By David Swanson

Sixty-five congress members, including 60 Democrats and 5 Republicans, voted to end the occupation of Afghanistan on Wednesday. But 356 congress members, including 189 Democrats and 167 Republicans voted to keep the war going. The vote followed three hours of debate created by Congressman Dennis Kucinich's introduction of a privileged resolution.

The debate featured three leaders from three groups of congress members: the war opponents (almost all Democrats), the pro-war Democrats, and the pro-war Republicans. Given this alignment, which has existed for nearly a decade now, is there any reason for supporters of peace and justice to take heart? I think so. Here's why: If the 60 Democrats acted in good faith and would have voted the same way even if the bill had a chance of passing, or even if that could be said of only 38 of them, then we may very well see funding of the wars dry up. If the leadership includes unrelated measures in the next war funding bill ($33 billion coming in April or May), measures that lead all the Republicans to vote No (as happened last July), then only 38 Democrats have to vote No to block the bill.

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There are two signs over the Dogs desk; one reads;

“The man that favors the ideal over the real learns to achieve not his salvation but his ruin”

the other reads

“Ideals must be defended with idealism”.

Yes, they seem to contradict each other yet to me they are the essence of politics and policy.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

On the one hand, when we are talking about policy, there is the need to get things done, to make progress on the issues, even if we don’t finish them in this fight. If there is not a pressing need, then the issue should not be the focus of political and legislative policy, so by definition if an issue is being worked on it has a real world impact for real people. This generally means that doing nothing is unacceptable. Trying and failing often means that nothing will change, and the damage (whatever it may be) that is spurring the debate will continue.

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It is easy to think of Members of Congress as corrupt, this is particularly true of the Republicans who seem hell bent on doing everything they can to go against what polls show time and again is the will of the people. Since they are the avowed party of business and they have so many multi-millionaires and billionaires in their ranks the circumstantial evidence is pretty strongly in favor of this idea.

However the Dog would like to offer an alternate theory; namely that a large percentage of Congressional Republicans are not evil or corrupt, they are merely sack-of-hammers-dumb. Call it the creeping Jethro Bodine-ism of the Republican Party.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Iraq remains a mess from which the U.S. military seems increasingly uninterested in withdrawing fully and Afghanistan a disaster area, but it’s never too soon to think about the next war.  The subject is already on the minds of Pentagon planners.  The question is:  Are they focusing on how to manage future wars so that they won’t last longer than the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II combined? 

There’s reason to worry, especially since the lessons of both Iraq and Afghanistan are clear: it takes years after a war has been launched for the U.S. military to develop tactics that lead to stasis.  (“Victory” is a word that has gone out of fashion.)

Here, then, are three modest suggestions for recalibrating the American way of war.  All are based on a simple principle -- “preventive war planning” -- and are focused on getting the next war right before it begins, not decades after it’s launched.

1.  Make the Apologies in Advance

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Okay the Dog has had it right up to here with Republicans saying that unemployment assistance keeps people from finding work. Only a party that is the refuge of scoundrels and the ultra-rich could possibly think this. As one of those folks who is trying (and failing) to get by on the unemployment benefits, let the Dog lay it out for you.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

In the state of Colorado, you are entitled to 60% of your wages on unemployment. That is as long as you did not make too much money at your previous job. You see benefits are capped at $443 a week, so if you made any more than $38,400 you are out of luck for the rest of the 60%. This means that when middle class folks making around $50,000 a year become unemployed they are getting the shaft, twice. When the Dog was employed he was making $1,025 a week (not how they actually paid it but to compare apples to apples) so instead of getting 60% of that the hound is getting 43%.

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With Rush Limbaugh’s latest full court press against Barack Obama he has, among other things, sought to link Obama’s effort to pass a health care bill with Nazism.

This is dangerous ground for Limbaugh since analysis of Nazi practices, particularly in the realms of propaganda and economics, reveal much more in the way of commonality with the loquacious talk show host than with Barack Obama.

On the subject of propaganda, look at what Limbaugh has been up to the last few days. He has been referring to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as imams and mullahs.

