What it would have cost us to publicly fund independent media that would have prevented the invasion of Iraq wouldn’t amount, in a year, to what we spend on a month of occupying that country. Diverting the cost of a month of war to a year of giving substance to our “freedom of the press” would mean that the last time someone asked you about the Teabaggers’ genius in being smart enough to talk dumb enough to persuade everyone to be racists would, in fact, be the LAST time anyone would ask you how a creation of the corporate media manages to get coverage from the corporate media.
The director of U.S. national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee the government has the right to kill Americans abroad. Here are 10 problems with this: 1. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don’t cease to be crimes because you cross a border. 2. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don’t cease to be crimes because you engage in them frequently. Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder.
This week I asked Rep. Donald Payne if he would commit to voting No on the next $33 billion for war. I asked him privately, just after he’d given a long speech to a Progressive Democrats of America conference in New Jersey, a speech about how much he opposes the wars. Payne told me that he didn’t want to commit to voting No on the next “emergency war supplemental” because Obama is president, echoing Jan Schakowsky’s comments last June when she made a similar reversal.
If a group of dedicated scholars, attorneys, journalists, and activists had tried to generate a comprehensive list of impeachable offenses committed by George W. Bush as President, one of them might have read something like this:
Whenever I write about U.S. politics, people ask me “Don’t you have any good news?” … But I do have good news, boatloads of good news, if Americans want to hear it. If a city or state next to yours were to achieve a dramatic breakthrough for democratic representation, environmental sustainability, healthcare, education, peace, or justice, wouldn’t that be good news? Wouldn’t you trumpet that news where you live and demand the same of your elected officials?
Up through 2008, it was extremely unusual for questions from the audience to consist of pure defeatism. In 2009, it was rare to get through a Q&A session without being asked what the point was of trying. And the defeatism is so contagious that it will be hard for me to make it through 2010 if people don’t shut up about how doomed we are.
If current trends continue, by 2011 the only people showing up at forums on peace and justice will all be old enough to tell my grandparents they’re too young to understand how pointless it is to try.
December 31, 2009 | Filed under
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Let’s face it, if James Cameron had made a movie with the Iraqi resistance as the heroes and the U.S. military as the enemies, and had set it in Iraq or anywhere else on planet earth, the packed theaters viewing “Avatar” would have been replaced by a screening in a living room for eight people and a dog. Nineteen years ago, Americans packed theaters for “Dances with Wolves” in which Native Americans became the heroes, but the story was set in a previous century and the message understated.
December 28, 2009 | Filed under
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Does the United States Constitution allow Congress to force people to purchase a product (health insurance) from a private corporation, and fine them or tax them if they refuse? The answer is a matter of debate, but there is little dispute that such an act of Congress would be unprecedented. Sheldon Laskin, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Baltimore Law School who has argued that the Constitution forbids such a move, describes the new and dangerous can of worms it would open up.
December 24, 2009 | Filed under
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Compare Tony Blair’s latest confession to mass murder with Bush’s. The BBC has just aired an interview of Blair in which he was asked whether he would have attacked Iraq even if he had known there were no “weapons of mass destruction” there. Blair replied: “I would still have thought it right to remove him.”
December 15, 2009 | Filed under
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It’s Oct. 23, 2002, and you’re Jay Bybee, the man in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel in the United States Department of Justice. John Yoo and a bunch of other lawyers — willing to claim that absolutely anything is legal — work for you. But you’d much rather be a judge. That would be a cushy job, a lifetime job, a job with a book of the Bible named for it, a job where you would get to decide which crimes to legalize rather than being told by someone else, a job where you might eventually even get to rule on the legality of some of the crimes you were presently engaged in committing.
December 10, 2009 | Filed under
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