose election was monitored by former President Carter and certified as legitimate. President Chavez has a greater claim to legitimacy than President Bush.

Now let's examine Carville's excellent adventures in Bolivia:

Political documentaries don’t come any more shaming than Rachel Boynton’s terrific ‘‘Our Brand is Crisis,’’ a barely straight-faced account of what happened in Bolivia in 2002, when a group of US consultants helped a candidate win the presidency only to see the country slide into near-total chaos.

Globalism extends to the American way of campaigning, it seems, and the hubris of the gringo strategists — earnest ex-Clintonistas employed by James Carville’s Greenberg Carville Shrum group — would be hilarious if human lives and a country’s political will weren’t at stake.

It’s a galling and provocative experience to viewers of any political persuasion, and a reminder to the left of how easily idealism can run amok.

The Carville boys were hired by Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a.k.a. ‘‘Goni,’’ a patrician Bolivian businessman who served a rough term as Bolivia’s president in the mid-’90s. Goni’s legacy was an unsuccessful program of ‘‘capitalization’’ (i.e., he welcomed foreign investment and watched foreigners get all the jobs).

All hail the free market gods.

Against Goni are Evo Morales, a socialist firebrand who represents the country’s coca growers but who denies he’s a drug lord or a terrorist, and Cochabamba mayor Manfred Reyes Villa, a thoughtful pragmatist with a charismatic head of hair. Villa leads in the polls, so Rosner and company decide he must be taken down.

It’s a measure of the trust filmmaker Boynton built with the Americans that they happily discuss negative campaigning with the cameras rolling — either that, or they’re willfully blind. Management consultant Tal Silverstein insists ‘‘we have to turn [Villa] from a clean candidate to a dirty one,’’ and articles go out fretting about his military experience and digging into his finances. ‘‘Tomorrow they’ll probably say I’m an associate of Osama bin Laden,’’ Villa shrugs in an interview.

Karl Rove could take notes.

Goni wins by the narrowest of margins in a severely split field. He does little for several months (other than plan to ship Bolivia’s natural gas from a port in enemy Chile), then decides to raise taxes. Cut to riots in the streets. Over a hundred people died in the ensuing months, and Goni eventually fled to America. In late 2005, Morales won the presidency with a historic 54 percent of the vote. You could argue that the Carville consultants helped drive Bolivia into his arms, since the centrist Villa would likely have won in 2002 without their intervention.

This begs the question: Carville may know how to win elections, but does he know a thing about good government? The answer is clearly "no". Getting back to Dean, the DNC under his leadership seems to be more interested in building a strong infrastructure than in getting particular Democrats (namely, Hillary) elected President. Carville, on the other hand, would like to put another Clinton in the White House. Not only is he fiercely loyal to them, but it would also put another notch under his belt. But Democrats whose last names are not "Clinton" need to watch out for this little weasel. His loyalty is not to the Democratic Party or to Democratic ideals. His loyalty is to corporate America and the Clintons. He could give a rat's ass if the Democrats won the House and Senate. He wants to use the DNC as a tool to sew up the nomination for Hillary early. That's why he wants Harold Ford in the big seat and not Dean.

That's the conflict. It's not about egos, it's about differing agendas. Anybody who thinks Carville can be trusted at this point needs to look at his history. He's a pit bull for very specific interests; nothing more, nothing less.

Electronic voting machine slays nine?

Democrats are turning away from the problems with electronic voting machines because they happened to win this time around. Not so fast, says Brad Friedman in Computer World.

They didn't check with Bill Ritter, the Colorado gubernatorial candidate, who had to wait almost two hours to vote, or with Sean Kelley, a Denver resident, who said to the Post, "I can't believe I'm in the United States of America," before he gave up and went home without voting after waiting three hours in line when electronic machines broke down. Despite an emergency request, the courts in Colorado refused to allow the city's new consolidated "Election Centers" to remain open for extra hours that night.

Similar problems led to slightly more responsible officials ordering polls to be kept open longer than scheduled in at least eight other states due to voting machine problems.

