This Can't Be Happening!

If the day comes that Congress finally does its duty and begins an impeachment effort against 9th Circuit Federal Appeals Judge Jay Bybee, the former Bush assistant attorney general who in 2002 authored a key memo justifying the use of torture against captives in the Afghanistan invasion and the so-called “War on Terror,” it would be fitting punishment to watch him squirm as his own words as a judge were played back to him.

President Obama deserves credit for breaking the half-century-long taboo in American politics of dealing with Cuba, and meeting with Raul Castro, Cuba’s current leader. He also deserves credit for dealing in a friendly manner with Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

But what is this crap about “talking with” our enemies or with countries that have been “hostile” towards us?

Back in 1965, as a 15-year-old kid, I had a chance to spend half a year as a student at a boy’s gymnasium (high school) in Darmstadt, the cultural capital of the German state of Hesse, which had the distinction of having been one of a handful of cities in Germany (Dresden was another) that were selected by the Allies to test out the terror tactic of firebombing. The town was chosen for incendiary bombardment precisely because it had no military value and thus, no air defenses (and because it consisted mostly of wooden structures).

As you’re mailing out that tax return again this year, it’s time to remember once again how much of your hard-earned bucks are being devoted to destruction, imperialist domination, slaughter and war, to funding ridiculous programs like the failed anti-missile system, and also to supporting a massively bureaucratic and overstaffed military.

Reading the latest AP report on how American citizens are being snatched up, detained and deported (sic) by the Immigration and Naturalization Service has reminded me just what a screwed up place this country has become.

Ever since September 11, 2001, the country has simply lost it.

By Charlie Ehlen

As a former US Marine/Vietnam veteran, I agree with your position
on this 100%. Americans need to see what war does to all those caught up in it.

War is the most pornographic thing we humans have ever
devised. It is nasty, brutal, obscene, and vile. There is no glory in war.

Wars are fought, basically, in a garbage dump. Think of it: there are
the waste materials of the food containers, and spent shells all over
the area. You live in this shit during any war. It is inescapable. I

When I was a 17-year-old kid in my senior year of high school, I didn’t think much about Vietnam. It was 1967, the war was raging, but I didn’t personally know anyone who was over there, Tet hadn’t happened yet. If anything, the excitement of jungle warfare attracted my interest more than anything (I had a .22 cal rifle, and liked to go off in the woods and shoot at things, often, I’ll admit, imagining it was an armed enemy.)

A Colorado TV station is reporting that interviews with some of the six jurors in the unfair dismissal court case filed by University of Colorado Professor and Native American activist Ward Churchill against the university reveal that five of the six wanted to award him $150,000 in damages after establishing unanimously that he had been improperly dismissed by the school.

Reportedly one lone juror held out for a minimal $1 dollar symbolic award and ultimately, because they "wanted to go home," the rest of the jurors conceded the point.

The accounting profession might seem like the last place that you’d find serious political hanky-panky going on, and it’s probably not on very many people’s A-list of fun subjects to read about, but the Financial Accounting Standards Board, a quasi-governmental body that has statutory authority to regulate and establish the rules by which public companies, including banks, do their books, has just caved in to pressure from those banks and from the large number of members of Congress who pocket huge piles of campaign swag and perks from those banks and other public companies, and gravely

A group of six ordinary people in a Colorado courtroom saw through the McCarthyite political tactics of the University of Colorado officials and Colorado politicians who conducted a witch hunt against tenured professor and long-time Native American activist Ward Churchill, saying with remarkable clarity and sense that he never would have had his tenure revoked and been fired by the university had it not been for his unapologetic left-wing politics and writings.

It was an enormous victory for academic freedom and for the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech.