It would be the height of Irony if this entry brought a John McCain spot onto my Google Ads to the right.

The "Age of Reason" is over. 

According to The Progress Report, the Pentagon has big plans for the Green Zone in American occupied Iraq:

With the help of the Defense Department, the Los Angeles-based company C3 is "developing the Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience, a massive American-style amusement park that will feature a skateboard park, rides, a concert theatre and a museum" and "is being designed by the firm that developed Disneyland." More than that though, the Pentagon is also backing a $5 billion plan to create a "zone of influence" around the new $700 million U.S. embassy that will include luxury hotels, a shopping center, and condos in an effort to "transform" the Green Zone into a "centerpiece for Baghdad's future."

Washington has officially lost its collective mind.  Everything in Iraq will be fine once we build a big shopping mall and some rides for the kids.  Right.  The fact that this passes for serious policy puts our government on the same ground as the one found in the movie Brazil.

And to all the folks out there that look to Barack Obama (whose performance in the presidential primaries yesterday put him on the road to sealing the Democratic nomination) need to think again:

Obama, who, on his past record, is believed to have the best policy on military withdrawal from Iraq, does not seem to intend to end the occupation. Susan Rice, a senior foreign affairs adviser to the Obama campaign, reiterated what we have heard from Bush administration officials over the past five years: that the number of US troops Obama would keep in Iraq "depends on the circumstances on the ground".

While Sen. Obama does call for an effective end to a large portion of the occupation, the massive embassy/amusement park/shopping mall is another matter:

Today he not only refrains from calling for total withdrawal - he does not address the removal of the "enduring" US military bases in Iraq and the embassy scheduled to open there this month.

Make no mistake, we are going to have to end this ourselves, and that will only come through popular and organized dissent.  Once it is too politically costly, the troops will come home. 

To all those who are privileged enough, or "white" enough to think that there exists no racial or economic class borders in our country, I give you (once again) the "Drug War":

More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.

Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.

According to the HRW report , the disparities are huge: 

Across the 34 states, a black man is 11.8 times more likely than a white man to be sent to prison on drug charges, and a black woman is 4.8 times more likely than a white woman.  
 
In 16 states, African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at rates between 10 and 42 times greater than the rate for whites [emphasis mine]. The 10 states with the greatest racial disparities in prison admissions for drug offenders are: Wisconsin, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, Colorado, New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Did you notice that the majority of the worst offending states are north of the Mason/Dixon line?  So don't make the mistake of assuming that this is a problem with The South.  Racism in the US is everywhere, and cuts to the root of our problems (by "our" of course I mean the majority of the population) which is economic exploitation, in which race is still a huge factor in who is an elite and who is not.

Detained immigrants are a hairs breath away from being disappeared:

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.

We are messed-up to let this happen. 

Guess what?  Things just keep getting worse for Americans' health care.  The NY Times has a Sunday exposé on a problem that is hardly a new one:

Many of the 158 million people covered by employer health insurance are struggling to meet medical expenses that are much higher than they used to be — often because of some combination of higher premiums, less extensive coverage, and bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments.

With medical costs soaring, the coverage many people have may not adequately protect them from the financial shock of an emergency room visit or a major surgery. For some, even routine doctor visits might now take a back seat to basic expenses like food and gasoline.

. . .

Already, many doctors say, the soft economy is making some insured people hesitant to get care they need, reluctant to spend a $50 co-payment for an office visit. Parents “are waiting longer to bring in their children,” said Dr. Richard Lander, a pediatrician in Livingston, N.J. “They say, ‘The kid isn’t that sick; her temperature is only 102.’ ”

The problem of affording health care is most acute for people with no insurance, a group expected to soon exceed 48 million, but those with insurance say they too are feeling the pain.

Since the recession of 2001, the employee’s average cost of an annual health care premium for family coverage has nearly doubled — to $3,300, up from $1,800 — while incomes have come nowhere close to keeping up. Factor in other out-of-pocket medical costs, and the portion of the average American household’s income that goes toward health care has risen about 12 percent, according to the consulting and accounting firm Deloitte, and is now approaching one-fifth of the average household’s spending.

That's right folks, we are all getting taken in every way imaginable by an economic system that requires choosing between food and making sure that your child isn't deathly ill.

 The wonder of the PR industry that keeps us from socializing this mess is truly stunning.

When ever these "free trade" deals get negotiated, liberal Democrats in the US often get a couple of bones thrown their way to satisfy those pesky human rights junkies (me being one of them).  The problem is that everyone knows that they are complete BS and have few teeth.

