Duty to Warn

Once I did put it on, Omar motioned for me to push back some loose strands of hair still visible outside my hooded sweatshirt. Long-haired men, though a typical sight in some regions of Afghanistan, are apparently not very common in Kabul. Covered up to his satisfaction, I followed close behind as we made our second attempt to enter the university through a second gate. We slipped handily past the guardpost, and made our way into the men’s dormitory.

Omar had been visiting the community house of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, where I was a guest and partner organizer through my role as co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. In an effort to improve human conditions in Afghanistan, he is starting to build bridges between the APVs and his university classmates. It was his fifth visit to the house when he met me and offered to bring me to meet some of them.

Note that in this hot, never-ebbing, electoral season, global warming is not among the issues given much attention. This is the case despite the fact that the trend in rising temperatures and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to rise at crisis levels, and that 97% of all climate scientists have been persuaded by the best scientific evidence that global warming is having increasingly deleterious and disruptive effects on the climate. Recent polls find that an increasing percentage of respondents agree that global warming is occurring, that it is caused by human activities, most notably by the burning of fossil fuels for energy, and that the government should take actions that would reduce the problem.

If we lived in a more politically responsive time, government would pass and enforce a carbon tax and undertake massive support for renewable energy, conservation, and efficiency policies. As the matter stands, the Republicans in the U.S. Congress oppose and would surely stop any such legislative initiatives and the Democrats with other priorities have not pressed the issue.

In late October 1968, Beverly Deepe, a 33-year-old Saigon correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, came upon a story that could have changed history. A six-year veteran covering the Vietnam War, she learned from South Vietnamese sources that Richard Nixon’s campaign was collaborating behind the scenes with the Saigon government to derail President Lyndon Johnson’s peace talks.

On Oct. 28, Deepe sent her startling information to her Monitor editors in the United States, asking them to have the Washington bureau “check out a report that [South Vietnamese Ambassador to the United States] Bui Diem had sent a cable to the Foreign Ministry about contact with the Nixon camp,” she told me in a recent e-mail exchange.

At that moment in 1968, the stakes surrounding Nixon’s secret contacts could hardly be higher. With half a million U.S. soldiers serving in the war zone – and with more than 30,000 already dead – a peace deal could have saved countless lives, both American and Vietnamese. Progress toward a settlement also could have meant defeat for Nixon on Election Day, Nov. 5.

Check out Richard Charnin's work:
Final Exit Poll
Spreadsheet

Mr. Thomas E Stewart, lobbyist for the Oil and Gas industry and executive director of Ohio Oil and Gas Association based out Granville Ohio, testified before the House Public Utilities Commission on May 22nd, 2012 concerning Governor Kasich’s ‘Energy Bill’, SB 315. Many amendments were offered to SB 315 concerning full chemical disclosure, dye tracers, fresh water well testing, local decision making on well placement and background checks for well operators, that would have added much needed protection for Ohioans, but these were disregarded for the most part in favor of a ‘gag’ rule which ties the hands of first responders and doctors in treating anyone affected by a toxic spill or drill site accident.

What we got tonight, June 5th, in Wisconsin was the same old stench, coming from the same old corner of the room, even more pungent than usual. If it smells a bit acrid to you, that would be the ashes of your democracy still smoldering. To wit, there was a huge turnout (highly favorable to the Democratic candidate Barrett), in fact they're still waiting in line to vote in Milwaukee and elsewhere nearly two hours after poll closing; and the immediate post-closing Exit Polls had it a dead heat, 50%-50%. But the only place those polls were posted was as a Bar Chart in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Not a single network posted any Exit Poll numbers, though they all have been regularly posting them throughout the 2012 primary season within a few minutes of poll closing. But they all called the race "extremely tight," since they were looking at the same 50%-50% Exit Poll that the Journal Sentinel at least had the courage to post in some format.

"It was a great demonstration of democracy, whether you agree or disagree with the outcome," Huffington Post's political reporter Howard Fineman told Ed Schultz on MSNBC late tonight, while discussing the results of the historic Wisconsin recall elections.

Fineman's comment is either accurate or it is not. Just as the results reported by the computers across the Badger State are either accurate or not. Who knows? Nobody in WI does, and that's exactly the problem.

The early Exit Poll results had reportedly predicted the race between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett a virtual tie, leading media to plan for a long night tonight. A second round of Exit Polls results, however, were said to have given Walker a broader lead over Barrett. Even so, we were told, the race based on the Exit Poll data alone was still "too close to call." That data was either accurate or it was not.

The poison seeps slowly into the future. No one notices.
“The Obama administration,” the Wall Street Journal informs us, “plans to arm Italy’s fleet of Reaper drone aircraft, a move that could open the door for sales of advanced hunter-killer drone technology to other allies . . .”

I can’t quite get beyond the name: Reaper drones?

“The Predator’s manufacturer, General Atomics, later developed the larger Reaper,” John Sifton wrote last February in The Nation, “a moniker implying that the United States was fate itself, cutting down enemies who were destined to die. That the drones’ payloads were called Hellfire missiles, invoking the punishment of the afterlife, added to a sense of righteousness.”

Early on, George Bush called his invasion of the Middle East “a crusade” and declared that “God is not neutral” in the war on terror. The rightist spin was that we had engaged “a clash of civilizations”; and Ann Coulter, articulating the unrestrained righteousness that 9/11 had unleashed in America, declared: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

When Gov. Rick Scott's (R-FL) administration distributed its controversial lists of possible non-citizen voters last month, state statute required the state's 67 county supervisors of elections to send out letters requiring those voters to prove their eligibility to vote within 30 days - a window that will end in the next couple of weeks in many counties. But a ThinkProgress survey of several county supervisors in Florida reveals that the lists of presumed non-eligible voters is riddled with errors. In large and small jurisdictions across the state, supervisors have found that a large number of the voters on the list are indeed eligible voters.

Volusia County Supervisor of Elections Ann McFall told ThinkProgress that she and the state's 66 other county elections supervisors sent a "clear message" to the Scott administration at a Tampa conference two weeks ago. "One after another, [they] got up and talked about inaccuracies [in the state's voter purge list of alleged non-citizen voters]."

This letter is in response to the articles covering the JP Morgan Chase investment debacle.
Well Mr. Dimon, it looks like you and your company have landed in the rough. This is because of the same type of stupidity and hubris that helped to cause the Great Recession is now déjà vu all over again. Now what? Layoffs? Did someone say layoffs? Sir, I've worked in the finance industry for the better part of 16 years and have never witnessed such a reckless disregard for the investor's money as this.