Now just what does that translate into? Race hate against Arabs. He is using a blanket charge of racism against the Arab community and then linking the House and Senate Democratic Party leaders to terrorism through trying to domineer the legislative process in a dictatorial manner.

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In his film Capitalism: A Love Story [set to be released on DVD and Blu-ray Monday], Michael Moore squares off with the free-market system for its role in leveraging the United States's wealth into the hands of a few.

But in one clip cut from the documentary [Moore] interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, who explains how capitalism is actually contributing to the very downfall of the human race and the "degradation of the planet."

"All sorts of people who have spent their lives studying climate change, from Bill McKibben on down, have warned us that we don't have a lot of time left," Hedges said. "So it's not just that capitalism has destroyed our economic system and hijacked our political system, but it literally is extinguishing the system that sustains life. If that's not thwarted soon...then we will begin to see massive dislocations, environmental refugees, further depleting of natural resources. Overpopulation is also an issue. The UN estimates that by 2050 the size of the planet will double."

The very concept of capitalism, Moore declares in the film, is the problem because it inevitably leads to a system where the richest few control the means of production as well as the levers of power -- leading to a "plutonomy," a term used in a leaked Citigroup memo from 2005, in which the finance juggernaut concluded that the United States is no longer a democracy.

In the interview, Hedges decries America's turn toward supply-side economics over the last three decades as the cause of stagnating middle class incomes, contrasting it with the increasingly lavish fortunes of the wealthy and the aid they often receive from the government at the expense of working people.

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We spent a couple of days in Durban which is the third largest city in South Africa. We arrived exhausted from Maputo, Mozambique after a 24-hour bus ride on Intercape (gotta love when they breakdown for hours in the middle of the journey and you have to jump on a replacement bus seven hours later).

Durban has a population of almost 3.5 million, and is a major domestic tourist destination, close to national parks and the historic sites of Zululand and the Drakensberg. Similar to our experience in J'burg, people kept warning us about the crime rate due to the economic crisis that resulted in very high rates of unemployment, reaching over 30% in many parts of the city.

Again we felt pretty safe, never felt threatened in any way or scared, despite staying at a hostel right in the city center, where we took advantage of all the terrific hi-speed wi-fi spots, nightlife, and affordable restuarants in walking distance.

We want to share with you the terrific site visits we had there...

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In recent weeks, former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen has been on a public relations campaign defending the efficacy of waterboarding, going so far as to say that the torture technique sanctioned by the Bush administration is not only safe, but is in line with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

On Tuesday, in an interview with "Fox News," John Yoo, the former Justice Department attorney who was the principal author of legal memoranda that cleared the way for CIA interrogators to waterboard "war on terror" detainees and subject them to other brutal torture techniques, asserted that waterboarding was harmless.

Please click this link to listen to an interview with Jeffrey Kaye on the Peter B. Collins show.

In his defense of the practice, Yoo cited the thousands of US servicemen who have undergone SERE training and said, "we don't think it amounts to torture because we would not be doing it to our own soldiers otherwise."

However, a previously unreleased internal Department of Defense (DoD) memo, summarizing a review of the Navy SERE program in late February - early March 2007, reveals  that there was fierce criticism within the DoD of the Navy SERE school in North Island, San Diego, for being the only SERE facility to still use waterboarding in its training program.

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With the close of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, much of the media was quick to declare them a total success. This goes against the mounds of journalism produced before and during the games by the Vancouver Media Co-op, the city's newly launched independent media center. Believing that their might be more than one answer regarding the success of the games, and one of those should come from the host communities, The Real News spoke to Franklin López, Video Producer with the Co-op, to find out more about the legacy of the 2010 Olympics for the people of Vancouver.

Franklin López is a video producer with the Vancouver Media Co-op. You can find the co-op at vancouver.mediacoop.ca. It is one of a series of similar projects getting started in Canada, currently there are also chapters in Toronto and Halifax. For the co-op's coverage of the Olympics, go to 2010.mediacoop.ca

Below the fold : Vancouver Poverty Olympics

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