An Afghan woman cries out among the dead and injured in Kabul after a suicide bomber hidden among worshipers at a Shiite Muslim shrine exploded a device, killing 55 people and injuring 134 others. It was one of two deadly bomb attacks on Shiites in Afghanistan on a religious holiday. (Massoud Hossaini, AFP/Getty Images / December 7, 2011)
Bush Policies Dominant Cause Of National Debt
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has updated and refined a widely cited chart, laying out the origins of the country's current fiscal trajectory. And as before, the lion's share of the problem comes from ongoing George W. Bush-era policies -- particularly deficit-financed tax cuts, which eliminated Clinton-era surpluses and left the Treasury poised for a huge hit when the financial crisis and economic downturn further eroded federal revenues.
By the end of the decade, CBPP projects that, on the current trajectory, the Bush tax cuts, exacerbated by the economic downturn, combined with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for the significant majority of public debt as a share of GDP.
Without those factors, and without the need for stimulus measures under President Obama, CBPP projects that the debt-to-GDP ratio would have dropped under both Presidents Bush and Obama.
CAMP VICTORY, Iraq — With heads bowed beneath a palace dome still etched with the initials of Saddam Hussein, dozens of U.S. service members paid tribute Monday to Americans killed in action not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and in wars of the past.Seeing the war dead arrive at Dover:
Officers presented a Memorial Day wreath, a bugler played "Taps" and a lieutenant general spoke about how "little compares to the loss of a brother in arms." Soldiers in uniform and contractors in work boots said the nearly 4,400 Americans who've died in Iraq since 2003 weren't faceless statistics: They were commanders, friends, family.
For some of the troops who gathered at Camp Victory in Baghdad, it was difficult to discuss individual losses, even now that combat deaths have tapered off and the war here is eclipsed by the bloodshed in Afghanistan, where the number of troops killed in action just passed the 1,000 mark.
"It's too personal," said Air Force Staff Sgt. Bien Covita, 34, of San Jose, Calif., looking away as he declined to discuss the fallen service member on his mind. He added that he wished that Americans would view Memorial Day as "more than just a day off work. We sacrifice every day for them to sleep comfortably."
It was pretty stark in the dim light with an almost full moon; at first there was no one there. Then the bus carrying the families showed up but it was choreographed so they got out on the side away from us so we could not see them. One white van, what they call the "transfer vehicle," was parked on the tarmac and one soldier, a young woman, stood next to it. She is the "Transfer Vehicle Guide," whose ceremonial role it is to close the van's back doors after the bodies are loaded on board.Asking too much of our military and their families:
The procedure began with high-ranking officers and the pall-bearer details appearing, marching in formation. Since there were two dead that night, Cpl. Kenneth Nichols, Jr., of Chrisman, Illinois, US Army, and Lance Cpl. Jonathan Taylor, of Jacksonville, Florida, US Marine Corps, both killed in Afghanistan, there were two separate teams, one from the Army, the other of Marines, dressed in their different uniforms.
The Army went first, boarded the stairs onto the airplane, and emerged out the front. The loading ramp then lowered onto ground level with the coffin and the seven pall-bearers carried the body past the saluting officers, into the waiting van. The Marines then repeated the same. Not a sound could be heard from the hidden family members just a few feet from us on the other side of their bus. Another time, I could hear a woman, probably the wife or the mother, crying a terrible wail that was the only sound on the airfield.
Brooke Knox, a former Navy wife, counsels military relatives who are struggling with the repeated deployments of husbands and fathers, wives and mothers.And the week that was:
There's often one unifying refrain -- one deployment too many to handle well. She has found that often, that number is three.
"There's a saying among Army wives," said Knox, who leads a free counseling program for military families through the Mental Health Association of Tarrant County.
"The first deployment, they say, 'I think I can do this.'
"The second deployment, they say, 'I know I can do this.'
"The third deployment, they say, 'I can't do this.'"
The company recalled 40 widely used children's pain and allergy medications, saying some may have a higher concentration of their active ingredients, while others may be contaminated. J&J has had four recalls in the past year of over-the-counter medicines.What the hell was Israel thinking?:
In an FDA report issued on Tuesday, inspectors said they found thick dust, grime and contaminated ingredients at the J&J plant that produces Children's Tylenol and dozens of other products recalled last week.
DeLauro, in her letter, said the company's "disregard" for manufacturing standards was "both unnerving and unethical."
"The corporate oversight observed at this facility appears to be symptomatic of reckless behavior that is clearly unacceptable," she wrote.
After least nine people have been killed after Israeli commandos stormed a convoy of ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army says.
Armed forces boarded the largest vessel overnight, clashing with some of the 500 people on board.
