Left I on the News  

The headlines blare "Iranian nuclear scientist defects" (quite possibly for a large sum of money, something of course not admitted but suggested by this: "Since the late 1990s, the CIA has attempted to recruit Iranian scientists and officials" as well as mention of "an offer of resettlement.").

But the story, after all is said in done, is as inconsequential as possible, and boils down to this:

Amiri has been extensively debriefed since his defection by the CIA, according to the people briefed on the situation. They say Amiri helped to confirm U.S. intelligence assessments about the Iranian nuclear program.

And what are "U.S. intelligence assessments"? That "Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons though we do not know whether Tehran eventually will decide to produce nuclear weapons." I'm not sure how exactly you would not "keep open the option to develop nuclear weapons" - kill all the nuclear scientists in your country and ban the teaching of nuclear physics? Other than that insightful observation from the CIA, what we see from this "extensive debriefing" is that there is no "smoking gun" or even the faint smell of gunpowder, because you can bet your life if this person had revealed anything that could even remotely be construed to suggest that Iran is actually engaged in a nuclear weapons program, that would be the headline, rather than the defection itself (which happened quite a while ago).

Of course, Donald Rumsfeld was indeed right when he said "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." The fact that this particular scientist had no secret revelations proves nothing, he may simply not have been part of or knowledgeable of the alleged secret programs. Although the fact that there was "a long-planned CIA operation to get him to defect" certainly suggests that the CIA thought he wasn't just any random nuclear scientist, but one who actually would know something, if there was something to know. Conclusion: there isn't. Or rather there is, which is that there is no "secret program."

Nobody who isn't a Muslim, at least according to the corporate media. First it was the Hutaree group, who you'll find described as "Christian warriors" (wouldn't that be "jihadis"?), "militia members", pretty much anything but "terrorists." Do a Google search for "Hutaree terrorism" and pretty much every link you'll see will be to a blog, or at most an op-ed like Eugene Robinson's in the Washington Post, but few if any to actual corporate media.

Then we have a story which wasn't even important enough to make my morning paper or the network or cable news as far as I saw - the guilty plea entered by this fellow:

Cowart and fellow skinhead Paul Schlesselman told police that they planned to kill 88 [black] people [or 102, numbers vary], beheading 14 of them, and then die in a blaze of glory as they drove towards Mr Obama dressed in white tuxedos and firing out the windows.

I searched multiple news stories, not one included the words "terrorism" or "terrorist", even though this pair, just like the Hutaree group, fit the classic definition of "terrorism" - "the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes."

Meanwhile, last night on the Keith Olbermann show, I actually had to listen to Melissa Harris-Lacewell bring up an attempt to perform a citizen's arrest on Karl Rove as an example of "left-wing extremism" (you know, the old "a plague on both sides" position), even though she admitted that the person doing that was wearing a pink fuzzy hat and not carrying a gun. As if such an example belongs in the same library, much less the same book, chapter, paragraph, or sentence, as the groups noted above.

Amusing update: Each of the anti-government Hutaree defendants has asked for a public defender. :-)

On a state level, the farce of "free" speech continues. Republican Gubernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman continues to saturate the airwaves with her aids (bizarrely, most aimed at her primary opponent whom she leads in the polls by 50 points!), on track to spend...$150 million of her own money which, the San Jose Mercury News helpfully points out, would educate 13,194 California schoolchildren for a year, or would more than wipe out San Jose's $116.2 million budget deficit. Don't feel too bad for her opponent, another billionaire, who has already spent "only" $19 million of his own money on his campaign.

On a more local level, the numbers are smaller, but still put the lie to the concept of "free" speech. The San Francisco 49ers are trying to convince the small city of Santa Clara to help them build a new stadium, and there's a measure on the ballot for residents to vote on. The 49ers are spending $1.4 million on more not-so-free speech, running ads on TV which, you won't be surprised to learn, have no counterpart on the other side. So the "debate" continues, with one very heavy thumb on the scale.

