Light Blogging Week

Moving. Thanks for hanging in. Please be patient.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Earth Hour

8:30 PM

Straight From the Top

American and NATO troops firing from passing convoys and military checkpoints have killed 30 Afghans and wounded 80 others since last summer, but in no instance did the victims prove to be a danger to troops, according to military officials in Kabul.

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen.Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year.

  NYT

That's an admission that would be enough to make a man choke on his pretzel.

Though fewer in number than deaths from airstrikes and Special Forces operations, such shootings have not dropped off, despite new rules from General McChrystal seeking to reduce the killing of innocents. The persistence of deadly convoy and checkpoint shootings has led to growing resentment among Afghans fearful of Western troops and angry at what they see as the impunity with which the troops operate — a friction that has turned villages firmly against the occupation.

[...]

Many of the detainees at the military prison at Bagram Air Base joined the insurgency after the shootings of people they knew, said the senior NATO enlisted man in Afghanistan, Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hall.

WTF?

It's still not Sunday, but on the heels of the Wisconsin scandal of a priest abusing deaf boys, three deaf Italian men have come forth to make the same claim.

Bisoli, Laiti and 65 other former pupils signed a statement last year saying sexual abuse, pedophilia and corporal punishment occurred at the school from the 1950s to the 1980s.

While not all acknowledged being victims, 14 of the 67 wrote statements and made videotapes, detailing abuse they suffered, some for years, at the hands of priests and brothers of the Congregation for the Company of Mary. They named 24 priests, brothers and lay religious men.

  Yahoo

It Will Soon Be Time to Start Thinking About Vote Fraud Again

Supporters of unverifiable electronic voting, such as election officials and voting machines companies, had long argued that, though manipulation of such systems was possible, nobody had actually ever done so.

[...]

All eight defendants in Clay County, Kentucky's election fraud trial have been found guilty today by a federal jury. Six of those eight were high-ranking election officials, including the county clerk, a circuit judge and the school superintendent. The conspirators were charged with having manipulated federal elections in 2002, 2004 and 2006 by buying and selling votes and manipulating electronic voting machines.

According to AP, each of the now-convicted felons could face up to 20 years in prison for what prosecutors had described as a conspiracy to manipulate elections for decades in the rural, heavily Republican county.

[...]

[O]ne of the witnesses in the case [...] described how she was trained by the county's chief election official, Clerk Freddy Thompson (one of those convicted today), to change votes cast by voters on the county's ES&S touch-screen voting systems after they'd left the voting booth. The witness, Wanda White also detailed how she was instructed to change her own voter registration from Republican to Democratic so that she could serve as a Democratic precinct official.

[...]

The ES&S iVotronic touch-screen systems secretly manipulated by the cabal of election officials in Kentucky to change voter's votes, are used in a total of 18 states, including Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and West Virginia.

  BradBlog

And There He Goes...

A politician can stick to his principles only so long. There goes Kucinich.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Finally the Change!

In 2008, Indonesia empowered a national commission to investigate human rights abuses committed by its own government under the U.S.-backed Suharto regime "in an attempt to finally bring the perpetrators to justice," and Obama was asked in this interview: "Is your administration satisfied with the resolution of the past human rights abuses in Indonesia?" He replied:

We have to acknowledge that those past human rights abuses existed. We can't go forward without looking backwards . . . .

When asked last year about whether the United States should use similar tribunals to investigate its own human rights abuses, as well his view of other countries' efforts (such as Spain) to investigate those abuses, Obama said:

I'm a strong believer that it's important to look forward and not backwards, and to remind ourselves that we do have very real security threats out there.

  Glenn Greenwald

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

It's Not Sunday, But...

Yet another instance where Joe "the Pope" Ratzinger's office covered up priestly child abuse. And, while it's just one of many, many cases of priestly child abuse, this one's a doozey.

Arthur Budzinski says the first time the priest molested him, he was 12 years old, alone and away from home at a school for the deaf. He says he asked the Rev. Lawrence Murphy to hear his confession, and instead the priest took him into a closet under the stairs and sexually assaulted him.

