Public pressure carries the day

The President cancels criminal bombing of Syria due to public, Congressional pressure. To paraphrase Hawk Harrelson when the White Sox are rallying: "Don't stop now peaceniks"!

Time to exercise his "License To Kill"

President Obama to the world: "Some Syrians must die so I don't lose face."

Music Pick: Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger (b.1919) is probably the living public figure I admire most. He's done it all several times over and, to the best of my knowledge, is still singing and writing provocative and inspiring songs. The feature, "Garbage" is, well, a treatise on all things garbage in 4 minutes, be it meal residue, carbon emissions, nuclear contamination, fraudulent finances and mindless TV. If ol' Pete would update it I'm sure he'd add a verse or two about Fukushima, tar sands and the like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZesRAo5PBg

British poodle just morphed into a pit bull

In a stunning defeat for the British War Party of Prime Minister David Cameron, the British Parliament voted 285-272 to defeat a resolution allowing Britain to join America in another senseless and murderous intervention in the Middle East, this time against the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad. Prime Minster David Cameron said it is clear Parliament does not want military intervention and "the government will act accordingly". Unlike American congressmen, Britain legislators actually debate entering criminal war against countries not an imminent danger to the homeland. The opposition Labor Party learned its lesson for supporting Prime Minister Tony Blair's criminal war against Iraq ten years ago and led the opposition to military intervention.

Britain may have been President George W. Bush's poodle whom he led to the most disastrous and senseless war in American and British history, but ten years on that poodle has morphed into a bit bull that just bit off a chunk of Uncle Sam's leg. Hopefully, the leader of the American War Party, President Obama, is rethinking his urgent drive to a war which will accomplish nothing but add more dead bodies to the 100,000 souls who've already perished in Syria, and drive American credibility in the Middle East further into the gutter. We know that British Prime Minister David Cameron gets it. The only question now is...will President Obama?

Just desserts for climate change deniers

http://climatenamechange.org/

It's not Pay To Play - its just Free Speech

Thank goodness DuPage residents have diligent public interest watchdogs like DuPage Board member John Curran (GOP. 3rd). Curran, chairman of the Board ethics ordinance subcommittee, discovered that the Board's ethics policy on campaign contributions is too good. It restricts businesses doing or seeking business with the county from only contributing $1,000 a year. Curran is horrified that this ethics law doesn't conform to the state law that allows such donors to contribute up to $3,500 during a two year campaign cycle.

"Quite frankly, I might have something on the books that's not enforceable", Curran surmised, and the full Board in poised to raise the campaign contribution cap in a bit over 24 hours to prevent state gendarmes from swooping down and padlocking Board member offices for being out of sync with the more liberal (campaign contribution wise) state ethics guidelines.   

Joining Curran in this truly bizarre exercise in bad governance is county spokeswoman Judy Pardonnet who opined, "We currently have two standards...the Board will consider making a change", claiming it's "inherently flawed" for the county to have a yearly cap when the state imposes a per election (and higher annual) limit.

What is inherently flawed are County Board officeholders who would dare water down ethics guidelines regarding campaign contributions in the poster state for campaign contribution abuse. The Quinn administration, which has made ethics reform a signature accomplishment to erase the corrupt Illinois image, will not interfere with DuPage's current ethics guidelines. To paraphrase the last line in "Gone With The Wind", their take on Curran's hysteria over the imagined conflict between DuPage and Illinois ethics guidelines would be: "Frankly, DuPage...we don't give a damn"!

Leaking 700,000 docs gets 35 year sentence; killing 700,000 people gets $1.3 million pension‏

Col. Denise Lind, the military judge who sentenced Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years for leaking 700,000 classified documents about our criminal Iraq and Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks, sure has a sense of understatement. In addition to the 1,294 days confinement waiting for swift justice Manning gets credit for, Lind also credited him an additional 112 days compensation for "harsh confinement". Wow, eleven months of solitary confinement, forced nudity, sleep and sensory deprivation causing world wide condemnation that compelled his transfer to humane conditions, is dismissed as "harsh treatment". I wonder what Judge Lind would call pulling out Manning's fingernails: "really nasty stuff"?

Manning's sentence in the Kangaroo Court of American military justice was actually pretty light considering the war party demanded 60 years for Manning's audacity on trying to inform the public of their criminal activities. How was his trial a Kangaroo Court, you might ask? For starters, his lawyers were prohibited from mounting a credible defense that Manning was simply following the military code of conduct and international law. His lawyers could not enter into evidence the documents that exposed numerous war crimes and government lies that covered up those crimes. If true, this is conduct Manning was legally and morally compelled to reveal.  Also, the court accepted, without an iota of evidence, that Manning's document release harmed American security and endangered American citizens. Those rulings foreordained a guilty verdict and a miscarriage of justice.

Manning's release of 700,000 documents brings to mind another factoid of 700,000; the approximate number of Iraqis killed in President George W. Bush's phony, made up, senseless and therefore illegal war against Iraq. We'll never know the true number of deaths Bush's criminality caused for two reasons. First, Uncle Sam has toiled mightily to prevent a true accounting, least it bring new calls for W's prosecution. Secondly, his Disaster In Iraq is the war that keeps on killing, as we've left behind tons of depleted uranium from our high tech ordinance that will be deforming and destroying Iraq fetuses for generations to come. Even if the civil war currently raging in Iraq calms down, that fouled landscape must be one sorrowful land not on your Top Ten Vacation List.

And while Manning contemplates his 35 year prison sentence, President Bush contemplates his $1.3 million annual pension in salary and ex-president benefits. The only downside for Bush is that he has to spend this taxpayer financed largesse here in the Good Ol' USA. Once he enters any land that takes the Nuremberg War Crime Trials seriously, he may get to join Manning in a prison cell.