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Caught My Eye

Caught My Eye

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What caught my eye this morning, in no particular order…

And (even) weird(er) news…

A drunken German man climbed into an emergency postbox for unwanted babies, slid down the chute and landed in an incubator. Medical staff found him there, smoking a cigarette.

Ummm…there are postboxes for unwanted babies?

Hundreds of babies have been deposited in the boxes set up across Germany and Austria since the scheme started five years ago. It came into effect after more and more young mums unable to cope with their newborns had been abandoning them on the street. The baby boxes offered a safe ‘no questions asked’ alternative.

I’m assuming it’s not like a roadside postal box. It’s got to be more like an ATM, right? On the outside of a hospital? I’m trying to imagine a newborn sliding down a “chute” into an incubator. How does that work? I want to see a photo.

Once again, Terry Jones

Once again, Terry Jones

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Wouldn’t you love to see him perform this? Can’t you hear the words as you read?

Call that humiliation?

No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch.

Terry Jones, Saturday March 31, 2007, The Guardian

And what’s all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It’s time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That’s one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.

The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn’t rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it’s just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!

Go on and read the whole thing.

15 Brit Navy Personnel Seized by Iran

15 Brit Navy Personnel Seized by Iran

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Ominous development…

Fifteen British Royal Marines on patrol in the Persian Gulf have been “seized” by the Iranian navy, the British Ministry of Defense said.

The Marines were “engaged in routine boarding operations of merchant shipping in Iraqi territorial waters,” the ministry said in a statement on Friday.

A U.S. military official who monitors the region told CNN the Marines stopped an Iranian ship suspected of smuggling automobiles, and boarded it for an inspection.

While the Marines were on board, six Navy ships from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard showed up and claimed the British had entered Iranian waters.

A dispute ensued over whether the Marines were in Iraqi, international, or Iranian territorial waters, and the 15 were then seized and taken to Iran, the U.S. military official said.

Nuclear Plans, Libby’s Friend, Scope of War, SOTU

Nuclear Plans, Libby’s Friend, Scope of War, SOTU

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Some recommended reading – do your homework.

Saving the World By Stopping the Pentagon’s Programs
By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet

All that work against nuclear proliferation – gone, gone, gone. Another way we make the world a more dangerous place.

Then there is “Complex 2030,” a proposal to consolidate and update the entire nuclear complex, including the opening of a new plutonium “pit” facility capable of producing 125 new bombs a year. Estimated price tag: $150 billion over 25 years. The Bush administration and the Department of Energy argue that the overhaul is necessary to maintain the country’s deterrence and close aged plants, but arms control experts who have read the fine print say otherwise.

“The current nuclear stockpile is not in need of replacement, all of the existing nuclear weapons sites would still be in operation under the new plan, and the fundamental environmental problems of weapons production would not be solved,” states a joint report issued by more than a dozen nuclear watchdog groups, including Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Furthermore, the increased design, production and testing capabilities of Complex 2030 could spark a new nuclear arms race.”

…The major nuclear powers cannot continue to simultaneously refine their arsenals while keeping the rest of the world in 1944 by threat of force; only a madman thinks threats and preemptive strikes constitute a coherent or sustainable nonproliferation strategy. Nor can we continue to allow the production of fissile material and expect it to remain forever out of dangerous hands. We cannot have our yellow cake and eat it, too.

If we don’t come to grips with the dead-end of the nuclear double-standard, and begin soon the brave and historic grapple with the nuclear genie, we race toward a climax as awful as it is certain.

Take a look at Payson’s blog entry (Think Progress)on Chuck Hagel’s claim that the White House originally wanted the 2002 Iraq War Resolution to cover the entire Middle East. No-one else picked this up from the men style column at GQ? It ought to be on the front page.