Everybody, Democrats in particular since they're going to be the ones running the agenda in Congress, need to stay on top of this issue. The solution is easy, of course: a voter verifiable paper receipt and internal paper trail in the voting machine itself. Diebold makes ATMs without these kinds of electronic glitches and with much better accountability than their voting machines do. Why can't they track our votes like they track our money? Our votes are every bit as important.

Now that the Democrats are in Congress, we have the ability to affect real change on this issue. It has been, and this is a matter of public record, the Republicans who have been opposed to paper trails. Why they are opposed to them is a matter of speculation (one could posit that they didn't want to mess with a system that had been working to their advantage, since every "glitch" benefited the Republicans), but they shouldn't be. How hard would it be for a George Soros or Hugo Chavez to come along and finance the hacking of these machines to swing things the Democrats' way (not saying they would, but for the sake of discussion...)?



Paper trail. Insist upon it, especially if your Congress critter is a Democrat. Let's not give the Democrats a pass on this one the way the pro-life movement did regarding the Republicans' inattention on the abortion issue. Legislation mandating a paper trail for these electronic voting machines must be passed within the first 100 days or it will never happen. Arm twist to over-ride a Presidential veto if you have to, although I don't think they will. Once this issue gets brought to the American people, the President will bow to public pressure and accept the paper trails. It just makes sense.

This isn't about Republicans vs. Democrats; this is about the integrity of our democracy. It's an issue Republicans and Democrats should be able to come together on.

Crazy like a fox.

In other news, turns out Howard Dean is crazy like a fox. Who knew?

Nov. 10, 2006 | Only weeks after the Democratic National Committee chose Howard Dean as its chairman last year, the nasty whispers began to circulate around Washington and among longtime party donors and activists in cities from New York to Los Angeles. "He's going to be a disaster," they muttered. "He can't raise any money. He doesn't know what he's doing. And what does he mean by this crazy 50-state strategy?"

Those early days must have been painful for the former Vermont governor -- still smarting back then from his presidential primary defeat and that endlessly looped "scream" video -- and he endured a barrage of snarks and snipes from the Democratic congressional leadership as well. Unfortunately for Dean, he doesn't play the Washington press corps nearly as well as do rivals like Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., who ran the House Democrats' campaign committee, or Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who performed the same role in the Senate.

But this week, he is enjoying vindication far earlier than he ever expected.

Yes, my friends. Turns out Dean wasn't a disaster. Turns out he exceeded even his supporters expectations. Turning the Democratic party around was supposed to be a large, arduous task requiring at least ten years of building at the ground level. And it probably would have been had Republican leadership not been so disastrous the past two years. George Bush gave Dean's plans a boost. It's too bad so many people had to die along the way. But that's all going to change....



Who's laughing now?

Rumsfeld quits.

Quitter.

Was he going it quit even if the Republicans retained Congress? Possible. The dude is as old as time. He was Secretary of Defense before I was born.

Only the good die young....

Oh, and the Democrats have taken the Senate. What a great day to be an American.

One month later....

Everything has changed. It's been a month since my last post. That's because I felt I had said everything that I had to say. The important things hadn't become less important in the light of the Mark Foley scandal or John Kerry's ill-advised comments. Those things were a blip on the radar compared to the issues of who we are as a country and who we want to be. Habeas corpus, torture, and aggressive war are still the issues of the day, no matter what anybody might try to tell you.

The choice between the two parties was clear and most aptly described by Noam Chomsky in 2003: hegemony or survival. The Republicans sought American hegemony internationally, at any cost. The Democrats have posited that the survival of our nation is too high a price to pay for short-term global dominance. The American people, increasingly, agree.

