little red cookbook | fair and balanced thought is free

Better than CNN: The Agonist | Cursor | BuzzFlash
Act: VOTE IN 2004 | 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action | Take to the Streets

Friday, July 11, 2003

The Wal-Mart Wars: The Battle for MoPac and Slaughter...and beyond

Looks like Californians aren't the only ones up in arms against Walton's empire...Austin locals are also making some rumblings about the retail giant's planned superstores on grandfathered tracts in and around the environmentally sensitive Barton Springs Recharge Zone. Will it make a difference? It may be to late to halt construction of at least one supercenter, but this could begin a ripple effect that will hurt Wal-Mart's profit in the Austin area...so if you were considering boycotting Wal-Mart, now might be a good time to start...and to tell them why!

posted by Jenny at 2:15 PM |

Gerrymandering in Texas...it ain't over yet

Although the Runaway Democrats are now back in their home state, Texas Republicans continue to push for redistricting to feather Tom DeLay's cap. All Texans interesting in stopping this mess should check out the latest from MoveOn:

Monday presents one of the last chances to make your concern heard about Tom DeLay's redistricting plan, at the final Senate Hearing on Redistricting.

I hope you can attend and tell the Senate why you believe this plan would be bad for Texas. Here are the details:

Where: Capitol Auditorium E1.004

When: Monday, July 14 at 9:00 am

You have probably heard that on Monday night, July 7, the Texas House of Representatives on a largely party-line vote of 83-62 approved a redistricting map that would disenfranchise voters across the state by gerrymandering one community after another. The plan will likely award Tom DeLay six to seven more congressional votes from Texas.

If the Senate votes for any plan, no matter how "moderate" its approach, it is a win for DeLay because it will then be sent to a House-Senate conference committee, all of whose members will be appointed by Republicans, and from which DeLay’s Frankenstein monster of a map will likely re-emerge.

Also, if you are represented by one of these Texas State Senators, you can contact them to let them know that they should keep the congressional districts just the way they are and not to consider any new legislation. The message is no new map.

Sen. Kenneth Armbrister
(512) 463-0118 (Capitol)
(361) 572-8061 (District)

Sen. Kip Averitt
(512) 463-0122 (Capitol)
(254) 772-6225 (District)
(817) 326-1161 (District)

Sen. Robert Duncan
(512) 463-0128 (Capitol)
(800) 322-9538 (Capitol-Toll Free)
(806) 762-1122 (District)
(915) 481-0028 (District)

Sen. Eddie Lucio
(512) 463-0127 (Capitol)
(956) 548-0227 (District)
(956) 968-9927 (District)

Sen. Frank Madla
(512) 463-0119 (Capitol)
(210) 927-9464 (District)

Sen. Bill Ratliff
(512) 463-0101 (Capitol)
(903) 572-1887 (District)

Sen. John Whitmire
(512) 463-0115 (Capitol)
(713) 864-8701 (District)

Come on, folks! We just gotta keep up the momentum a bit longer...it can't hurt to call or drop these folks a line and tell them how you feel.

posted by Jenny at 2:09 PM |

We Must Ask the World for Help on Iraq

Here's Robert Byrd's latest, posted at AlterNet. Some choice selections:

Weeks ago, the President gave vague assurances about the timely withdrawal of our troops. He said, "We will stay as long as necessary to get the job done, and then we will leave." [Remarks at Santa Clara, CA, 5/2/03] Such words are without substance. They are "doublespeak." They do nothing but feed the hopes of the American people that our troops will soon return from Iraq while avoiding any real indication of when that might happen. The fact is that the Administration has carefully avoided telling the American people when it expects our occupation of Iraq to conclude. So far, this Administration has yet to even estimate how soon it will be able to hand Iraq over to the Iraqi people. In short, it appears that we have no exit strategy. The word "quagmire" is starting to be used by the media. Clearly, many people are very worried about our situation in Iraq. The death toll keeps mounting.