Scooter Libby and Me
By Nick Bromell, The American Scholar, posted at AlterNet

Childhood friend of Scooter Libby’s shares questions he wants to ask him, and comments on the differences between liberalism and fundamentalism as they affect current US policy. This is worth a read just for the clear explanation of the difference between truth and the Truth (How did I miss Lynne Cheney’s article “The Roots of Today’s Lying Epidemic: The English Department Virus”? ). Oh, on lying?

Keep an eye out for fact checking updates on the State of the Union Address. The discussion on Charlie Rose was pretty good, and ABC has collected some citizen comments. To my ears, all Bush is saying…. is give war a chance.

Impeach George Now

Impeach George Now

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For a number of valid (if frustrating) reasons, the Democratic leadership is not considering impeachment at this time.

You, however, can still join the Peace Team in expressing your views on the matter. If there were more outcry, momentum toward impeachment might go forward.

IMPEACHMENT ACTION PAGE: http://www.peaceteam.net/impeachment_now2.php

Before the coming of george bush and his shadow president Dick Cheney, the greatest military blunder in American History was thought to be Custer’s Last Stand. It did not take a lot of hindsight to know that general Custer’s vain assault on a much larger force of better-armed native Americans would come to no good end. His own Indian scouts told him that the encampment at Little Bighorn was far too large to be attacked. But in his supreme arrogance, Custer believed that HE knew better than his own best sources of intelligence. We all know the result of that one.

How uncanny are the parallels to the current situation in Iraq? The neocon ideologues who seized dictatorial control of our government brushed off all contrary advice, and manufactured intelligence to support their case. They dismissed any challenge to their vision of the absolute power of American military dominance as a matter of right. They fired any underling who dared to try to tell them the truth, that
deposing Saddam would lead directly and inexorably to an Islamic theocracy, if not a sectarian civil war. They used the power of their crony associates in the corporate media to smear any public critic. And they are still doing it.

In case you had not noticed, the very first act of the new secretary of defense was to order more troops to Kuwait. [This was] to enable sending more to Iraq. In other words, the self-anointed “decider” has already decided– to defy the will of the American people, their Congress, and the entire rest of the world, for all it matters to him. In his mind, this is another one of those “done deals.” The only thing that’s taking so long to make the official announcement is the difficulty of yet another con job on us, with public opinion moving ever more forcefully in the opposite direction. Most of the remaining rubber stamp members of Congress are already coming down with a major case of cold feet, thanks to your voices, but george bush does not care.

They’ve even had problems this time finding strategists to sign on to this surge of stupidity. The best that they could come up with was some chest pounder talking about “choosing” victory, as if this was just some kind of personal motivation seminar, and the Iraqi people themselves were to have no say at all in the matter. Why don’t we have George Custer tell us that the number of Indians was of no consequence? The primary difference between him and what bush has done is that Custer did not wreck the ENTIRE U.S. Army, Custer did not mortgage our whole economy for generations to come, and, unlike bush, he actually had the courage to enter mortal combat himself.

You see, our child king has already declared that, as long as he is president, he is not budging an inch from Iraq. Take him at his word. You heard him say it. He is determined to take this country down with him in a pique of stubborn ignorance. He will not go out without a final surge of insanity and horror. And the only thing that can possibly save us all, and our future, is to finally stand up and hold him accountable for his high crimes and misdemeanors. [These are] enough to impeach every president who has ever served.

IMPEACHMENT ACTION PAGE

It is impossible to read the Constitution and not see george bush’s name writ large in every reference to the salvation of impeachment. If the founders had known his actual name, it certainly would have been expressly stated there, just as they enumerated the many outrages of their own king George. And all that is required for it to happen is for enough of us to speak out at the same time, to our members of Congress, in letters to the editors of our newspapers, and it WILL be so. When Custer’s Crow scouts told him in unison that he was out of his mind, he let them go. It’s not only time to let george bush go; but we must MAKE him go– NOW.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours.

To be added to the list, go to http://www.peaceteam.net/in.htm

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