This is the dynamic as it has played out. While the American people may not necessarily see it in those terms, that is the clear choice they were offered. Look at the record of the past six years pursuing unbridled hegemony: the most devastating terrorist attack on U.S. soil in history on 11 Sep 01, a follow-up war (still on-going) in Afghanistan that cost tens of thousands of Afghan lives and accomplished none of the stated goals (capture Osama bin Laden, destroy al Qaeda) but plenty of unstated goals (establishing a U.S.-friendly government in Kabul and building a pipeline through their country to pipe natural gas from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean), devastating deficits threatening the ability of our government to remain financially solvent, another war (still on-going) in Iraq whose reasons proved to be false (weapons of mass destruction) and whose real reasons are just now coming to light (oil) and which has cost over 2,800 American lives and 655,000 Iraqi lives (which, taken as a percentage of their population, would be the equivalent of losing 7.89 million Americans; when they say every day is 9/11 in Iraq, they're not kidding), strumming guitar while New Orleans drowned, and finally, posting nuclear secrets in Arabic on government websites in a desperate attempt to justify their ill-conceived and even more poorly planned invasion of Iraq, all so that America could maintain some sort of strategic dominance over friends and enemies alike. To sum up the Republican policies: "For America to remain safe and secure, many Americans and even more foreigners will have to be killed or maimed for dubious and often out-right fallacious reasons."

The Democratic platform has been, essentially, "I'm not with stupid." And that, as it is turning out, seems to be enough.

The Democrats have recaptured the House of Representatives. This is a huge shift in the power structure of Washington, D.C. Instead of House minority leader Nancy Pelosi struggling to get a hearing at all in the Republican-dominated House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be working on an even footing with President Bush. Nancy Pelosi will be the most powerful legislator in Washington, and John Conyers, who has been drafting articles of impeachment against President Bush, will be the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

And that says nothing of the Senate, which, as of this writing, is still in play.

What does this mean? It means that President Bush is no longer the undisputed master and commander of our nation. He has to answer to somebody and that, fittingly enough, that someone is a woman. It means accountability, and to Republicans who know that they've been screwing the pooch for the past six years, that's a truly frightening prospect.

What it means for America, though, is that the system works. Even when our nation is at its darkest, the people can still rise up and insist upon change. It means that Americans do care and have a sense of moral outrage over the atrocities of the past six years. Moreover, it means that the old saw, "it's always darkest before dawn", holds true today. For that is where we are now: dawn. The light is not shining at its brightest, but we can see it coming. We are still in relative darkness, but we have finally had the first bitter taste of that horrible illusion:

Hope.

Despite the great trepidation with which many of us faced today's events, neither the American people nor the voting systems we have in place let us down. The will of the people is being carried out. This is the beginning of the end of our long national nightmare. Now we must insist that Democrats not acquiesce to the Republicans' more unreasonable demands. Now Nancy Pelosi must insist equal footing with President Bush in the national debate. Now the Democrats become a true opposition party in the House of Representatives, opposing President Bush's demands.

Now, more than ever, we must show this President that he is not the emperor of our nation and that he can be told "no". Insist that the Democrats do so. We have won this battle. Now thus begins our war in earnest.

Ooh-ra.

Gen. Clark: It's not WWIII, unless we make it that way.

It's all good stuff, but skip ahead to 20:50 to get to the REALLY juicy stuff. Stuff about Wolfowitz, the five year plan to overthrow seven governments, and the "clash of civilizations" between the U.S. and the one billion Muslims in the world.

Message received.

From MadSatyrist:

I have concluded that Republicans were correct about one thing in the attempts to impeach Bill Clinton for having a consenual affair while President. The President and the majority party do set the moral tone of the nation.

The recent upswing of perverse sexual attacks culminating in the attack on the Amish school in Pennsylvania, are not by chance. It cannot be chance for this upswing to occur during a national discussion of torture which ended with the passage by Congress of a bill designed to make torture legal under some circumstances, and place the President under immunity from prosecution for ordering such. Sadistic predators are obsessed with such discussion, they gloat over it, drool over it, and the passage of such a bill will have been seen as a signal that their perversions are now acceptable, their fantasies can become realities, and their obsessions are now normal. Congress sent the message, and the response is clearly "Message Received".

And it isn't only in the US. This apparent approval is being heard, and acted on, world wide. Sadistic torture murders are very much on the rise. And now, to my shame, some of them will be legal in the United States.

Other messages have been sent as well. Recently, in Nashville, a woman and an illegal immigrant were convicted of murdering her husband. The immigrant was her sex toy who had been living in a 2 by 8 closet for months. When the husband investigated noises coming from the closet, he jumped out and killed him, probably with the help of the wife. Both have been convicted of murder in the first degree.

What message has the reigning party sent about immigrants, over and over again? They've said very plainly that we should take advantage of illegals, that they are a great resource, and we can use them for things we cannot ask another American to do.