Last week, the President actually taunted those forces who are murdering our troops in the streets of Iraq. He dared the violent militants by saying "Bring 'em on." One can hardly think of a more inappropriate comment for a President to make when Americans are under siege in Iraq and being asked to deal with the treacheries of urban guerrilla warfare with no end in sight. Chest thumping should have no place in such a situation. This was the President who went to the trouble to put on a flight suit, land on an aircraft carrier, and, with great fanfare, tell the American public that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." But, British and American soldiers are still dying in Iraq. Now, the President is saying, "Bring 'em on." What are we to believe?

The President has backed away from earlier suggestions of a foreseeable end to U.S. peacekeeping efforts in Iraq. He warns of the return of tyranny if our troops begin returning home. Judging by the President's statements, our armed forces have become the thumb in the dike – the only obstacle that prevents the return of a repressive dictatorship in Iraq.

...

Americans have good cause to be proud of the men and women who unselfishly serve our country in uniform. They have carried out their duty in Iraq admirably. But what is the next step? The last thing we want to do is repay the services our troops have given to our country by committing them indefinitely to a fuzzy reconstruction mission of uncertain duration.

Iraq is fast becoming an urban guerilla shooting gallery with U.S. troops as the targets. It is time to go to the United Nations and work to deploy a trained multinational peacekeeping force to cope with the perils of the occupation of Iraq. Before there is a disaster to cope with. Before there is a major loss of life. Before there is a crisis, we must read the tea leaves.

This White House cannot further presume on the patience of the public. The American people must be given an exit strategy for our troops. We must ask the International Community for help in Iraq.

posted by Jenny at 1:50 PM |

It's official, Hesiod informs us: they've chosen their fall guy. Condoleeza Rice has pointed the finger directly at George Tenet vis a vis that phony story about Saddam Hussein's uranium interests in Nigeria...unfortunately for AWOL, though, it looks like the CIA isn't willing to take the blame...more on this also at Body and Soul.

Meanwhile, as the spin doctors were working hard on the homefront, Dubya was faking some photo ops of his own. Pretty damn disgusting...and, unsuprisingly, elitist.
posted by Jenny at 9:19 AM |

I don't usually quote Maureen Dowd, but I found her article on the "Incredible Shrinking Y" very interesting. Originally checked on it because I thought the "Y" was a pun on the reasons behind the Iraq war...little did I know it was about the endangered male chromosome! That's right, friends, males are rapidly deevolving, thanks to decreased sex rates among humans and the rise in female "promiscuity"...or so say Dowd's sources.
posted by Jenny at 9:10 AM |

Thursday, July 10, 2003

Hey folks, Blogger has been holding my blog hostage again...well, sort of--can't get the sidebar updated, and I'm hoping it'll be back up tomorrow. One of these days, when I have the time to expand, I'm just going to switch to Movable Type...

You've probably noticed that I haven't been writing as much lately, thanks this Blogger stuff in tandem with visitors from the US and a slough of choir rehearsals and appearances. We're performing Carmina Burana out of town tonight, which means that I won't have access for the rest of the day...BUT I'll be blogging again tomorrow, with some stuff I've accumulated over the last few days...and I assume the server will comply!

Meanwhile, enjoy the day--go out and breathe in some (hopefully) fresh air, call somebody you care about...cheer the Democrats' filibuster, marvel at Bush's spiraling approval ratings, recycle your trash, and keep reading blogs! Feel free to visit any of the fine locales listed on the blogroll (there are more to come soon!), and make a point to visit skippy, who is celebrating his one-year anniversary as the most cherished bush kangaroo in blogtopia (y!sctp!). Happy birthday, skippy!
posted by Jenny at 1:25 AM |

Tuesday, July 08, 2003

Here's an interesting one from Grist...nice to tie in with the figures that indicate the DoD as the world's worst polluter...for some reason, it gets more attention when the pollution creeps into your own backyard...

Karen Strand was six in 1958 when her father, a Marine Corps chaplain, was transferred to the Camp Lejeune military base in North Carolina. It wasn't until 2000 that she made the connection between her ongoing health problems -- a bleeding ulcer at 19, thyroid and parathyroid problems, depression, and cysts and tumors that necessitated a complete hysterectomy -- and the chemical-smelling water she drank and bathed in at the base for 13 years.

