From the Independent (via Salon) :

It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.

Two missiles from an American jet killed them all — by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be ‘liberated’ by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this ‘collateral damage’? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning …

How should one record so terrible an event? Perhaps a medical report would be more appropriate. But the final death toll is expected to be near to 30 and Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each day; so there is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see should not be told.

For another question occurred to me as I walked through this place of massacre yesterday. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?

It looks like the senate and House have cut Bush’s tax cut in half. I suppose this is good news in a way, but it’s still providing massive tax cuts for the rich. Of course to pay for these cuts, there have been billions cut from a variety of social services programs including Medicaid, veterans programs, student loans, school lunches, child care, food stamps, and cash assistance for the elderly and disabled poor. There’s a good review of the budget the house passed last week here :

Yet as large as these programmatic cuts would be, they would be surpassed in size by the tax cuts proposed in the same budget that would be received by the top one percent of the population. In other words, if the budget contained no spending cuts but the top one percent did not receive any tax cuts, it would cause less of a dent in the nation?s fiscal outlook.

I know to people like Bush and his cronies programs like welfare and social security are just line items on budgets that can be adjusted at will, but to the poor, cuts in these budgets can mean the difference between life and death. To take away money from these kinds of programs to give more tax money back to the richest of the rich is repulsive.

While I’m on the subject of taxes, let’s not forget the billions of dollars that are being siphones from the government every year in offshore tax shelters (”tax motivated expatriation”) :

Nobody is sure precisely how much this corporate exodus is costing us, but the IRS estimates that it’s siphoning off at least $70 billion each year from the U.S. Treasury. And that number doesn’t include the billions in taxes that corporations avoid paying by creating offshore subsidiaries. Enron, for example, had 881 of them and paid no taxes in four of the last five years. That’s right, if you paid one dollar in taxes in those years, you paid more than this longtime fixture on the Fortune 500.

Personally I don’t mind paying taxes as long as the money is helping people that need assistance (as well as paying for shared services, going towards social security, etc.), but every year I hear people gush to each other about how much money they saved in taxes. Since when is it a virtue to contribute as little to society as possible?

The rest of this insane tract (including the part where the Vatican is blamed for the Holocaust) can be found here. This kind of conspiracy theorist crap isn’t much different than the anti-Catholic views of Bob Jones University, the notoriously racist college where Bush appeared during his 2000 presidential campaign. In the past, officals of BJU have called the Pope the “Antichrist” and refered to Catholicism as a “satanic cult”.

Personally, I don’t like Catholicism or fundamentalism, but in the case of the war, the Pope was right. The current war in Iraq doesn’t fit under the criteria of a “just war”. Go here for an excellent article about “just war” written by former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter :

As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantially unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards. This is an almost universal conviction of religious leaders, with the most notable exception of a few spokesmen of the Southern Baptist Convention who are greatly influenced by their commitment to Israel based on eschatological, or final days, theology.

…either way, they shouldn’t be leading us to war. The New Yorker has a great article about the fake documents claiming that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. Apparently the information in these documents was so explosive that the allegations made their way into the State of the Union address. It’s too bad they didn’t warrant a little fact checking as well :

One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, ?These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.?
…
The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Co?peration, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that ?they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.?

Images from thememoryhole.org.

You know we’re in trouble when some of the best news coverage is coming from The Onion :

U.S. Continues Proud Tradition Of Diversity On Front Lines
CAMP COYOTE, KUWAIT?With blacks and Hispanics comprising more than 60 percent of the Army’s ground forces in Iraq, the U.S. military is continuing its long, proud tradition of multiculturalism on the front lines of war. “Though racism and discrimination remain problems in society at large, in the military?especially in the lower ranks where you find the cannon fodder?a spirit of inclusiveness has prevailed for decades,” Gen. Jim White said Monday. “When it comes to having your head blown off by enemy fire, America is truly colorblind.”

There seems to be a lot of talk about “rape rooms” lately in defense of the war in Iraq. The Administration would love us to believe that they sent troops because they care about the Iraqi people, but if they were so concerned, then why did they wait this long? Why haven’t they gone after Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the senate Republic of Congo, and Rwanda, where raping women during conflicts is common? Why haven’t they tried to “liberate” the estimated 135 million women who have undergone forced “female circumcision” (mutilation of the clitoris and parts of the labia) which is a common procedure in much of Africa as well as Egypt, Oman, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates? Why haven’t they sought “regime change” in Ukraine, Moldova, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, Burma, and Thailand where women have been bought and sold as sex slaves? Why is the United States the only industrialized nation that hasn’t ratified the U.N.’s Women’s Rights Treaty?