And the response from Nashville was "Message Received".

People, this can't go on. We cannot continue to send such messages as part and parcel of the official policy of the United States, lest our fragile social fabric be torn asunder forever.

The next election will be perhaps the most important of this century, because it represents a chance for America to send a new message, a message clearly stating that we the people find this unacceptable. We cannot continue along these lines, because if we do we fail and fall as a people.

Please, Republicans, Democrats, everyone, send a different message.

It's the most patriotic thing you can do.

'No pasaran'

"They shall not pass."

"I pushed myself forward and because I was 6ft I could see Mosley. They were surrounded by an even greater army of police. There was to be this great advance of the police force to get the fascists through. Suddenly, the horses' hooves were flying and the horses were falling down because the young kids were throwing marbles."

Thousands of policemen were sandwiched between the Blackshirts and the anti-fascists. The latter were well organised and through a mole learned that the chief of police had told Mosley that his passage into the East End could be made through Cable Street.

"I heard this loudspeaker say 'They are going to Cable Street'," said Prof Fishman. "Suddenly a barricade was erected there and they put an old lorry in the middle of the road and old mattresses. The people up the top of the flats, mainly Irish Catholic women, were throwing rubbish on to the police. We were all side by side. I was moved to tears to see bearded Jews and Irish Catholic dockers standing up to stop Mosley. I shall never forget that as long as I live, how working-class people could get together to oppose the evil of racism."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/farright/story/0,,1884440,00.html

School shootings.

Violence in schools was sort of a pet issue of mine when I was in high school, because I saw it all around me. Kids were brutally beating up other kids while other kids stood around in a big circle-jerk and watched. I actually wrote an editorial about it in the school newspaper advocating that instead of just standing around with their mouths hanging open, maybe these large groups of people could step in and do something about it. It tapered off, since I think seeing students advocating vigilante action motivated administrators to clamp down on it.

Eleven years later, and I'm hearing about a thwarted shooting plot at my alma mater, Green Bay East High School. I see that the problem, in the long run, hasn't gotten better. It's gotten worse. Why is this? What do we need to be doing differently? Here's another story of a disgruntled student who, tragically, killed his principal before being stopped.

Why is this allowed to happen? Every time one of these students goes over the edge and kills students, teachers, and an occasional principal, you always hear about the warning signs that the kids exhibited that were ignored until it was too late. Suggested solutions generally range from better counseling, cracking down on teasing, and metal detectors. All of these are band-aid approaches. The problem isn't that we aren't acting to prevent the violence in schools. The problem is that we're putting these mentally ill children in the same schools as everyone else, putting them in different classes that only serve to further ostracize them from their peers, and then still subjecting them to the harsh ridicule that inevitably stems from being unique or different. In some cases, these mentally ill children are very fragile and can only take so much. In other cases, they're just sociopaths who see nothing wrong with using violence to solve their problems.

We need to get past the tendency to sugar-coat mental illness in children. A homicidal maniac is a homicidal maniac, whether he's 15 or 51. The notion that we can put these square pegs into the round holes of public education is absurd. So many of these kids are ticking time bombs that need to be defused, but never get the help they need. In most cases, they don't blow up while they're still in school. Instead, they go on to be abusive spouses, abusive parents, criminals, or serial killers. Treatment in early adolescence could prevent a lot of these problems, but instead, we insist on working harder to force conformity on them. Mental illness isn't something that you can beat out of a kid with a "good whuppin' behind the wood shed". They need to be treated, and yes, coddled. They're sick.

How do I know that Eric Hainstock was mentally ill? I don't, but any child whose solution to a little teasing is to grab his dad's guns and gun down the principal clearly doesn't have all of his faculties about him.

And that's another thing: what were this psychopath's parents' doing keeping guns in the house? Did they just not know their kid wasn't right in the head? His peers seemed to.

Rupp described Hainstock as a freshman with few friends who was “just weird in the head.“

“He always used to kid around about bringing things to school and hurting kids,” she said.

