Blackwater. What an apt name for mercenary merchants of death.

From the NY Times: Iraq Contractor in Shooting Case Makes Comeback

Here are a few highlights.

Guards for the security company were involved in a shooting in September that left at least 17 Iraqis dead at a Baghdad intersection. Outrage over the killings prompted the Iraqi government to demand Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and led to a criminal investigation by the F.B.I., a series of internal investigations by the State Department and the Pentagon, and high-profile Congressional hearings.

But after an intense public and private lobbying campaign, Blackwater appears to be back to business as usual.

The State Department has just renewed its contract to provide security for American diplomats in Iraq for at least another year. Threats by the Iraqi government to strip Western contractors of their immunity from Iraqi law have gone nowhere. No charges have been brought in the United States against any Blackwater guard in the September shooting, either, and the F.B.I. agents in Baghdad charged with investigating whether Blackwater guards have committed any crimes under United States law are sometimes protected as they travel through Baghdad by Blackwater guards.


Take a deep breath. Wrap something tightly around your head to fend of exploding skull syndrome.

The chief reason for the company’s survival? State Department officials said Friday that they did not believe they had any alternative to Blackwater, which supplies about 800 guards to the department to provide security for diplomats in Baghdad. Officials say only three companies in the world meet their requirements for protective services in Iraq, and the other two do not have the capability to take on Blackwater’s role in Baghdad. After the shooting in September, the State Department did not even open talks with the other two companies, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, to see if they could take over from Blackwater, which is based in North Carolina.

OK, all together now: Deep breath. Scream.


254 Day. 10 Hours. 9 Minutes. And counting.

According to a report on CNN this morning, Noble Prize winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz estimates that the Iraq war will cost the US $12 billion per month in 2008. The good news is that's less than we spent last year.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/10/iraq.costs.ap/index.html

At the same time, the President and Congress have cut funding to Head Start, a national federally funded program to provide comprehensive early education programs to more than 900,000 disadvantaged infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. The legislation, which received overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, included policy changes designed both to enable the program to serve more low-income children, including underserved groups such as Native American children children of seasonal and migrant farmworkers and infants and toddlers, and to improve program quality."
http://www.nhsa.org/press/News_Archived/index_news_012408.htm
http://www.cbpp.org/2-5-08bud.htm

Ralph Nader.

Ralph, Ralph, Ralph.

Sit down. Shut up. Go home.

Because the last few presidential candidate races have been quite clear cut, we haven't heard much about so called "super delegates", who are, apparently governors, senators, state chairs and Bill Clinton.

From Wiki:
"Superdelegate" is an informal term for some of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention, the quadrennial convention of the United States Democratic Party.
The convention delegates who are not superdelegates are selected as a result of party primaries and caucuses in each U.S. state, in which voters express their preference among the contenders for the party’s nomination for President of the United States. Delegates supporting each candidate are chosen in approximate ratio to their candidate’s share of the vote. In some states, the delegates so chosen are legally required to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged, at least on the first ballot at the convention. By contrast, the superdelegates are seated based solely on their status as current or former elected officeholders and party officials. They are free to support any candidate for the nomination, although many of them have publicly announced endorsements.
At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the superdelegates will compose approximately one-fifth of the total number of delegates. The closeness of the race between the leading contenders, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, has caused greater attention to be paid to the role of the superdelegates in selecting the Democratic nominee.
The Republican Party also seats some party officials as delegates without regard to primary or caucus results[citation needed], but the term "superdelegate" is most commonly applied only in the Democratic Party. Sometimes, the term is used only to describe Party Leader and Elected Official (PLEO) delegates, and other times it is used to describe all Democratic unpledged delegates. This article discusses only PLEO unpledged delegates.

According to MSNBC:

By Tom Curry
National affairs writer
MSNBC
WASHINGTON - It’s called the Democratic Party, but one aspect of the party’s nominating process is at odds with grass-roots democracy.

Voters don’t choose the 842 unpledged “super-delegates” who comprise nearly 40 percent of the number of delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination.

The category includes Democratic governors and members of Congress, former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, former vice president Al Gore, retired congressional leaders such as Dick Gephardt, and all Democratic National Committee members, some of whom are appointed by party chairman Howard Dean.


Forty percent? FORTY percent??? And as of yesterday, a considerable number of the Democratic sups are already pledged to "the Clintons". How is this not rampant cronyism? If they overturn a popular mandate from the voters, I will seriously consider burning tires and American flags in front to the post office. I'd be almost as worried if the situation was reversed on principal if not preference. Almost. ;-)

It's this sort of thing that made me an independent for so long, and why I will probably go back to that once we've swept out the White House.