It happened about 40 miles (64 km) out to sea, in international waters.
Israel says its soldiers were shot at and attacked with weapons; the activists say Israeli troops came on board shooting.
The activists were attempting to defy a blockade imposed by Israel after the Islamist movement Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Streaming video of oil pouring from the seafloor and images of dead, crude-soaked birds serve as visual bookends to the natural calamity unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico.All about fucking booms... and how BP isn't doing anything right:
But independent scientists and government officials say another disaster is playing out in slow motion — and out of public view — in the mysterious depths between the gusher and the coast, a world inhabited by sperm whales, gigantic jellyfish and diminutive plankton.
It's fucking obvious. Boom is not meant to contain or catch oil. Boom is meant to divert oil. Boom must always be at an angle to the prevailing wind-wave action or surface current. Boom, at this angle, must always be layered in a fucking overlapped sort-of way with another string of boom. Boom must always divert oil to a catch basin or other container, from where it can be REMOVED FROM THE FUCKING AREA. Looks kinda involved, doesn't it? It is. But if fucking proper fucking booming is done properly, you can remove most, by far most of the oil from a shoreline and you can do it day after day, week after week, month after month. You can prevent most, by far most of the shoreline from ever being touched by more than a few transient molecules of oil. Done fucking properly, a week after the oil stops coming ashore, no one, man nor beast, can ever tell there has been oil anywhere near that shoreline.And the inevitable:
While work continues to try to staunch the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, an avalanche of class action lawsuits is descending upon BP in courthouses from Texas to Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.Pakistan, between a rock and a hard place....
This week's visit by the US president's national-security adviser and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to Pakistan was portrayed as a feel-good trip that highlighted the high level of cooperation between Washington and Islamabad.Uhhhh.... right.
But despite what may have been written about CIA chief Leon Panetta's and General James Jones's meetings with civilian and military leadership during their visit, analysts in Pakistan say all is not well between the two sides.
They note that as senior US officials visit Islamabad to make new demands -- mostly about increasing military or law enforcement efforts against myriad extremist groups in Pakistan's western border regions -- Pakistani officials continue to respond by urging patience, asking for more money and weapons, and calling for a true understanding of their military, political, and economic limitations.
Former Pakistani diplomat Tayyab Siddiqui says the US-Pakistani relationship is currently on a "bumpy road" and the visit by the two senior US officials a week ahead of a planned second round of strategic dialogue was significant.
The Vatican is planning a new initiative to reach out to atheists and agnostics in an attempt to improve the church's relationship with non-believers. Pope Benedict XVI has ordered officials to create a new foundation where atheists will be encouraged to meet and debate with some of the Catholic Church's top theologians.No Dawkins and Hitchens? Then you aren't serious. And then there's this:The Vatican hopes to stage a series of debates in Paris next year. But militant non-believers hoping for a chance to set senior church figures straight about the existence of God are set to be disappointed: the church has warned that atheists with high public profiles such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will not be invited.
Tombstone, shackles found in priest's homeSo how about you fix your own house before you go knocking on other people's doors, Pope?
Poole, accused of shoplifting, nailed posters all over rectory
.....here are six things you need to know about Connections:No One Cares: By Chris Hedges
Facebook will not let you share any of this information without using Connections. You cannot opt-out of Connections. If you refuse to play ball, Facebook will remove all unlinked information from your profile.
Facebook will not respect your old privacy settings in this transition. For example, if you had previously sought to share your Interests with "Only Friends," Facebook will now ignore this and share your Connections with "Everyone."
Facebook has removed your ability to restrict its use of this information. The new privacy controls only affect your information's "Visibility," not whether it is "publicly available."
Explaining what "publicly available" means, Facebook writes:
"Such information may, for example, be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), be indexed by third party search engines, and be imported, exported, distributed, and redistributed by us and others without privacy limitations."
Facebook will continue to store and use your Connections even after you delete them. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they're not there. Even after you "delete" profile information, Facebook will remember it. We've also received reports that Facebook continues to use deleted profile information to help people find you through Facebook's search engine.
Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you "Like" something. That "Like" button you see all over Facebook, and now all over the web? It too can sometimes add a Connection to your profile, without you even knowing it.
Your posts may show up on a Connection page even if you do not opt in to the Connection. If you use the name of a Connection in a post on your wall, it may show up on the Connection page, without you even knowing it. (For example, if you use the word "FBI" in a post).
