Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Disculpa mi ausencia

Honestly, I don't know how some of these high powered people keep up daily posting. Yesterday I had to do a training all morning, then spent the afternoon in a big, ponderous meeting. So I just didn't have time to post and wasn't up for it in the evening. Today I had meetings all morning, another coming up in a few minutes, then I'm doing a focus group. Tomorrow I'm doing a training all morning, then meetings in the afternoon . . .

So anyway, I'll do my best to fit in a substantive post, maybe the promised one on disease-related stigma and discrimination. But for now, it's just a fart in a whirlwind, but I do want to add my little peep to the chorus of astonishment and the viewing with alarm and all that over the deterioration of our political culture. You have the Vice President going on TV and saying sure, I committed war crimes, what's wrong with that? A Senate committee quietly issues a report saying the former Secretary of Defense, the Veep and the Preznit are war criminals, but none of the Senators and nobody else in the Congress as far as I can tell goes on teevee and says, this is outrageous and disturbing and appalling, they just ignore it. So do the reporters and pundits.

In fact, we've known that the U.S. committed an illegal war of aggression, justified by a concerted campaign of lies, and committed massive, systematic violations of human rights, for years now, and it's been the official, repeatedly affirmed position of the Democratic leadership in Congress that there will be no accountability and nothing will be done about it. What has become of us?

Contact your senators and your representative in Congress. Tell them that the United States must confront its recent past. Impeachment is not reserved for current office holders -- the process is fully applicable to people who have left office. Furthermore, Barack Obama's Justice Department can and must prosecute criminals, with the full support of the Democratic leadership in Congress. All criminals, no matter what high positions they have held. We must do what we can to recover our national honor.

Update: In response to a request for more info, I recommend starting with Glenn Greenwald here. Continue to read GG, and he also has links and references.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You have the Vice President going on TV and saying sure, I committed war crimes, what's wrong with that? A Senate committee quietly issues a report saying the former Secretary of Defense, the Veep and the Preznit are war criminals, but none of the Senators and nobody else in the Congress as far as I can tell goes on teevee and says, this is outrageous and disturbing and appalling, they just ignore it. So do the reporters and pundits.

I've missed all of this. I don't get to hear Democracy Now. I'm betting that NPR sidestepped this. Can you provide some links so I can read up?

Cervantes said...

Sure C. The go-to guy is Glenn Greenwald, starting here. In subsequent posts he's continued to follow up on the first rant.

Monado said...

I agree that if the U.S. is going to go on saying that it has a right to correct others it had better start living up to its own ideals and actually punishing those responsible for its recent rampages.

As for posting regularly, Blogger recently started letting you post-date articles so that they appear on a schedule. Other blogs have had that feature for years and do not arbitrarily delete people's blogs based on software rules or anonymous accusations. (After they mysteriously deleted ERV's blog, I moved to Wordpress.)

For several months I scheduled three posts a day, morning, noon, and night, so that whenever someone visited there would be a new article. I did it by concentrated work a couple of times a week to queue them up. But I found that the articles were staler, shorter, and less spontaneous. When I had something to say, I'd be dating it three days out to fill the schedule. So I went back to my old, random schedule. Consistency is overrated. Post when you have something to say and time to write. If you anticipate a long gap, schedule something into the middle of it.