Budzinski, now 61, was one of about 200 deaf boys at the St. John's School for the Deaf just outside Milwaukee who say they were molested by the priest decades ago in a case now creating a scandal for the Vatican and threatening to ensnare Pope Benedict XVI.

[...]

Murphy was accused of molesting boys in the confessional, in dormitories, in closets and during field trips while working at the school for the deaf from the 1950s through 1974.

[...]

Some of the allegations became public years ago. But they got renewed attention this week after documents obtained by The New York Times showed that Murphy was spared a defrocking in the mid-1990s because he was protected by the Vatican office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now the pope.

  Yahoo

Is there any more heinous organization than one which protects and thereby makes it possible for its members to molest children?

Church and Vatican documents showed that in the mid-1990s, two Wisconsin bishops urged the Vatican office led by Ratzinger to let them hold a church trial against Murphy.

However, Ratzinger's deputy at the time decided the alleged molestation occurred too long ago and said Murphy — then ailing and elderly — should instead repent and be restricted from celebrating Mass outside of his diocese, according to the documents.

Whoah! That's a little excessive, don't you think?

How anyone could give money to the Catholic Church these days is beyond me.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

P.S. This all brings to mind the Boys Town of Nebraska scandal where young boys were being used by the archdiocese to entertain and entrap (obviously stupid, in addition to immoral) politicians at private parties. (My November 2004 post on the subject is here.) I wonder how long before the outing of Ratzinger (who was very aware of that sex ring) leads to some well-known politicians. Or, will it once again get clamped down and covered up?

Time for a Treat

Update: More tree sculptures in Galveston.

Some people found a way to turn Hurricane Ike's tree damage on Galveston Island into something wonderful.

Good God

No change here.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Not Exactly His Finest Moment

President Barack Obama awkwardly kept a promise Wednesday he made to ensure passage of historic health care legislation, pledging the administration would not allow federal funds to pay for elective abortions covered by private insurance.

Unlike Tuesday, when a beaming Obama signed the health care law in a nationally televised ceremony interrupted repeatedly by applause, the White House refused to permit coverage of the event.

  Yahoo

If we don't see it, it doesn't happen?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Nothing to Crow About

Kaiser Health News has a new article today -- headlined: "Doctors, Hospitals, Insurers, Pharma Come Out Ahead With Health Bill" -- which begins as follows: "Most health industry sectors are winners -- some bigger than others -- under sweeping health care legislation that will expand coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans over the next decade, analysts say." It details the massive benefits each industry receives (compared to their mild costs) [and] the success they had in killing any real competition and reform in the bill (i.e., the public option, Medicare expansion, drug-reimportation, bulk price negotiations, and an end to the insurers' anti-trust exemption).

[...]

one wants to argue that this is a good bill, that's reasonable, but to claim that it is an example of Democrats' "standing up to special interests and the health insurance lobby" is so blatantly false that everyone -- especially supposedly independent commentators -- should be deeply embarrassed to espouse it.

  Glenn Greenwald

Staffed with the very best from the league of conventional politics, [Obama's] team bought off PhRMA (with the promise not to use market forces to force market prices for prescription drugs), and the insurance industry (with the promise[...] that they would face no new competition from a public option), so that by the end, as [Glenn] Greenwald puts it, the administration succeeded in "bribing and accommodating them to such an extreme degree that they ended up affirmatively supporting a bill that lavishes them with massive benefits." Obama didn't "push back on the undue influence of special interests," as he said today. He bought them off.

  Huffington Post

At the public's expense.

And while we're trading and buying….

The health care reform bill signed into law by President Barack Obama Tuesday requires members of Congress and their office staffs to buy insurance through the state-run exchanges it creates – but it may exempt staffers who work for congressional committees or for party leaders in the House and Senate.

Staffers and members on both sides of the aisle call it an “inequity” and an “outrage” – a loophole that exempts the staffers most involved in writing and passing the bill from one of its key requirements.

  Politico

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.