Strand and her two sisters, who have also had hysterectomies, assumed they were the victims of bad luck until three years ago, when they saw a CNN show in which representatives of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry asked women who carried pregnancies at Camp Lejeune to come forward for a study on the health of their children. Until 1985, the ATSDR officials said, Camp Lejeune residents drank water laced with high levels of the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE), used in military operations. TCE is known to cause cancer, autoimmune disorders, birth defects, and nervous-system problems.

Strand, who now owns a day spa in North Carolina with her husband, decided to take action. In 2001, she and her sisters formed a group called Toxic Homefront Empowered Survivors Take All Necessary Defense (THE STAND). They set up a website last fall, and have since had more than 200 former Camp Lejeune residents come forward to report health problems ranging from anxiety disorder to muscle deterioration to cancer.

Complicating matters is the fact that many military families are less like Strand's (which spent more than a dozen years drinking contaminated water in a single area) and more like that of Lita Hyland, another member of THE STAND. Hyland spent the first few months of her pregnancy in 1978 at Camp Lejeune with her husband, a Marine. After her daughter was born, the family was moved to Marine housing at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego, Calif. Next they moved to military housing on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay.

Although it is the contamination at Lejeune that has mobilized Hyland (and that she blames for her daughter's seizures and Crohn's disease), records from the EPA and ATSDR show that the housing areas at both Pendleton and Treasure Island are contaminated with heavy metals. In a May interview, Hyland said she was unaware that Pendleton and Treasure Island are polluted. "I never expected this from the American government," she said.

...

According to environmental advocates, cases like Hyland's highlight one of the biggest obstacles to protecting military families from toxic exposure: Many families spend decades going from base to base, breathing, drinking, or touching a laundry list of poisons. That nomadic lifestyle makes it difficult to track where exposure occurs, what risks the average military family faces, and the cause of illnesses -- not that anyone is trying to do so, or speaking out on the victims' behalf.

Steve Taylor of the Military Toxics Project said he believes contaminated housing is a serious problem, but his group is not focused on the issue and has no funding to tackle it; the leaders of several other environmental groups echoed this sentiment. And Joyce Raezer, director of government relations for the National Military Family Association (which calls itself "the only national organization dedicated to identifying and resolving issues of concern to military families"), said that with the country at war, housing issues have taken a back seat, as her legislative staff of three seeks support for the families of deployed soldiers.

...

Raezer and other advocates said that despite soldiers' silence, contaminated housing is a serious problem for military families and the officials charged with their safety. "If there's a sleeper issue on military health, this is it," said Saul Bloom, director of Arc Ecology, a San Francisco-based environmental group that specializes in overseeing military cleanups. "It's as important as inoculating against anthrax."
Based on his work on closed military bases, Bloom estimated that at least half of military housing is "environmentally compromised." But, he added, whereas the government and charitable foundations will provide funding for groups like Arc to oversee cleanups affecting the general public, addressing health risks faced by military residents is taboo.

"You're looking at a tremendous amount of liability for the federal government, so there's not a lot of help out there," Bloom said. "Dealing with military issues is like the third rail of the funding world: You touch it and you don't get money."

Raezer said the military itself faces a parallel issue: While overall defense funding goes up, the money available for cleaning and improving housing remains inadequate. "They're not intentionally being negligent. They just don't have enough money," she said. A 2000 report by the Association of the U.S. Army reads, "It would take $20 billion and 30 years to bring military housing up to par. Complicating matters is that there is little money to keep it up to par." The report goes into detail about the decrepit state of family housing, but does not address the issue of contamination. (The military's current effort to revitalize its moldering homes involves privatizing much of the housing. Because developers shy away from contaminated sites, Raezer and others questioned whether this gives the Pentagon a disincentive to proactively assess and address potential contamination.)
Although current government officials refused to address the issue (Department of Defense spokesperson Glenn Flood asked for a list of questions and then stopped responding to phone calls), a former Pentagon official disagreed with claims that military housing contamination is a massive problem.
posted by Jenny at 8:39 AM |

...and they actually admit it!

