General Discussion

By Dave Lindorff

Ordinary, average, struggling Americans might be scratching their heads over the news today, as the Labor Department reports that unemployment is up by four-tenths of a percent for the month to a record 10.2%, fully three-tenths of a percent higher than economists had been forecasting, and stocks do what? Rise by a quarter of a percent!

What’s going on here?

Well, the tube analysts are quick to say, unemployment figures are a “lagging” indicator. That is, employment generally lags the overall economy, with layoffs coming after a recession kicks in, and hiring waiting until a recovery is well underway.

By Dave Lindorff

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

By Dave Lindorff

Country Joe McDonald said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that started out because the US didn't want the Commies to win a battle in the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious--we had no business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

By Dave Lindorff

If you listen to the happy-talk folks at Treasury and the Fed, and on the tube, you’d think things had finally turned a corner. The economy grew at a 3.5% annualized rate in the third quarter ended September 30. “The Economy is Back in Gear” shouted the headline on an article by CNN senior writer Chris Isadore. “The recession ended unofficially in September,” said a reporter on NPR.

By Dave Lindorff

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose, just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: “Your Federal Tax Dollars at Work.”

Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the CIA payroll.

By Dave Lindorff

The Nuclear Regulator Commission will be holding hearings tomorrow and Wednesday in Hawaii on an application by the US Army for a permit to have depleted uranium at its Pohakuloa Training Area, a vast stretch of flat land in what’s called the “saddle” between the sacred mountains of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island, and at the Schofield Barracks on the island of Oahu. In fact, what the Army is asking for is a permit to leave in place the DU left over from years of test firing of M101 mortar “spotting rounds,” that each contained close to half a pound of depleted uranium (DU). The Army, which originally denied that any DU weapons had been used at either location, now says that as many as 2000 rounds of M101 DU mortars might have been fired at Pohakuloa alone.

But that’s only a small part of the story.

We're All Balloon Boys Now
By Daniel Henninger | WSJ

The current president seems taken aback that so many could doubt his good intentions. But politicians trying to sell big things, whether ObamaCare or privatized Social Security or even wars, need to get better at what they do. We are all balloon boys now, learning every day how to make sure the clever people don't take us for a ride.

The "balloon boy" floating over Colorado last week got me thinking of the Obama photo-op airliner flying around lower Manhattan last April at 9/11 altitude. This is not to suggest that the Obama presidency is a hoax, though more on that later. It is to suggest it's getting harder to know what's real and unreal in a world that always seems to be slipping slightly out of focus.

The best thing to emerge from the balloon boy story, other than the uncontestable fact that six-year-old Falcon Heene was safe on the ground, is that the guy who did it thought that staging a hoax would get him into reality TV programming. It had to come to this.

I love reality TV, though I never watch it. Reality TV—"Project Runway," "Celebrity Rehab" or "The Real Housewives of North Dakota," (I made that up, but would watch)—is just about the perfect metaphor for the world we're all trying to live in now. More often than not, you have to ask yourself whether what's in front of you is real, sort of real, a hoax or what. Writing about the balloon-boy fiasco in the Toronto Star, a bemused Vinay Menon wondered whether hoaxer Richard Heene was "even a real person and not a CNN hologram."

In 1938, Orson Welles caused a sensation when he did a "reality" radio broadcast announcing a Martian invasion. Now we get the equivalent of a Martian invasion almost every day; or maybe it's every other hour. Read more.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 16, 2009) — Americans think locally when they consider whether the loss of U.S. troops overseas warrants troop withdrawals, a new nationwide study suggests.

Researchers found that people were more likely to support withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq if one or more soldiers from their home state were killed there within the past two to three weeks.

That was true regardless of how many soldiers from other parts of the country had been killed recently, or how many total national casualties had occurred.

“If you want to gauge public opinion about the war, look at local coverage about the deaths of local soldiers – that seems to be driving opinion more than what’s on national news,” said Andrew Hayes, co-author of the study and associate professor of communication at Ohio State University.