The "greatest democracy in the world"? Yeah, about as much as "the best medical care in the world."

Is it "terrorism" to willfully deny people, including children, access to clothes and shoes for three years? I don't know, but it's certainly immoral and illegal. It's also a policy that has been supported by almost the entire "civilized world." Of course that's "civilization" in the Ghandian sense:

Israel will allow a shipment of clothes and shoes to be delivered to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for the first time in its almost three-year-old tight blockade of the enclave, Palestinian officials said on Monday.

And what does the "civilized world" have to say?

Israel is under international pressure to relax its blockade.

Yes, and you can tell just how strong that "pressure" has been by the fact that it hasn't succeeded in relaxing the blockade enough to allow in clothes and shoes for three years!

Like his predecessor, President Obama slinks into a country occupied by the U.S. under cover of night (and leaves before dawn), and delivers the bait-and-switch:

"Al Qaeda and their extremist allies are a threat to the people of Afghanistan and a threat to the people of America, but they’re also a threat to people all around the world, and that’s why we’re so proud to have our coalition partners here with us."

Of course the U.S. hasn't been fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan for years, they're fighting the Taliban. And the claim that the Taliban are a "threat to the people of America" or "people all around the world" is as specious as the claim that Iraq had WMD and the U.S. had to attack. Obama knows that only by throwing up the Al Qaeda bogeyman can he possibly justify the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

Of course, that's not his only justification. His other? We're there because we're there:

"The United States of America does not quit once it starts on something. You don’t quit, the American armed services does not quit, we keep at it, we persevere, and together with our partners we will prevail."

What exactly "we" will "prevail" at isn't specified. The "war on terror", no doubt.

And, by the way, if the U.S. is still in Afghanistan to prevent "Al Qaeda and its extremist allies" from regaining power and threatening the U.S., why is the U.S. still in Iraq? "We" "won" apparently, because there hasn't been any claim that Al Qaeda is active in Iraq for a long time now, and, even if they are, there doesn't appear to be the slightest chance they will gain power there. So why are there still American troops in Iraq? Waiting for a "stable government" to emerge? Hell, we don't even have that in the U.S.! Obama just had to appoint 15 people to important positions by "recess appointments" because the simplest government function, confirming someone's appointment for office, couldn't be accomplished in over a year! This is the country that is going to lecture others about democracy? The country where one person can put a "hold" on unemployment benefits for millions? The country where the idea that "majority rules" is a thing of the past? That country?

It's not really news if you followed the actual cases we knew about, but now we have official confirmation that "Don't ask, don't tell" was a complete fraud, a lie. Today Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the Pentagon would no longer launch investigations based on anonymous tips, confirming that this policy always involved ferreting out gays in the military, by any means necessary. It had nothing to do with "not asking" and "not telling."

And even that change is not real. Because even after this alleged change, it turns out that "authorities [are supposed to] discourage the use of overheard statements and hearsay" (by the way, "overheard statements" are hearsay). So even now, there will still be "asking," and "telling" on the part of the accused has nothing to do with it, and the standards for these investigations don't even match those afforded to accused criminals.

The lie continues.

Hard to believe, I know, but it's true. Beck says that "social justice" and "economic justice" are "code words" for communism. Quite right!

Of course Beck also says they are code words for fascism, too, because fascists preached the "rights of workers." That's where Beck, like so many on the right, go wrong. Because fascism was no more for the "rights of workers" than those who wage war are actually for "peace." Talk is cheap, and often, meant to intentionally deceive. It's actions that count, and that's where we learn that, between communism (or socialism) and fascism (and let's throw in "capitalism" as well), only one of them is actually for social and economic justice. And it isn't fascism (or capitalism).