An article by Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador, recently debunked the claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa as likely fraudulent, prompting this official response two days later:

WASHINGTON, July 7 — The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.

The White House statement appeared to undercut one of the key pieces of evidence that President Bush and his aides had cited to back their claims made prior to launching an attack against Iraq in March that Mr. Hussein was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program. Those claims added urgency to the White House case that military action to depose Mr. Hussein needed to be taken quickly, and could not await further inspections of the country or additional resolutions at the United Nations.

The acknowledgment came after a day of questions — and sometimes contradictory answers from White House officials — about an article published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Sunday by Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger, in West Africa, last year to investigate reports of the attempted purchase. He reported back that the intelligence was likely fraudulent, a warning that White House officials say never reached them.

"There is other reporting to suggest that Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Africa," the statement said. "However, the information is not detailed or specific enough for us to be certain that attempts were in fact made."

In other words, said one senior official, "we couldn't prove it, and it might in fact be wrong."

So the truth is slowly oozing out...but the question is, who will actually listen to it?
posted by Jenny at 8:28 AM |

Confess or Die, US Tells Jailed Britons

The two British terrorist suspects facing a secret US military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay will be given a choice: plead guilty and accept a 20-year prison sentence, or be executed if found guilty.

American legal sources close to the process said that the prisoners' dilemma was intended to encourage maximum 'co-operation'.

The news comes as Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, prepares to urge US Secretary of State Colin Powell to repatriate the two Britons. He will say that they should face a fair trial here under English law. Backed by Home Secretary David Blunkett, Straw will make it clear that the Government opposes the death penalty and wants to see both men tried 'under normal judicial process'.

Lawyers acting for Moazzam Begg, 35, from Sparkbrook, Birmingham, and Feroz Abassi, 23, from Croydon, said that any confessions gathered while the men were kept without charge or access to lawyers in Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and Camp Delta in Cuba would have no status in international law and would be inadmissible in British courts.

Gareth Peirce, who acts for Moazzam Begg, said: 'Anything that any human being says or admits under threat of brutality is regarded internationally and nationally as worthless. It makes the process an abuse. Moazzam Begg had a year in Bagram airbase and then six months in Guantanamo Bay. If this treatment happened for an hour in a British police station, no evidence gathered would be admissible,' she said.

Stephen Jakobi of Fair Trials Abroad, which is leading the campaign for the two men, said: 'Our concern is that there will be no meaningful way of testing the evidence against these people. The US Defense Department has set itself up as prosecution, judge and Defense counsel and has created the rules of trial. This is patently a kangaroo court.'

Begg's family believe he was kidnapped in Pakistan by US authorities. He was taken to Bagram on suspicion of passing funds to al-Qaeda and later transferred to Camp Delta. He has not seen a lawyer since he was seized.

In a clear signal of the high levels of concern within the Government, the acting British ambassador in Washington, Tony Brenton, will raise 'official concern' with the White House.

According to US legal and constitutional experts, the Final Rule, the regulations that will govern the military commissions, has rendered a fair trial almost impossible.

Among those representing the two British men in the United States is Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who believes the tribunals are weighted in favor of securing guilt verdicts.

'The trial system in Guantanamo Bay allows a whole series of serious breaches of defendant rights that would mean that they could never come to trial in the US.

'First, it allows the wiretapping of attorney-client meetings, although those wiretaps cannot actually be used in evidence. Then there is the fact that the Pentagon "Appointing Authority" - probably US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - has the ability to remove a judge at any time without giving any reason.'

Among other concerns about the 50-page Final Rule, which was published by the Department of Defense last week for governing the trials, are:

· that rules of evidence are so broad that it is left at the discretion of the trial's presiding officer whether to allow any evidence he believes would be convincing to a 'reasonable person' and that that would appear to allow the admission of hearsay evidence; · that evidence can be admitted by telephone and by pseudonym; · that it is insisted that only security-screened civil attorneys be allowed to appear before the court and they can also be removed at any time.

Nice to hear that Britain is actually alongside Europe, standing up for their own on this one...
posted by Jenny at 8:21 AM |