We are approaching a decade of war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq is in its eighth year. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands more Afghans and Pakistani civilians have been killed. Millions have been driven into squalid displacement and refugee camps. Thousands of our own soldiers and Marines have died or been crippled physically and psychologically. We sustain these wars, which have no real popular support, by borrowing trillions of dollars that can never be repaid, even as we close schools, states go into bankruptcy, social services are cut, our infrastructure crumbles, tens of millions of Americans are reduced to poverty, and real unemployment approaches 17 percent. Collective, suicidal inertia rolls us forward toward national insolvency and the collapse of empire. And we do not protest. The peace movement, despite the heroic efforts of a handful of groups such as Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Green Party and Code Pink, is dead. No one cares.
POLITICS: Behind Cautious Signal, a Decision for Afghan Peace Talks
By Gareth Porter*
KABUL, Jan 26, 2010 (IPS) - Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's very cautiously-worded support for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban leadership in an interview published Monday is only the first public signal of a policy decision by the Barack Obama administration to support a political settlement between the Hamid Karzai regime and the Taliban, an official of McChrystal's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command has revealed in an interview with IPS.
Speaking to the Financial Times, McChrystal couched his position on negotiations in terms of an abstract support for negotiated settlements of wars, saying, "I believe that a political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome." The ISAF commander avoided a direct answer to the question of whether the Taliban could play a role in a future Afghan government.
When pressed by the interviewer on the issue, McChrystal would only say that "any Afghan can play a role if they focus on the future and not the past."
The ISAF official, who spoke with IPS on condition that he would not be named, was much more candid about the centrality of peace negotiations with the Taliban leadership in the Obama administration's strategy in Afghanistan and about the understanding of the ISAF command that the Taliban leadership is independent of al Qaeda and is already positioning itself for a political settlement.
Now outside of government, members of the George W. Bush administration are desperate to polish their turbulent legacy. However, a history of "Operation Enduring Freedom" being prepared by the Army would seem to contradict their version of the war on Afghanistan.Contrary to repeated claims that the Iraq war did not deprive Afghan forces of necessary resources, the Army's history shows that the Bush administration "hamstrung" forces in the country, according to The New York Times.
"A Different Kind of War," to be published later this year, was written by seven historians at the Army's Combat Studies Institute. It is the first report of its kind, giving an official stamp on events which transpired between October 2001 and September 2005. The Times obtained the 400-page manuscript and posted it online.
A Final Verdict on the Presidential Salute
DURHAM — The U.S. military is not just fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most renowned investigative journalist says.
The army is also “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have [President] Obama boxed in,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh told several hundred people in Duke University’s Page Auditorium on Tuesday night. “They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.”
In a speech on Obama’s foreign policy, Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraqi war, said many military leaders want Obama to fail.
“A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble,” he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.
It’s time to declare victory and begin to get out rather than descend deeper into an intractable civil war that we neither comprehend nor in the end will care much about. Terrorists of various stripes will still exist as they have throughout history, but the ones we are most concerned about have proved mighty capable of relocating to less hostile environments, including sunny San Diego and southern Florida, where the 9/11 hijackers had no trouble fitting in.
There is a continued need for effective international police work to thwart the efforts of a widely dispersed al-Qaida network, but putting resources into that effort does not satisfy the need of the military establishment for a conventional field of battle. That is the significance of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s leaked report calling for a massive counterinsurgency campaign to make everything right about life in Afghanistan, down to the governance of the most forlorn village. The general’s report aims not at eliminating al-Qaida, which he concedes is barely existent in the country, but rather at creating an Afghan society that is more to his own liking.
It is a prescription, as the Russians and others before them learned, for war without end. That might satisfy the marketing needs of the defense industry and the career hopes of select military and political aspirants, but it has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. In the end, it would seem that some of our leaders need the Afghanistan battleground more than the terrorists do.
MACON — U.S. Army Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook is seeking a federal court order to stall and eventually prevent an upcoming deployment to Afghanistan.Major Cook is very brave to bring attention to the fact that he wasn't paying attention in history class. Hawaii isn't part of the United States but one of those weird island nations filled with exotic natives and stuff, apparently.
In the 20-page document — filed July 8 with the United States District Court, Middle District of Georgia — Cook's California-based attorney, Orly Taitz, asks the court to consider granting his client's request based upon Cook's belief that President Barrack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is therefore ineligible to serve as commander-in-chief of U.S Armed Forces.
That's a lot of fake brake repairs....
----------------Rarely do stories generate the kind of consumer response that The Bee received after the state attorney general's office sued a Modesto businessman and his 22 Midas Automotive Service franchises.
The civil lawsuit, which seeks $222 million in penalties, claims the shops owned by Maurice "Mike" Irving Glad used false advertising and fraudulent business practices to sell consumers unnecessary parts and services. The case stems from a four-year investigation and 30 undercover sting operations.