We actually know the answer to that last one. The Treaty was on its way to ratification in the senate in 1994 when the “Republican Takeover” happened and the Republican Party took over the House and senate. There it sat the the shelf for eight years because the Republicans objected to the treaty’s perceived “pro-abortion” slant as well as the treaty’s failure to reinforce gender-based stereotypes that are “anti-family”. It wasn’t until 2002 when the Democrats controlled the senate that ratification of the treaty even made it out of a senate commitee (in a 12 - 7 vote). Unfortunately, the treaty never got a full vote and has reverted back to the senate Foreign Relations Committee. (You can contact them here.)

But then again, the US has it’s own rape problems to worry about :

The Air Force acknowledges that at least 56 cases of rape or other sexual assaults at the academy have been investigated in the last 10 years, though only one male cadet has faced a court-martial as a result of any accusation, in 1995. He was acquitted. Eight other male cadets have been expelled in sexual attacks since 1996. The academy concedes that it has no records of sexual assaults in the first 20 years of women’s admission, starting in 1976.

You can find more information about global women’s rights issues here and here.

There’s something disturbing about the fact that almost all the news that’s being reported on American networks is from reporters that are closely working with the Pentagon. Isn’t the whole point of journalism to be objective and not take sides? If they have to clear everything they report through the Pentagon, then there’s no way they’re being impartial. These “embeded” reporters are essentially an information laundering operation, filtering government propaganda through their facade of objectivity. Now I expect the American media is naturally going to be biased towards American interests, but there have been too many questions going unasked and too many big stories being shrugged off or mentioned in passing in favor of showing “exclusive” footage of tanks driving through the desert or yet another long-winded speech about how revolutionary the war coverage has been. Just the other day I saw a clip of a British raid on an Iraqi compound that clearly showed a guy running around on fire. The retired general (or whoever the hell he was) was going into great detail about the military strategies involved in the raid but the news anchor never even thought to throw in a “Who was the guy on fire? Was he a good guy or a bad guy?”

I’m not the only one noticing this stuff either. Check out the great articles here, here, and here.

You’re not gonna see this kinda stuff on CNN. I guess it wouldn’t be “respectful” (read : entertaining) to show that wars kill innocent people.

Al Jazeera’s website keeps going down, so I’ve changed the references to point to thememoryhole.org (which I highly recommend)

For those of you who couldn’t hear it over the boo-ing :

Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I’d like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to ? they’re here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much.

It’s a shame that he had to speak quickly and yell over the hecklers because he made some good points. Despite the boo-ing, I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone make an overtly political statement at the Oscars without admonished by one of the later presenters. It’s obvious to me that besides the hecklers, everyone involved in the ceremony seemed to agree with Moore’s message even if they didn’t agree with the way he presented it. Even more interesting than the acceptance speech were the comments he made backstage :

I saw the entire place stand up and applaud. Applaud a film that talks about how we are manipulated by the fear that’s put forth from the white house, that’s put forth by corporate america to create a culture of violence. Violence at home and violence abroad. We kill each other at an enormous rate. More so than virtually any other country on this planet. What was the lesson that we taught the children of Columbine this week? This was the lesson : that violence is an acceptable means to resolve a conflict.

The majority of Americans don’t want your your young men and women to be hurt in this war. They want the troops to come home safe. And the majority of Americans never voted for that guy who sits in the White House. He was never elected by a majority of the citizens of this country and I’ll keep saying that until he’s outta there. Our democracy was hijacked and there’s a sqatter on federal land at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Call me crazy, call me an American, I just happen to believe it’s “one person one vote” and “you count all the votes”. What a wild idea!

The majority of americans were not for us getting in the war, are not for Bush’s policies, they’re not for drilling in Alaska. Go down the whole damn list. The majority of Americans oppose what Bush stands for. The majority of your fellow Americans are pro-choice, they’re pro-environment, they’re pro-labor, and that’s the truth. And I’m sorry to have to speak it but I don’t know what else to do.

[The ficticious reason is] that Saddam Hussein is going to kill you or I tonight. That’s the fiction. The non-fiction is that we’re over there because they’re got the second largest supply of oil in the world.