PS: sorry for the long quotes. I can't seem to figure out lj cuts.

When I first read this story about the mistreatment of an Icelandic tourist by Homeland Security officials in NYC, I first thought it might be a hoax—in part because I couldn't imagine a detanee who'd been shackled, fingerprinted, and mug shotted being allowed to keep their cell phone, or why anyone would turn down the chance to call their embassy, and partly because I hadn't heard anything about it, and that's the kind of thing that registers on my radar. I couldn't find what I would consider a reliable news source for it, not even on NPR. then someone some tipped me off to the following article from the Icelandic Review.


12/20/2007
US Authorities Regret Treatment of Icelandic Tourist

"Iceland’s Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir received a letter from Stewart Baker, Assistant Secretary for Policy for the US Ministry of Homeland Security, yesterday, saying he regretted the treatment of an Icelandic tourist earlier this month.

The letter states that the incident gives the US Ministry of Homeland Security a reason to review work procedures regarding how foreign tourists are being received in the US, Morgunbladid reports.

Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lilliendahl was arrested at JFK airport in New York on December 9 for an earlier visa violation. After 24 for hours of interrogation and humiliating treatment, being locked up in a prison cell, barred from making phone calls and refused food and drink, Lilliendahl was deported.

Gísladóttir met with the US Ambassador in Iceland Carol van Voorst on December 13 and demanded an apology from US authorities. Following the meeting, van Voorst contacted the authorities at JFK airport as well as the US Ministry of Homeland Security.

“I believe this is a very successful conclusion of this case,” Gísladóttir told Morgunbladid. “I’m happy for Erla Ósk that the US Ministry of Homeland Security responded quickly to her case. I would also like to thank the US Ambassador in Iceland for her part in this.”

According to Morgunbladid, both Icelandic and American lawyers who have experience of the American justice system have contacted Lilliendahl and offered to represent her case in court. But Lilliendahl has not decided whether she is going to sue.

“I could not, in fact, have imagined a better outcome of this case, this is more than I had expected,” Lilliendahl said, referring to the US Ministry of Homeland Security’s decision to review its work procedures regarding how foreign tourists are being treated. “They are not admitting a mistake as such, but they regret the poor treatment I received.”

Gísladóttir said she is satisfied with Lilliendahl taking her story to the press and how Icelandic authorities reacted to it. “The fact that Iceland is a small country where all distances are short and every individual matters, results in Icelandic authorities taking such stories seriously, which may not have happened in other countries.”

“We must hope that this case will result in things like this never happening again in the future,” the minister concluded."

See link for the whole story. I'm betting this is not an isolated incident, either. Perhaps others on the receiving end of this sort of thing weren't "tall and blond enough" to get any attention.

Why was this not reported in the US? I Googled it, and the only hits I had were on people's blogs, which I generally take with a grain, or sometimes a heaping tablespoon of salt. So I'm passing it along to all of you, with sources, so you can be surprised/appalled/saddened/outraged/etc. too. I'm trusting the US news people less and less, and worrying more than I used to about government control.

What turned out to be the long diatribe that follows started out as a perfectly reasonable question about Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney to my dear friend kythiaranos, who has very generously offered to explain Mormonism to anyone who has questions about it. I encourage you to go talk to her, because she's a wonderful, intelligent person and a devout and lifelong Mormon who is very good at dispelling myths and ignorance about her faith. (She's also an amazing poet!)

I know and love kythiaranos and her family, and knew a lot of Mormons when we lived in Oregon. My experiences have all been positive. I think Romney is a forthright, intelligent, clean-cut guy with a good heart, and from what I've heard, did a good job in Massachusetts. However, he has done some serious and disturbing back flips to distance himself from his previously moderate stand on some things I care about, including legal abortion, and appears to be courting the far Right by teaming up with Dr. Bob Jones III. I seriously wonder if he could get elected governor in MA on his current platform?

Oddly enough, right before I read K's LJ post, I'd just finished watching today's Face the Nation, which I'd DVR'd, which featured Tim Russert's interview with Romney as part of Russert's series of interviews with all the candidates. I really like Russert. He's smart and insightful, has a sense of humor, asks pointed questions, while always remaining reasonable and polite. Sort of a Jon Stewart with out the bad language.

( Enter at your own risk )