Case in point:

Ridiculous, right? Well, at least in 2010, anyway. But when the government in question is Israel, and it's not "whites-only" but "Jews-only," what is really ridiculous is that this blatant racism passes almost completely unnoticed. We hear complaints about the "timing" of the announcement, and much less often complaints that such building is actually illegal, but not only don't you hear complaints about the flagrant racism on display, it passes completely unnoticed. Indeed, if the government of Israel approves new Jewish housing in Tel Aviv, or Haifa, or anywhere else in "Israel proper," I'm sure you don't hear about it at all.

Here we go again:

President Barack Obama is reassuring immigration reform advocates that he is committed to working with Congress on a comprehensive bill to fix a "broken immigration system."

Obama said he would do everything in his power to forge a bipartisan consensus on immigration reform this year.

He doesn't look like he's thick as a brick, but I'm beginning to wonder.

Actually, of course, I'm not. As with health "reform," the pretense of looking for "bipartisanship" is just a way to push the bill further and further to the right, while maintaining some "cover" for that maneuver.

When talking about "money for education, health care, mass transit, etc and not for war," it's easy to focus on the most dramatic (and to many people, most unnecessary) expenses - the wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. But U.S. military expenses go far beyond that. Far beyond. As an example:

Lockheed Martin's F-35 jet fighter, the Pentagon's most expensive program, has risen about 62 percent in cost and is four years behind schedule, according to Pentagon documents and new data.

Production of the airplane by the Bethesda-based firm was projected to cost an estimated $143 billion for 2,852 aircraft in 2002.

The Defense Department now says it will cost as much as $232 billion for 2,443 aircraft when calculated in 2002 dollars, according to figures released Friday.

Development and testing, originally scheduled to be finished in March 2012, won't be done until April 2016, the documents say.

The "main enemy" of the U.S. who we're told "threaten our way of life" is a rag-tag bunch of fighters whose main weapon is IEDs, akin basically to land mines. They barely seem to have even RPGs any more, much less any kind of weapons which can shoot down aircraft. And against this "enemy," the U.S. is spending a quarter of a trillion dollars to develop a new generation of aircraft, which won't even be deployed for another six years.

Meanwhile, roads, mass transit systems, and schools and colleges (just to name a few of the more prominent problems) all over the country are deteriorating and badly in need of investment.

Nothing can be more irritating than belated, useless "apologies," whether it's Alan Greenspan "apologizing" for totally misunderstanding capitalism and helping to wreck the economy, or Colin Powell or many others "apologizing" for not making clear what they knew about the lies being told about Iraq at the time they were being told.

Latest in the long string of ruling class hacks apologizing for screwing up the world is Bill Clinton:

Decades of inexpensive imports - especially rice from the U.S. - punctuated with abundant aid in various crises have destroyed local agriculture and left impoverished countries such as Haiti unable to feed themselves.

While those policies have been criticized for years in aid worker circles, world leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the first time that loosening trade barriers has only exacerbated hunger in Haiti and elsewhere.

They're led by former U.S. President Bill Clinton - now U.N. special envoy to Haiti - who publicly apologized this month for championing policies that destroyed Haiti's rice production. Clinton in the mid-1990s encouraged the impoverished country to dramatically cut tariffs on imported U.S. rice.

But of course he knew exactly what he was doing:

"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake."

And how's this for the height of self-centeredness:

"I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."

"Nobody else," Bill? How about the starving people of Haiti? They not only had to "live" with the consequences of your actions, some of them had to die from the consequences.

If you're wondering where I've been for a week, it's been working on today's march (not to mention actually working!). Today is the day if you live near Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Albuquerque, or many other cities to get out and public and say: "Money for health care, education, mass transit, not for war!" Demand that we stop spending a half billion dollars a day to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan (and three billion a day on war in general) and start spending it right here at home for human needs.

San Francisco: Civic Center at 11
Los Angeles: Hollywood & Vine at noon
D.C.: Lafayette Park across from the White House at noon
Portland: 11:00am PSU, Noon at Terry Schrunk Plaza, 1pm Teach-In Unitarian Church

To get you started, some video from the press conference which took place in Washington, D.C. on Thursday: