Speaking of Glenn Greenwald, the Salon.com columnist has a fact-filled column eviscerating Barack Obama's claim that Senate Democrats are "standing up to the special interests" opposed to American health care reform. Greenwald catalogs the explosion in health insurance company stock prices as the severely watered-down reform bill edges toward passage. By way of illustration, he notes that Susan Bayh, wife of Indiana Democratic Senator Evan Bayh and board member of the Indianapolis-based insurance giant WellPoint, has seen the value of her stock in the company rise between $125,000 and $250,000 since her husband helped defeat the bill's already lame public option. Although...

23 December, 2009

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's insistence that the torture of prisoners Canada hands over to Afghan authorities is a problem for Afghanistan, not Canada, calls to mind Tom Leher's lyric about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun's apparent indifference to the consequences of his work on Germany's World War II V2 rocket: Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? 'That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun. In fact, as Bob Rae points out in the same Globe and Mail article, transferring prisoners with the expectation they may be tortured is a violation of the Geneva Conventions - a war crime,...

23 December, 2009

Who knew that the US Government and various states had commissioned hundreds of comic books? Richard Graham, librarian at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, knew, and he assembled a collection of more than 180 digitized examples on the UNL website. Charles Schutlz (Peanuts), Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace), and Chic Young (Blondie) were just three of the artists who turned in stints as civil service cartoonists. Topics ranged from the benefits of treating children for lazy eye, to the wonders of DDT in the battle against malaria. Dennis the Menace had a thing or three to teach the Mitchell family about household safety. The...

22 December, 2009

The management of the Lakeside Bar and Grill, Camden, Tennessee, has exercised its discretion to bar firearms. ...

14 December, 2009

James Fallows, the Atlantic writer who is a thoughtful observer of US foreign affairs and an admirer of President Obama, says the president's newly announced war strategy rests on two "judgment calls." 1) Whether Al Qaeda/related terrorist groups really do depend so heavily on a specific geographic base in Afghanistan that, if the U.S. can disrupt them there, we won't have to apply similar efforts later on in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or anyplace else. 2) Whether a limited increase in U.S. troops, for a limited amount of time, really can make a decisive difference -- in the long-term stability of the Afghan...

08 December, 2009
"Oil," a major exhibition by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, is currently on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. in Washington, DC. The exhibit includes horrific photos of the Alberta Tar Sands: Burtynsky-06-s [Click images for larger view - links fixed.] Burtynsky specializes in sweeping, often eerily beautiful views of landscapes altered by industry: mine tailings, quarries, scrap piles. James Fallows, of the Atlantic, which features another of Burtynsky's images this month, writes:
The impact of the exhibit as a whole is, well, hard to convey in words.... [V]ery few people have seen the range of oil-industry artifacts that he has captured in his wall-sized and incredibly-detailed photos. Extraction and refinery operations around the world; the industries oil has made possible; the indications of the end of the oil era. Hard to forget.
The exhibit moves next to The Rooms Art Gallery in St. John's, Newfoundland, where it will be on display from May 7–August 15, 2010. It will continue to travel through 2012. More photos and a video after the jump.
28 November, 2009

A scathing editorial in today's New York Times denounces a US appeal court for having "brushed off" a lawsuit by Canadian Maher Arar. As the paper put it,  Arar "was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials," and "held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go." Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping...

11 November, 2009

Contrarian reader Jon Coates of Halifax has no trouble with the kidnapping, rendition, and indefinite detention without due process to which Omar Khadr, a Canadian juvenile, has been subjected for seven years. He writes: [caption id="attachment_3064" align="alignright" width="231" caption="Omar Ahmed Khadr at age 14, one year before his capture and removal to Guantanamo."][/caption] I believe that Khadr is a prisoner of war and should stay right where he is until the war in Afghanistan has run its course, just like any other prisoner of war. As he is also being charged with criminal activity - killing an American medic, a non-combatant...

08 November, 2009

Remember Barack Obama's "fired up, ready to go" campaign story? About a tiny Greenwood, South Carolina, city councilor named Edith Childs who saved a sparsely attended, early Obama rally with her rhythmic cheerleading? It became one of Obama's most effective set pieces, almost on a par with, "Yes we can!" Well, it turns out the story didn't trip lightly off the President-to-be's tongue the first few times he told it. In the clip below, an outtake from a documentary on the Obama campaign broadcast tonight on HBO, Obama aides coach him on how to tell the story more effectively. Hat tip: Politico....

03 November, 2009

Who said this? There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize. Our soldiers are not to blame. They’ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills...

29 October, 2009
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