November 26th, 2006
I hadn’t heard a report about the situation in Iraq quite as raw as this, via CrooksandLiars.com:
MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, firstly, let me say, perhaps it’s easier to deny that this is a civil war, when essentially you live in the most heavily fortified place in the country within the Green Zone, which is true of both the prime minister, the national security adviser for Iraq and, of course, the top U.S. military commanders. However, for the people living on the streets, for Iraqis in their homes, if this is not civil war, or a form of it, then they do not want to see what one really looks like.
This is what we’re talking about. We’re talking about Sunni neighborhoods shelling Shia neighborhoods, and Shia neighborhoods shelling back.
We’re having Sunni communities dig fighting positions to protect their streets. We’re seeing Sunni extremists plunging car bombs into heavily-populated Shia marketplaces. We’re seeing institutionalized Shia death squads in legitimate police and national police commando uniforms going in, systematically, to Sunni homes in the middle of the night and dragging them out, never to be seen again.
I mean, if this is not civil war, where there is, on average, 40 to 50 tortured, mutilated, executed bodies showing up on the capital streets each morning, where we have thousands of unaccounted for dead bodies mounting up every month, and where the list of those who have simply disappeared for the sake of the fact that they have the wrong name, a name that is either Sunni or Shia, so much so that we have people getting dual identity cards, where parents cannot send their children to school, because they have to cross a sectarian line, then, goodness, me, I don’t want to see what a civil war looks like either if this isn’t one.
November 26th, 2006
Not the way I would want to die:
Woman’s body found behind bookcase
NEW PORT RICHEY, Florida (AP) — A woman’s body was found wedged upside-down behind a bookcase in the home she shared with relatives who had spent nearly two weeks looking for her.
A spokesman for the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office said Mariesa Weber’s death was not suspicious. Family members said they believe she fell over as she tried to adjust the plug of a television behind the bookshelf.
Weber, 38, came home October 28 and greeted her mother, then wasn’t seen again. Her family thought she had been kidnapped and contacted authorities. Family members scoured her room for clues but found nothing, although they did notice a strange smell.
On Nov. 9, Weber’s sister went into her bedroom and looked behind a bookcase, where she saw the woman’s foot. Using a flashlight, the family saw Weber was wedged upside-down behind the unit.
“I’m sleeping in the same house as her for 11 days, looking for her,” her mother, Connie Weber, told the St. Petersburg Times. “And she’s right in the bedroom.”
Both Weber and her sister previously had adjusted the television plug by standing on a bureau next to the shelf and leaning over the top. Her family believes Weber, who was 5-foot-3 and barely 100 pounds, may have fallen headfirst into the space.
“She’s a little thing,” her mother said. “And the bookcase is 6 feet tall and solid. And she couldn’t get out.”
The sheriff’s office said Weber appeared to have died because she was unable to breathe in the position she was in.
November 26th, 2006
Our democracy at work:
After six years of technological research, more than $4 billion spent by Washington on new machinery and a widespread overhaul of the nation’s voting system, this month’s midterm election revealed that the country is still far from able to ensure that every vote counts.
[...]
Voting experts say it is impossible to say how many votes were not counted that should have been. But in Florida alone, the discrepancies reported across Sarasota County and three others amount to more than 60,000 votes. In Colorado, as many as 20,000 people gave up trying to vote, election officials say, as new online systems for verifying voter registrations crashed repeatedly. And in Arkansas, election officials tallied votes three times in one county, and each time the number of ballots cast changed by more than 30,000.
[...]
Accusations of missing ballots and vote stuffing were not uncommon with mechanical voting machines. But election experts say that with electronic voting machines, the potential consequences of misdeeds or errors are of a greater magnitude. A single software error can affect thousands of votes, especially with machines that keep no paper record.
[...]
In Arkansas, Florida and Pennsylvania, the questions were about the voting machines themselves. In addition to the Sarasota issue, which may have been caused by a software problem, there were similar problems in the Florida counties of Charlotte, Lee and Sumter. In those counties, said Barbara Burt, vice president and director for election reform at Common Cause, more than 40,000 voters who used touch-screen machines seemed not to have chosen a candidate in the attorney general’s race. But since one candidate won by 250,000 votes, the anomaly has been generally overlooked.
On election night in Arkansas, officials discovered that erroneous results had been tallied in Benton County. After retabulating the votes, they announced that the total number of ballots cast had jumped to 79,331 from 47,134, which meant a turnout of more than 100 percent in some precincts. After a third tallying, the total dropped to 48,681.
November 21st, 2006
There’s been a lot talk recently about reinstating the draft:
The incoming Democratic chairman [Rep. Charles B. Rangel] of the House Ways and Means Committee said yesterday that he will push to renew the military draft, as lawmakers in both parties sharpened their criticisms of the situation in Iraq and struggled for consensus and solutions.
Rep. Rangel explains his motivations for reinstating the draft:
"There’s no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way," said Rangel, a Korean War veteran. "If we’re going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can’t do that without a draft."
And, given the following, Rep. Rangel is clearly on to something:
With Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) “calling for resuming the draft to spread the burden of military service across society,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution notes that Congress itself illustrates the same gap.
“Only about 10 percent of the members elected to Congress for the first time this year are military veterans, according to a survey by the Military Officers Association of America. In all, only about one in four members of the new Congress will have served in the military — down from half in 1991 and three-quarters a decade earlier.”
The decline in military experience among members of Congress reflects the fading of the World War II generation — where most of the men served — and the decades that have passed since the end of the Vietnam War and the nation’s last military draft.
“The number of veterans in the House peaked in 1977-78, when about 80 percent of the members had military experience, said Strobridge. The peak in the Senate was in 1983-84, when 75 percent were veterans.”
As I mention at the start, all this talk about the draft has gotten a lot of people around the blogsphere chatting about the topic, its consequences and how we can address the current lack of service inequalities illustrated by the paragraphs quoted above.
A diarist over at DailyKos.com suggest that we should reinstate the draft, along with a slew of "public service corps" for those that don’t want to serve in the military.
If there’s a draft I would ONLY support it if everyone had to serve in the military in some capacity. I would not support the draft if draftees could serve their time in one of the "service corps" that the DailyKos diarists suggests; because the mechanism that the diarists suggests opens the door to abuse by those that wish to dodge serving during a time of war and, too, the "service corps" alternative offers a way for politicians to skirt the political consequences of an aggressive foreign military policy (just like we have now, where the consequences of foreign wars are not widely felt across our country nor by the political elite because they don’t have "skin in the game").
Of course, there are those that would object to serving in the military because of religious or other moral reasons, and for those individuals there would be an option to serve in a non-combat role within the military. But the point, though, is that everyone would wear the uniform and be exposed to the sort of discomforts that come with serving in the military — which, quite simply, are not the same sort of discomforts that one is exposed to in any other type of organization.
Of course, having everyone serve in the military would create a large and ready resource available to tackle some of our ongoing domestic concerns. Consequently, a peace time military with a large number of draftees could be used at home to do many of the things that the DialyKos diarists suggest: clean up and rebuild our crumbling cities and towns; work with patients in rural areas with poor medical service; work with conservation issues; etc. My point is that the draft is only fair if everyone is obligated to serve through the military; otherwise we will not be addressing the very problem that the current "draft reinstatement" discussion seeks to address, that is: making sure that our military is used more responsibly by our political elite by ensuring that the costs of not doing so are felt widely by the American public.