Student Ellen Laufenberg said Hainstock was always nice to her but described him as a “problem kid” with “a short fuse.“

I'll tell you the real reason nobody wants to talk about setting up separate schools for mentally ill children: the financial cost. It would cost a lot of money to get these kids the help they need. Nobody wants to acknowledge the human cost of just putting these kids in "special ed". Instead, they say what these kids need is just a good whuppin', when in fact that just exacerbates the problem.

I feel compelled to point out that not all special ed kids are mentally ill. But there are enough of them that are that I feel that they merit a more comprehensive approach.

Do parents feel safe knowing that four eight hours a day, their kids are locked into a brick building that may or may not contain psychopaths who are ready to show up out of the blue and start killing people? I wouldn't want that for my kids. Nobody wins in that situation. Not the normal kids, not the teachers, not the parents, and not the mentally ill kids in need of treatment. It's just short-sighted.

We can still win this in the courts.

http://www.aclu.org/

The suspension of habeas corpus is blatantly unconstitutional, whether through executive or legislative fiat.

Donate to the ACLU. I just gave money. They're still fighting the good fight, and they have the resources to bring habeas corpus back from the grave through judicial review.

Let's not throw in the towel yet. The system still has a few avenues we can pursue.

We can't not fight. They want us to quit, but the fight's not over yet.

October 5 -- Day of Mass Resistance

Thanks again to pandora...




...
October 5 - Day of Mass Resistance

On October 5, people everywhere will walk out of school, take off work, and come to the downtowns & townsquares and set out from there, going through the streets and calling on many more to join us - making a powerful statement: "NO! THIS REGIME DOES NOT REPRESENT US! AND WE WILL DRIVE IT OUT!"

Below you can find a growing listing of protests across the country. Check back here for the latest information (updated daily), or contact a local World Can't Wait chapter in your area (see menu to the left).

If there is not a protest organized in your area, head to the downtown or town square at noon on Oct. 5.
.....
http://worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2418&_event=14

Turn your despair into rage.

Turn your broken heart into a fist.

Then go visit my friend Tony at http://monkeyfister.blogspot.com /.

We're talking real-time action, not venting online.

One of us is a nut. Two of us is a conspiracy. Three of us is legion and unstoppable. Won't you join us?

The Senate just voted to end habeas corpus.

This is going to get worse before it gets better. Ready yourselves.

Here's the vote count.

Give my man Monkeyfister a visit. His blog is listed on the right. He's got some important discussions going. We need to seriously consider our options here. Civil disobedience may become necessary if these "people" continue trying to shred our Constitution.

Democracy's last stand.

Bush is seeking to over-turn habeus corpus. As I've said before, it's time. Bush and his people are seeking to establish an authoritarian regime. This is not hyperbole; this is the truth. Nancy Pelosi, in the video below, is can be seen taking a stand for American values.







This nation cannot withstand two more years of an unchecked Bush administration. If the Republicans win in November, our nation is through. Please, for the love of God, don't let this happen to my country.

Oh, this is rich....

Check out the variant covers of Newsweek across the world:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3037881/site/newsweek

Greg Palast interviews Hugo Chavez

http://www.gregpalast.com/hugo-chavez-an-exclusive-interview-with-greg-palast

Palast covers some basic points: high prices put Chavez into a position to usurp Saudi Arabia's place as the dominant player in OPEC. That's why they're so peeved with Chavez; he wants to keep Venezuelan petro dollars for Venezuela.

There are only two ways to defeat the rise of Chavez as the New Abdullah of the Americas. First, the unattractive option: Cut the price of oil below $30 a barrel. That would make Chavez’s crude worthless. Or, option two: Kill him.

....

Q: Your opponents are saying that you are beginning a slow-motion dictatorship. Is that what we are seeing?

Hugo Chavez: They have been saying that for a long time. When they’re short of ideas, any excuse will do as a vehicle for lies. That is totally false. I would like to invite the citizens of Great Britain and the citizens of the U.S. and the citizens of the world to come here and walk freely through the streets of Venezuela, to talk to anyone they want, to watch television, to read the papers. We are building a true democracy, with human rights for everyone, social rights, education, health care, pensions, social security, and jobs.

Q: Some of your opponents are being charged with the crime of taking money from George Bush. Will you send them to jail?