By Dave Lindorff

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most dangerous waste--the actual uranium from the used fuel rods--and putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned all across the landscape?

And I should note that it's not just remote places like Iraq and Kuwait and Afghanistan that are being covered in super toxic and radioactive uranium dust--and I'm not just talking about the stuff that gets picked up in the wind and carried around the globe, or the stuff that gets inhaled by our troops and carried home internally, bad enough as that is.

By Dave Lindorff

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it has used much more extensively--and in more urban, populated areas--in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan War.

by Linda Milazzo

Ted Turner would fire Lou Dobbs. How do I know? Because Ted Turner said so:

This excerpt from Ted Turner's April 1, 2008 interview on PBS, in which the visionary founder of CNN tells Charlie Rose he would fire Lou Dobbs, bears repeating:

By Dave Lindorff

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined “Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13 ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic heart disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by exposure to Agent Orange.

Mother of Severely Burned Florida Boy Pleads for End to Childhood Violence
Valerie Brewer Said She Knows the Teens Accused of Setting Her Son on Fire
By Sarah Netter and Anne Marie Dorning | ABCNews

The mother of a Florida boy severely burned after a group of teenagers set him on fire said adults need to do something to stop the wave of violence among children.

"People really need to wake up and see what's going on with this generation. They need to take hold of our children and really do something," Valerie Brewer told "Good Morning America" today. "The violence across our nation, across our world with our children is getting stronger and stronger and we need to stop it now, so this doesn't happen to somebody else."

"It's just unimaginable," she said. "Violence doesn't solve anything."

Brewer said her son is heavily sedated and has a tube to help him breath and can't speak.

It's unclear how much he remembers from the vicious attack, in which five teens allegedly doused him with rubbing alcohol and set him on fire, sending 15-year-old Michael running for a nearby pool. He was left with severe burns over 65 percent of his body. Read more.

By Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress, and their main man Barack Obama in the White House, have taken tens of millions in legal bribes from the health insurance industry over the past year, and have obligingly been hammering out in Congress a health “reform” bill that, instead of helping people, has been designed to help the insurance industry.

They started out by immediately blackballing any discussion of real health reform in the form of an expansion of Medicare to cover everyone of every age, which of course would have ended the problem of the uninsured, while cutting the nation’s overall health bill by at least a third, but in the process shutting down the private health insurance business.

Then they chipped away and are at this point on the verge of eliminating any so-called “public option” or government-run health insurance plan to even compete with the private insurance sector.

by Linda Milazzo

Our great buddy Mike is angry. For the past twenty years, Michael Moore, our everyday hero, has worked hard for us. He's documented sadistic acts against us by industry and government. He's exposed case after case of devious schemes that robbed us of our homes and our jobs, sent our children to war, and sacrificed our health. He's given us irrefutable proof that our leaders lied us to war, our insurers denied us care, and our lenders deceived us into hopelessness and destitution.

Mike's been our teacher, our ally and our devoted friend. Few people in recent memory have worked harder to inform us - ALL OF US - of the inhumanity and greed that are decaying our nation, which we perpetuate through apathy and inertia.

A 'funny prank' leads to charges in Princeton

Two teens put small explosives around Princeton to "make a little commotion." Their timing couldn't have been worse.

It was supposed to be a prank that would cause a little commotion in an already rattled Princeton.

Instead, two teenagers are facing felony charges for leaving six homemade bombs around the city just hours after authorities had closed schools and summoned bomb squads when suspicious packages were found at the high school, the post office and a city building.

By Dave Lindorff

It’s not as much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.

We’re talking about a man whose practically first act upon taking office early this year was to escalate the ugly and pointless war in Afghanistan with the addition of some 20,000 troops, and who, even as the Nobel committee was discussing his award, was meeting with his military and political advisors to consider expanding that war even further, both in Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan.