¡Vive El Grito!

In the early hours of September 16, 1810, father [Miguel*] Hidalgo, accompanied by several conspirators [...] rang the bell of his little church, calling everyone to fight for liberty. This was the beginning of the Independence War, which lasted 10 years.

Bicentennial of the Mexican Independence

*Full name: Miguel Gregorio Antonio Ignacio Hidalgo y Costilla y Gallaga Mondarte Villaseñor

A mis amigos Mexicanos: mi corazón está con ustedes hoy.

¡Vive la revolución!

...pero, haz lo que quieres...no importa, porque ya harás.

I hope that all makes sense. After all, I did post it today (which is actually Friday) thinking that today (which is actually the 17th) was the 16th. So I just cheated and changed the date of the post. Which is where you say, "Hey, do what you want...you will anyway."

What Health Care Problem?

In a reflection of the battered economy, the number of people without health insurance rose sharply last year to 50.7 million — an all time high — according todata released Thursday by the Census Bureau.

  MSNBC

What's Wrong With This Picture?

The Obama administration is considering filing the first criminal charges against radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in case the CIA fails to kill him and he is captured alive in Yemen.
The decision continues the White House's strategy of fighting terrorism both in court and on the battlefield.

  AP via the Houston Chronicle Online

I think we've missed the point here: Obama will file charges against a man if his order to kill him doesn't pan out. Silly me. I thought that in our country the law required us to bring charges first and then have a person found guilty through the judicial system, and lastly order a death sentence if allowed by law.

I would go so far as to say that Obama's decisions in this case constitute a decision to fight the courts, not terrorism.

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

Newsflash!

Church groups use tax money to fund anti-gay programs. What a surprise.

An obscure branch of the federal government responsible for distributing millions (-more than $255 million in 2008, according to the most recent annual report on file -) of tax dollars to religious organizations is drawing criticism for poor oversight over how federal grant money is spent and an overall lack of transparency.

  Washington Independent

Religious organizations should not be getting tax dollars. Thank you, George Bush.

In South Carolina, the Palmetto Family Council, a local affiliate of the Family Research Council (FRC), was awarded $1.2 million through Healthy Marriage and Abstinence Only grants from 2004 to 2009. According to its blog, the “top priority” for the group in 2006 was South Carolina’s anti-gay marriage amendment.

[...]

The Indiana Family Institute, another local FRC affiliate, received $50,000 in direct federal funding. [...]. Also known as Hoosier Family, the Indiana Family Institute is advocating for an anti-gay marriage amendment in 2010.

[...]

The Iowa Family Policy Center (IFPC) received more than $3 million in federal funds to pay for a marriage-mentoring program.

In addition to destroying hundreds of thousands of lives in foreign countries and making us the pariah of the globe, our tax dollars via the federal government are funding anti-gay activity.

Separation of church and state advocates were outraged when President Barack Obama elected to continue the program under the name Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Here's another newsflash: Obama was being hypocritical when he campaigned against George Bush's policies.

He added the "Neighborhood Partnerships" part to W's program. I wonder if any money goes out of it to any neighborhood organization that isn't religious.

The ACF has only three full-time Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) specialists on staff, which creates staggering wait times for fulfillment of information requests.

I don't guess that was the goal.

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

We Don't Need No Steenkeen Oversight

We've gotten along without it for years.

[Currently] federal law requires only seven percent of natural gas pipelines and 44 percent of liquid pipelines to be inspected.

[...]

Today, the Obama administration sent Congress draft legislation strengthening pipeline oversight. The proposal comes as pipeline safety is in the national spotlight. In July, a cracked pipe in Michigan leaked more than a million gallons of oil into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River — an event environmentalists describe as disastrous. And, just days ago, the explosion of a natural gas pipeline in California killed four and damaged dozens of homes. But, lawmakers are already raising questions about the proposal for failing to address key issues of concern identified by pipeline safety experts. Moreover, they argue that passing the pipeline legislation this year might be impossible, as there are so few days left on the legislative calendar.

  Washington Independent

So few days and so many Republicans and pseudo-Democrats.

Obama Works Around the Republicans for Once

Rather than naming Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, President Obama plans to name her to a new White House and Treasury advisory post, helping to set up the CFPB, Jake Tapper reports.

Obama chose not to nominate Warren to head the CFPB — her idea in the first place — due to the risks of the Senate confirmation process. A single Republican Senator could have held her nomination up for months. Worse, she might not have been confirmed, leaving the consumer agency without a head after weeks of waiting.

  Washington Independent

So in essence she has a position like Dick Cheney's.

The War on the Middle East

Drone aircraft unleashed a missile attack in a lawless tribal region on the Afghan border Wednesday, keeping up the most intense period of U.S. strikes in Pakistan since they began in 2004, intelligence officials said.

  Huffington Post

"A lawless tribal region." So that's good, then.

And we can rejoice that our electoral process has taken root in Afghanistan.

Printers in [a Pak city] near the Afghan border say they have produced thousands of fake voter registration cards at the request of Afghan politicians for use in that country's parliamentary elections on Saturday.

  NPR

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

BP: Something Fishy

BP has hired out-of-state contractors to use unregistered boats, usually of the Carolina Skiff variety, to spray toxic Corexit dispersants on oil located by VOO workers.

[...]

Along with giving a clear description of how the Coast Guard was thus always aware of the findings of the VOO workers, [a diary kept by one of the them, Shirley Tillman] provides, at times, heart-wrenching descriptions of what is happening to the marine life and wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico.

[...]

"There was, as usual, a Coast Guard on one of the boats in our team. He called in to report it, but we were told not to drop the boom, it was just ‘Fish Oil.’ In the beginning of the clean-up operation, if something was floating on the water and it looked like oil, it was oil or oil sheen. Later they would sometimes say it was just ‘Fish Oil.’ Also, if it was heavy foam with a brown or rust color, originally it was ‘Oil Mousse.’ Later it was called ‘Algae.’ We were then told to head Northwest. The further we went, the worse the ‘Fish Oil’ got. Then, the foam was mixed in with the oil. It was at least the size of a football field, around our boat alone. My husband got on the radio and asked if they could put the boom over.” The Coast Guard, again, told them no. “We were then headed West, back towards Pass Christian. A pleasure boat flagged one of the boats in our group down and told him that there was oil all over. The Coast Guard said to tell him that they were aware of the situation … On the way back to the Pass Harbor, I asked my husband, ‘Just exactly what are we even doing out here?’ He told me that he was beginning to think that it was all just for show.[...] We decided then to start documenting as much as we could. I believe it was the very next day, Thad Allen was on TV saying that they were scaling operations back due to the fact that, ‘No oil has been seen in the Gulf in almost two weeks.’

  Dahr Jamail

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

The War Is Over, Long Live the War

The hype around the change of mission, which allowed President Barack Obama to say he was fulfilling a pledge to start ending the unpopular war, set off complaints among some soldiers left behind who were no longer viewed as combat troops.

[...]

U.S. Staff Sergeant Kendrick Manuel swung his rifle over his shoulder and grumbled about being viewed as a "non-combat" soldier in Iraq.

"When NBC talked about the last combat troops are gone, they made it sound like everything is basically over," he said, after escorting a 19-truck convoy through a part of northern Iraq where roadside bombs and mortar attacks are still a danger.

"To us it was like a slap in the face, because we are still here ... we are still going in harm's way every time we leave out of the gate," Manuel said at a U.S. military base, Camp Speicher, near Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit.

[...]

U.S. military convoys are still shot at and bombed, and bases are mortared, despite a change in the name of the U.S. mission from Operation Iraqi Freedom to Operation New Dawn.

  Reuters

Always with the ridiculous naming. Rolling out "new" products for public consumption.

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

More Empire Irony

Iraq has quietly agreed to pay $400 million in claims to American citizens who say they were tortured or traumatized by Saddam Hussein’s regime after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
The controversial settlement ends years of legal battles and could help Iraq emerge from United Nations sanctions put in place two decades ago – a step Iraqi leaders see as a prerequisite to becoming fully sovereign.

  Yahoo

So, to recap: the U.S. creates a worldwide regime of torture, disappearances and lawless imprisonment. Then, the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and the American federal judiciary all collaborate to shield the guilty parties from all accountability (Look Forward, Not Backward!), and worse, to ensure that not a single victim can even access American courts to obtain a ruling as to the legality of what was done to them, let alone receive compensation for their suffering, even while recognizing that many of the victims were completely innocent.

[...]

[W]e invade, occupy and destroy Iraq -- while severely abusing, torturing and killing their citizens -- and then demand, as a condition for our allowing the end of crippling sanctions, that they fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to American torture victims, even though it all happened 20 years ago, under an Iraqi regime that no longer even exists.

  Glenn Greenwald

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

It's Sunday

1 Corinthians 13:11

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
(King James Version)

More words of wisdom from Stan Goff:

On education:

I’m still carrying a grudge about wasting 12 years of my life in a “democratic” institution called public school, where children — who should be exploring their own curiosity in a diverse world — are imprisoned and trained like lab rats, and segregated by age, creating one of the monstrosities of modernism — youth culture, a thing separate from the age-diverse world where they might learn something interesting and practical instead of memorizing test answers and saying the damned pledge [of] allegiance. Compulsory public school has, more than any other single thing, driven a wedge between generations and left our children vulnerable to the stupidity of their equally inexperienced peers and predatory advertising.

On democracy:

There’s a tendency to assume that if we share certain discernments about a situation, then we share an opinion about what ought to be done about it.

I abhor war, therefore I must also invest myself in the struggle to elect antiwar candidates, for example.

This is a non sequitur. I do not invest myself in these struggles, except where they are revelatory — deepening our discernments.

[...]

Elections! The heart of democracy by some accounts.

If anyone has any evidence that elections in the US have shifted power from the ruling class, I’m all ears.

[...]

Democracy makes us liars. Look at the grotesque apologetics deployed by “liberals” (I am emphatically not liberal! nor conservative! nor progressive!) to justify continuing support for the institutional cesspool called the Democratic Party. We stifle our basic powers of observation on behalf of a game that we never win and that never stops and that we never win and that never stops; and we would become like them if we did. We jump on the great hamster wheel of democracy, cycling through election after election, complaining about the things we have abandoned to management for this vanity, and blame those who say no to the wheel.

[...]

My FB friends assume that I, like they, want to seek power — collectively, of course — to fix the things that other powerful people are allegedly responsible for. This point-of-view, that someone has to exercise power against power, is absolutely hegemonic.

[...]

As long as we continue with the delusion that we need the state, or that we need to fight the state with the same kind of force the state uses, we will remain apart from what really matters: each other. Our mangerial society has placed a force-field of isolation around us all, and subsitututed rules and regulations for the bond between souls. Moreover, the modern managerial society has taken moral responsibility away from the individual, and thereby metastasized the lonely narcissism that infects modern society.

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

It's Sunday

He ["Pastor" Jones] flew to New York and appeared on NBC's "Today" show. He says that his Gainesville, Fla., church's goal was "to expose that there is an element of Islam that is very dangerous and very radical."

He tells NBC that "we have definitely accomplished that mission." He says no meeting is planned with the imam leading the center but he hopes one will take place.

  Yahoo

What a dick. His goal was to get attention. Or does he just live in the vacuum of his mind where no other information sees the light of day?

Expose that there is a radical element of Islam? Where has the old kook been? Of course there’s nothing radical about a book burning. I think I’ll burn copies of the Consitution to expose the fact that US politics stinks to high heaven. I’ll bet there are a lot of people out there who don’t know that.

What got exposed is that he was run out of Germany for using church money for personal pocket lining.

This is why the media should ignore these nutbags from the get go.

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

UPDATE: There may be a lesson for us all in this, though - it could be: Beware Bible-touting preachers named Jones.