Chavez: It’s not up to me to decide that. We have the institutions that do that. These people have admitted they have received money from the government of the United States. It’s up to the prosecutors to decide what to do, but the truth is that we can’t allow the U.S. to finance the destabilization of our country. What would happen if we financed somebody in the U.S. to destabilize the government of George Bush? They would go to prison, certainly.

Q: How do you respond to Bush’s charge that you are destabilizing the region and interfering in the elections of other Latin American countries?

Chavez: Mr. Bush is an illegitimate President. In Florida, his brother Jeb deleted many black voters from the electoral registers. So this President is the result of a fraud. Not only that, he is also currently applying a dictatorship in the U.S. People can be put in jail without being charged. They tap phones without court orders. They check what books people take out of public libraries. They arrested Cindy Sheehan because of a T-shirt she was wearing demanding the return of the troops from Iraq. They abuse blacks and Latinos. And if we are going to talk about meddling in other countries, then the U.S. is the champion of meddling in other people’s affairs. They invaded Guatemala, they overthrew Salvador Allende, invaded Panama and the Dominican Republic. They were involved in the coup d’etat in Argentina thirty years ago.

Q: Is the U.S. interfering in your elections here?

Chavez: They have interfered for 200 years. They have tried to prevent us from winning the elections, they supported the coup d’etat, they gave millions of dollars to the coup plotters, they supported the media, newspapers, outlaw movements, military intervention, and espionage. But here the empire is finished, and I believe that before the end of this century, it will be finished in the rest of the world. We will see the burial of the empire of the eagle.

Much more at the link. Take a good read, and then look at Noam Chomsky's book, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance per President Chavez's recomendation.

Green Arrow & Hurricane Katrina

I was debating on whether or not to blog on this here, but I decided that whereas I have about three actual readers, there was no inherent harm in it.

A few years ago, I picked up my childhood addiction to comic books. I rationalize it by telling myself that it's healthier than the adulthood addiction to cigarettes that I gave up last year. A title which has really caught my eye is Green Arrow because of its uncommon social commentary. I didn't catch the allegory at first, but let me give you the run-down:

Star City, Green Arrow's home city, has been devestated by a huge calamnity. The city's plight was largely ignored by the federal government, and the local government's response was to build a huge wall down the middle, separating the desirables from the undesirables. The "have-nots" call their side of the wall "the Glades" (shades of "the Pits" in New Orleans) due to the fact that the wall was constructed in a trench, which filled up with a lot of standing water, which attracted a lot of mosquitoes and created a swamp-like odor.

Green Arrow's alter ego is a multi-millionaire by the name of Oliver Queen. Queen runs for mayor of Star City on the promise to build the city back up and tear the wall down. He won.

Queen is a dyed in the wool liberal. He holds gay weddings outside city hall and withholds sales taxes from the state to put them toward rebuilding the city. His controversial policies result in corporate types putting out a hit on him.

But this exchange in Green Arrow #65 between a right-wing talking head from the "United Freedom Council of Americans for America" named Marc Spillman and the founder of a website called "Bring'emDown.com" named Jenny Parks (a fairly obvious MoveOn.org allusion) on a cable talk show where they debate the merits of Mayor Queen's administration brought home the parallels to me:

Spillman: "My heart goes out to the children who live in that city."
Parks: "Mine too. Their homes were blown up."
Spillman: "I meant the lawless, unpatriotic..."
Parks: "He's trying to--"
Spillman: "...liberal agenda that he just keeps ramming---"
Parks: "It's not a liberal agenda, it's---"
Spillman: "---down the troats of every decent person trying to live in---"
Parks: "WE LEFT THEM THERE TO DIE! Their city was destroyed and fell into ruin and we did nothing! And we continue to do nothing! Those are men, women and children who lived their lives, paid their taxes, and thought that they were living under the protection of this nation."
Spillman: (shifting uncomfortably in his seat)
Parks: "We didn't do anything to help them. He is. The very least we can do is stay out of his way."

Civil War may be addressing the War on Terror, but under the radar, Green Arrow is tackling Bush's response to Katrina. There's also a lot of other stuff going on in the title that makes it good reading. I highly recommend it to any comic book fans.