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Support the Troops

A US Army mental health advisory team's survey of battlefield ethics has come to an unpleasant conclusion:

One could say that's a lot of bad apples, but that would also be the same vicious shroud the Cheney-Bush administration uses to cloak its immoral policies toward the citizens of Iraq. It has set up an impossible task for the military presence in Iraq and then blames the troops when they don't reach the impossible.

As this evil charade continues to be played out, the makers of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are proving themselves to be genuinely inhumane (former Field Marshall Rumsfeld, et al), slavish shills (Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley), incompetent (Alberto Gonzales, George Tenet), corrupt (Paul Wolfowitz), and treacherous (Dick Cheney, Karl Rove). As if that's not bad enough, the President of the United States is now merely a cartoon character and doofus.²

We the people need three things: Congress' revocation of the 2001/2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force, impeachment of Cheney-Bush and their comrades, and then on to the War Crimes Tribunals.

1.  "US Iraq troops 'condone torture'," BBC News, May 4, 2007; see also "Lapses Found in Battlefield Ethics Study," AP/Guardian, May 5, 2005. The redacted Mental Health Advisory Team IV report is available in PDF form.
2.  See "Bush: 'I'm the Commander Guy'," New York Times, May 2, 2007. Bush happily refers to himself as "the commander guy" in a speech to the Associated General Contractors of America on Wednesday, May 2. The full speech (video/audio) is available at the Whitehouse.gov website.

Helping Hand Gets Big Enough to Slap Us Silly

You would think that 20 years of Betty Crocker's Helping Hand™ would have given us enough extra energy to find ways to stop poisoning ourselves with boxed foods. Despite the popularity of slow food, slow-motion training, slo-mo marathon racing, and other such tactics designed to get us in touch with good health, the one strategy that was meant to bring us closer to the source of our food may turn out to be a mere media epiphany. Buying local won't get us any healthier if it turns out there isn't any local food.

Over at Grist is a taut piece by Tom Philpott on how food processing in the US has been turned over to a handful of giant food companies. This follows upon the recent University of Missouri study on the Concentration of Agricultural Markets. With concentration ratios of the top four food-processing firms running as high as 83.5% in specific industries, it ain't a pretty picture they present.

Imagine Peas

The pro-peace, antiwar site, Justice Through Music, has released a remake of the 1971 John Lennon/Yoko Ono song Happy Xmas, War Is Over, in video format and with new lyrics. Listen, watch, and imagine peace with Op-Critical featuring the Harmonic Angels in Happy Springtime, Bush Is Over. Other video versions of the Lennon/Ono song are available here and here.

The songs and videos remind us, I think, that war is something we get to watch—and then we go back to eating our dinner.

We think our elected representatives are actually doing something by passing a bipartisan war-funding bill that calls for a complete withdrawal from Iraq by April 2008, but all they've done is pass gas. The faux press spared no trumpet in sounding the importance of the bill and Cheney-Bush spoke vociferously about veto plans. Surely this means the end of war as we know it. Alas, not only will a patented Bush signing statement get around all of the so-called tough provisions in HR 1591, but the loopholes in it are big enough to swallow all of the bombast that preceded the bill's passage. You can get details of the sellout at TomDispatch.com.