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Is It Time For Buh-Bye Mike Johnson Yet?
6 hours ago
Monday, July 13, 2009
July 13 2009 Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: On The Rethuglican Contentiousness Over Justice Sotomayor's Confirmation
"All The News You Never Knew You Needed To Know ...Until Now." July 13 2009 Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: Justice Is NOT Always Blind - On The Rethuglican Contentiousness Over The Sotomayor Supreme Court ConfirmationPrefer An MP3 Playlist? It's Here: [192kbps VBR 9:15 Minutes] Other Audio Formats Available [ Here ] Twitter This Commentary |
Four more soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan. Expect more US forces to be deployed soon to Helmand province. We're capturing territory there but can't hold it with the number of troops currently committed and the Afghans don't seem interested in committing their army to the task of staying behind (because they know the territorial capture is only oh-so-temporal).
The latest on the mysterious counter-intelligence program kept secret from Congress - It was ordered and kept from congressional oversight by EX VP Dick Cheney's orders.
More from Juan Cole (linkage on site):
It turns out that the secret CIA program that Leon Panetta cancelled, and which former VP Richard Bruce Cheney ordered hidden from Congress, was in fact an assassination squad focusing on al-Qaeda figures.
The problem with assassination teams is that they are extra-judicial. They are killing people who have not been proven to have done anything wrong. The long litany of mistakes that security organizations have made in recent years, targeting innocents, should form a legion of cautionary tales about just killing people.
Maher Arar, for instance, might as well have simply been shot down like a dog as shackled and sent for torture by the Baath Party in Damascus. He was innocent.
Murat Kurnaz might have as easily had two bullets put behind his right ear as to have been arrested and sent for "interrogation" to Guantanamo (this is the link for his book).
Then there was that little Khaled el-Masri 'oops' moment, which would have been even more embarrassing to the US government if he had been shot between the eyes by a US government sniper.
I could go on and on (the majority of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay now appears to have been clueless innocents, and Bush-Cheney appears to have wanted to sentence them to life imprisonment without a trial; they could have as easily just been shot on sight). [In Full]
The 4th scrub for Space Shuttle Endevour as Florida's thunderstorm season interferes with the attempted launch. Perhaps this evening.
In national socio-economic news:
Thanks this morning to ChrisM, my MP3Angel, for supplying backup copies of the commentary and news."The typical homeless person has changed to become less focused on the chronically homeless or single-individual homeless to somebody who is part of a family, whether it be a mother or a father or a child in a homeless family," HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan said. "I think what that tells us is that the economic crisis is forcing more families who had previously been well-housed into homelessness."More Families Are Becoming Homeless
Largest Increases in 2008 Came in Rural and Suburban Areas, Study Finds
By Alexi Mostrous
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Louis Gill doesn't like to turn anyone away. The director of the Bakersfield Homeless Center in California has taken to laying out cots and mattresses between the shelter's 174 registered beds to cope with the rush of homeless families brought to his doors by the financial crisis.
"Last year, we saw a 34 percent increase in homeless families and a 24 percent increase in homeless children," he said. "Why do we go beyond capacity? Because in a just society, a child should not have to sleep outside or in a car."
Gill is a frontline witness to the change in the makeup of the country's homeless. The stereotype of a homeless person as a single man no longer applies. A resident of the Bakersfield center is far more likely to be a young mother with a "good, solid job and a mortgage that she just couldn't pay."
"They're like folks you know and that you've worked with," Gill said. "Maybe the work's not there right now. Maybe they got behind on their payments. But the idea of a typical homeless person has changed. We're seeing individuals come in that have never had to access the safety net before."
Government figures support Gill's experience. The ravages of the recession, including a surge in foreclosures and unemployment approaching 10 percent, have driven thousands of families onto the streets.
Although the number of homeless individuals remained relatively stable between 2007 and 2008, the number of homeless families rose 9 percent, and in rural and suburban areas the number jumped by 56 percent, according to a report released last week by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. [In Full]
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