War in Two Directions

“Sometimes they have drug and alcohol problems and when they feel that the VA is ignoring them, not answering the phone, failing to return calls for assistance or there are long wait times, they get more and more disgruntled. The VA is ripe for a mass killing but no one is listening to us.”

The speaker is John Glidewell, former chief of police at the Cheyenne, Wyo., VA medical center, who was quoted in a Washington Post story a few days ago. As I read his words, I realized they sounded a far deeper note of desperation than the story was addressing, even though, my God, the events being reported on were the fodder of scandal.

The story was a follow-up about a murder that took place at another VA clinic, in El Paso, Texas, on Jan. 6. Jerry Serrato, an Iraq vet whose claim of PTSD, and the subsequent treatment and benefits, was denied, fatally shot the clinic’s chief psychologist, Timothy Fjordbak, then killed himself.

The waste dump of it all

Thirteen Class II injection wells in Central Ohio sit in the headwaters of the Olentangy River and threaten to contaminate Ohio’s drinking water, warned Dr. Julie Weatherington-Rice, hydrogeologist and soil scientist. The key 2004 and 2010 laws that have allowed deregulated fracking injection wells in Ohio came from the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) bankrolled by the controversial Koch brothers.

The Koch brothers, cited as the third and fourth wealthiest individuals in the United States, have made Ohio the worst state in the northeast for protecting the environment against the oil and gas industry.

“We’re the worst by far in our area of the country,” said Weatherington-Rice. “We’ve become the dumping ground, more than 60% of the fracking waste in Ohio is coming in from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Ohio is doing virtually nothing” in regards to regulating fracking.

“If you’ve got an old oil or gas well you can easily turn it into an injection well to take fracking waste,” she explained.

NHL All-Star fans learn of Columbus’ bad deal and never-ending Arena debt

A handful of cold, wet protesters stood in the rain outside Nationwide Arena on Sunday afternoon, January 25, urging people to ask the City of Columbus to overturn the bailout of the Arena with their tax money.

The message from the Columbus Coalition for Responsive Government (“the Coalition”) to National Hockey League (NHL) All-Star fans attending the game was direct: Columbus’ kids and generations of the unborn will be burdened with nearly three billion dollars of debt because of the city’s taxpayer bailout of the Blue Jackets and Nationwide Arena.

The Coalition’s Jonathan Beard explained, “Columbus politicians and business leaders cut a deal to dump the money-losing Nationwide Arena on the taxpayers two years ago.” Beard charges that the deal was “done behind closed doors” and against the citizens’ wishes, who had five times rejected any tax money going into the Arena.

Because voters rejected using their local tax money to fund the Arena, City officials decided to use state casino tax revenue which had been earmarked by the City of Columbus and the County for general citizen needs.

Militarism in the Air We Breathe


If there is a group of Americans to whom Iraqis struggling with the health effects of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and all the various poisons of war can relate, it might be the mostly black and largely poor residents of Gibsland, in northern Louisiana.

Here's how an op-ed in the New York Times from one resident describes their situation:

"For years, one of the largest employers in that area was the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant, about four miles from Minden. The Environmental Protection Agency eventually listed the plant as a Superfund site because for more than 40 years 'untreated explosives-laden wastewater from industrial operations was collected in concrete sumps at each of the various load line areas,' and emptied into '16 one-acre pink water lagoons.'"

And now (from Truthout.org):

Ohio’s Anti-Green Suicide

None of those coal/nuke burners can compete with the rising revolution in renewable energy. Throughout the world, similar outmoded facilities are shutting down.

In 2001, Ohio deregulated its electric markets. But the state’s nuke owners demanded nearly $10 billion in “stranded cost” handouts so the obsolete Davis-Besse and Perry reactors on Lake Erie could allegedly compete with more efficient technologies.

Today, despite the huge subsidies, renewables and fracked gas have completely priced them out of the market.

Doc revisits early feminist struggle to reshape society

Every so often, a celebrity like Shaleigh Woodley creates controversy by rejecting the “feminist” label. What’s less newsworthy is that lots of non-celebs do as well, even as they enjoy the freedoms the feminist movement brought about. A likely explanation is that some women simply don’t realize how restrictive society was when it was divided into rigid “his” and “hers” categories. They also may not realize how hard it was to begin breaking down the patriarchal barriers that were holding an entire gender back. The best antidote for this kind of historical obliviousness is to watch the entertaining and enlightening documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry. Directed by Mary Dore, it’s a warts-and-all look at the early years of the modern feminist moment, roughly 1967-71. Considering that’s a period of only four or five years, it’s astounding to recall how fast the feminist movement gained followers—and how quickly those followers began seeking change in every corner of society. And they did it all, one woman notes, without the benefit of the Internet, instead relying on mimeograph paper and the postal service to spread the word.

Will it make the news?

Study Finds People Assume War Is Only Last Resort

A scholarly study has found that the U.S. public believes that whenever the U.S. government proposes a war, it has already exhausted all other possibilities. When a sample group was asked if they supported a particular war, and a second group was asked if they supported that particular war after being told that all alternatives were no good, and a third group was asked if they supported that war even though there were good alternatives, the first two groups registered the same level of support, while support for war dropped off significantly in the third group. This led the researchers to the conclusion that if alternatives are not mentioned, people don’t assume they exist — rather, people assume they’ve already been tried.

Book Review: JFK Jr., George, & Me: A Memoir

 

 

JFK Jr., George, & Me: A Memoir by Matt Berman

 

It is somewhat difficult to believe that John F. Kennedy, Jr. has been dead for fifteen years. Known as John-John, America’s son, the Sexiest Man Alive, the Prince of Camelot–he had almost as many nicknames as the late soul singer, James Brown–he was killed, along with his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister, Lauren Bessette, in a plane crash on his way to his cousin Rory’s wedding In Hyannisport, the summer stomping ground of generations of Kennedys. The plan was to drop his sister-in-law off on Martha’s Vineyard, but something went horribly wrong. The crash occurred fewer than ten miles from the Gay Head beaches where his late mother had owned a summer estate. Kennedy was only thirty-eight years old.

 

Race, Leaks and Prosecution at the CIA

Condoleezza Rice made headlines when she testified Thursday at the leak trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling — underscoring that powerful people in the Bush administration went to great lengths a dozen years ago to prevent disclosure of a classified operation. But as The Associated Press noted, “While Rice’s testimony helped establish the importance of the classified program in question, her testimony did not implicate Sterling in any way as the leaker.”

Few pixels and little ink went to the witness just before Rice — former CIA spokesman William Harlow — whose testimony stumbled into indicating why he thought of Sterling early on in connection with the leak, which ultimately resulted in a ten-count indictment.

Harlow, who ran the CIA press office, testified that Sterling came to mind soon after New York Times reporter James Risen first called him, on April 3, 2003, about the highly secret Operation Merlin, a CIA program that provided faulty nuclear weapon design information to Iran.

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