Well according to Cyril Mychalejko, of Upside Down World (an excellent site that covers issues of South and Central America), writing on Dissident Voice, such facades can also be deadly:

Less than 24 hours after President Bush met with Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom at the White House on Monday, a worker from a union that filed a trade complaint with Washington against the Guatemalan government was murdered.

Carlos Enrique Cruz Hernández, a banana worker, was assassinated while working at a farm owned by a subsidiary of Del Monte. Cruz Hernández’s Union of Izabal Banana Workers (SITRABI), was one of six Guatemalan unions who, along with the AFL-CIO, filed a complaint allowed through labor provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on April 23, charging that the Guatemalan government was not upholding its labor laws and was failing to investigate and prosecute crimes against union members–which include rape and murder. The complaint states that violence against trade unionists has increased over the past two years (since CAFTA was ratified) and that the Guatemalan government may be responsible for some of the violence. The violence from this year alone includes 8 murders, 1 attempted murder, 2 drive-by shootings, and the kidnapping and gang rape of a top union official’s daughter who was targeted because of her father’s union work.

The problem, and the article, are way more extensive than this little snippet.  It reminds us that while there are those of us who complain and bitch about the state of the US body politic, at least violence has been minimized against dissidents.

Which is a damn good reason to get out there and do something. 

There is little doubt that Rev. Wright is a kooky preacher (although way less insane than say Pat Robertson).  Senator Obama was correct when he broke with Wright for comments about AIDS and for his bizarre caricatures of President Kennedy and "white" marching bands, etc.

Same goes for the New York Times editorial page.  But they are both wrong for criticizing Wright when "He suggested that America was guilty of “terrorism” and so had brought the 9/11 attacks on itself."

If you don't think that the US (like any dominant international power) doesn't practice terrorism, then you are ignoring reality.  Sorry, patriotism does not give you an free pass to ignore history. 

The Washington Post has a bit of a bombshell:

The Defense Department's former chief prosecutor for terrorism cases appeared Monday at the controversial U.S. detention facility here to argue on behalf of a terrorism suspect that the military justice system has been corrupted by politics and inappropriate influence from senior Pentagon officials.

Sitting just feet from the courtroom table where he had once planned to make cases against military detainees, Air Force Col. Morris Davis instead took the witness stand to declare under oath that he felt undue pressure to hurry cases along so that the Bush administration could claim before political elections that the system was working.

. . .

He also said that Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, who announced his retirement in February, once bristled at the suggestion that some defendants could be acquitted, an outcome that Davis said would give the process added legitimacy.

"He said, 'We can't have acquittals,' " Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents Hamdan. " 'We've been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.' "

Nice.

But wait, how could we look at Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray without it staring at the horror of our brutality in the face?

Davis also decried as unethical a decision by top military officials to allow the use of evidence obtained by coercive interrogation techniques. He said Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser to the top military official overseeing the commissions process, was improperly willing to use evidence derived from waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. "To allow or direct a prosecutor to come into the courtroom and offer evidence they felt was torture, it puts a prosecutor in an ethical bind," Davis testified. But he said Hartmann replied that "everything was fair game -- let the judge sort it out."

Unfortunately the top story tomorrow will still be about a Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and his ability to be paraded as the focus of The Hate.  And so more crimes of state will go ignored, as we all fiddle while the remnants of the republic burn.

Once in a while the theocratic Faith and Freedom Network's Gary Randall removes the compassionate "hate the sin but not the sinner" mask, and lets us see pathological revulsion that lies beneath.  An HR handbook from Human Rights Campaign on transsexuals in the work place elicited this particular 2 Minutes of Hate:

As distasteful as the subject may be, we feel it will be helpful for you to be aware of what is being presented to the H.R. departments of many companies.

. . . 

A small number of activists, representing an even smaller number of deviants, have persuaded your elected officials to continue to pass laws that affirm their behavior. These laws and a prevailing culture of political correctness are pressuring the business community to accommodate it.

Unfortunately, this minority of activists is leading our country to a culture that normalizes what is not normal and one that defies biological reality, traditional values and proven models for marriage and family.

The "proven models" in this case would return us to a mythological paradise when there were no gays, lesbians, or transsexuals.  Of course there have always been such people, and even if the theocratic fascism that Randall covets were to be brought to fruition, there would still be such people.

So at best they would just be intimidated into the closet, and forced to live a lie.  At worst they might have to wear pink triangles in special camps to isolate their "distasteful" behavior that "defies biological reality, traditional values, and proven models" of rigid theocratic sexual oppression. 

That is what we should say, "God help us," to. 

Let's file this one under, "when the president does it that means that it is not illegal":

While the Geneva Conventions prohibit “outrages upon personal dignity,” a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments.

“The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,” said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public.

The reasonable observer in this case would be the people who are secretly doing the torture.