For his part, Glad says he was the victim of overzealous enforcement by the state Bureau of Automotive Repair that was designed to deceive his mechanics. He defended his business practices and workers, vowing to fight the lawsuit aggressively.
------------------US bank Goldman Sachs reported a net profit of $3.44bn (£2.1bn) for April to June, beating analysts' forecasts.
Less volatility in stock markets, rises in global share prices and involvement in many firms' rights issues and takeovers had boosted profits, it said.
The bank said it had set aside $6.65bn for pay and bonuses in the quarter - an average of $226,000 per employee.
Goldman has recently paid off $10bn of government loans it had taken as part of a government bail-out programme.
A new study by Consumer Lab found that many multivitamins contain potentially dangerous levels of lead, and many did not contain the vitamins and minerals their labels proclaim.
[snip]
Almost no vitamins were found to be free of lead, according to the Sacramento Bee (the study results are by subscription only). Indeed, lead-free may be an impossible goal because fruits and vegetables absorb lead from soil and water.
What's a person to do? Your best bet is to buy a well known brand and look for a stamp on the bottle from USP, NSF or Consumer Lab.com. Living in California helps, because our state is the only one to regulate vitamins. By California law, 15 percent of the vitamins evaluated ought to carry a warning label.
Update:A US soldier has been captured by militants in eastern Afghanistan, the US military has said.
The soldier is believed to be the first seized in either Iraq or Afghanistan for at least two years.
News of the capture came as US and Afghan forces began a major operation against Taliban forces in southern Helmand province.
[snip]
A hardline Taliban faction called Haqqani said it had the soldier, but this has not been confirmed by the main Taliban spokesman.
The army was using all its resources to find the missing serviceman, who was taken on Tuesday, spokeswoman Capt Elizabeth Mathias said.
AFP news agency said a commander of Haqqani, named only as Bahram, said the soldier was captured along with three Afghans in the Yousuf Khail district of Paktika province.
The commander said the soldier had been taken to "a safe place".
Another Haqqani commander, Mullah Sangeen, told Reuters the soldier would be held until Taliban fighters detained by the US were released.
The BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner says the circumstances of this capture are strange and potentially very embarrassing for the Pentagon.
The Taliban are claiming he was drunk when they caught him, he says.
There is no indication he became separated during a firefight - rather that he wandered off out of his base with the three Afghans, our correspondent adds.
U.S. soldier sold to Afghan militant clan, official says
In 2008, 140 soldiers on active duty took their own lives, continuing a trend in which the number of suicides has increased more than 60 percent since 2003, surpassing the rate for the general U.S. population.The answer to this puzzling problem is found within the same article. To help, I've bolded it.:To deal with the problem, the Army has added to the ranks of mental health and substance abuse counselors. The service also required all units to cease operations for two to four hours to talk about suicide prevention in February and March.
Chiarelli's monthly meetings are the Army's way of sleuthing out patterns and identifying new policies to deal with the trend.
The Army's biggest challenge is that its volunteer force is in uncharted territory. Many soldiers are now in the midst of their third or fourth combat tour, and Army surveys show that mental health deteriorates with each one. Senior Army officials said they are focusing more resources, including extra mental health counselors, where troops are returning from multiple deployments. This year, Fort Campbell, Ky., which is home to the frequently deployed 101st Airborne Division, has had 14 suicides.Um... guys. The military is broken. Soldiers are people and they are used up and tired. You can't have an Eternal War on a Noun and expect only a small percentage of the American population to fight it ... forever. You can't extend tours, use stop-loss, badger and harass soldiers into reenlisting, lie to get potential recruits to sign up, ignore signs of mental stress and ptsd, provide crappy veteran's care and not have a backlash.
"We probably don't know how many mental health care providers we need after eight years of war and three and four deployments," Chiarelli said.
A former Afghan prime minister has called for an inquiry after Al Jazeera broadcast footage showing Christian US soldiers appearing to be preparing to try and convert Muslims in Afghanistan.But:
Ahmed Shah Ahmedzai said there must be a "serious investigation" after military chaplains stationed in the US air base at Bagram were filmed discussing how to distribute copies of the Bible printed in the country's main Pashto and Dari languages.
Denial may work for this event, but we know that the fanatical fundamentalists have overtaken parts of the military and have tried to make these wars into a holy crusade.Questioned about the footage, US colonel Greg Julian told Al Jazeera: "Most of this is taken out of context ... this is irresponsible and inappropriate journalism.
"This footage was taken a year ago ... the bibles were taken into custody and not distributed.
"There is no effort to go out and proselytise to Afghans."
The footage has surfaced as Barack Obama, the US president, prepares to host Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president, at a summit on Tuesday and Wednesday focusing on how to tackle al-Qaeda and Taliban bases dotted along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
