John Mortell’s blog

Having been suffering from senioritis myself, I can appreciate his position.

I love the seague that he has at the end:

Just lately, I’ve been finding that my sense of time is completely shot. Not in the sense of taking longer to do things than I thought, but that from hour to hour, day to day & week to week I just seem to be doing a lot more. For example, the UCC rag week was only about 3 weeks ago. It feels like it was at least two months ago, I have seen friends in the last two weeks but it felt like a lot longer since I’d seen them. Do other people get this?

I’ll really have to stop posting links from Alternet soon but before I get there…

Among the most fanciful is the notion that conservatives are self-reliant actors who embrace a private sector free from government meddling. Supposedly, the right is content to take on the free-market with strength and skill, and let the chips fall where they may, while liberals look to the state to be their protective nanny, there to iron out the wrinkles of a dynamic, entrepreneurial society

A quick example of how the deck is stacked in certain ways:

Now what they could have done — and this would have been a true free trade policy — they could have said, “Look, there are a lot of very smart people in Mexico and China and India. And they can be doctors, lawyers, accountants and economists, and they would drive down costs in those areas enormously.” We’d get our health care for much, much less — we’d save hundreds of billions of dollars per year — our college tuition would fall, because we’d pay college professors much less. We could make the whole thing transparent — set up standards to make sure that we get the same quality of doctors.

Enormous savings for the United States — a great free trade story — but instead of putting downward pressure on the wages of our auto workers, we’d be putting downward pressure on the wages of our highest earners. If we brought our wage structure for doctors just down to European levels, you’d be talking about saving $80 billion per year. That’s a big chunk of our health care bill right there. But no one talks about that, and that’s a classic example of framing the debate about what “free” trade is.

You can read the article here and download the PDF book here

Eugene will love this:

Interesting article here and while I’m not sure that it’s all completely accurate, it does strike me as being somewhat likely:

After the 2003 US invasion, amid the chaos and looting that followed the collapse of Saddam’s regime, SCIRI and Badr forces flooded across the Iranian border into Iraq. “Border control was nonexistent,” says Wayne White, who in 2003 headed the Iraq team at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “The Iranians could just drive across…. They would come in convoys, ten trucks at a time.” Ali Allawi, a postwar Iraqi defense minister and author of The Occupation of Iraq, wrote, “About 10,000 trained and disciplined Badr fighters entered Iraq, either unarmed or armed only with light weapons, and reassembled in various towns and cities as the fighting arm of SCIRI.” (Other estimates involve significantly higher numbers.) Lavishly financed by Iran, SCIRI and Badr installed their leaders within days in ad hoc posts in Baquba, Kut and other key junctions in the south. Wary of Iran, but seeing little alternative to the turban-wearing clerics of SCIRI and Badr, US and British occupation authorities put the party’s officials into top positions. From the early, US-selected Iraqi Governing Council in 2003 onward, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim was named to a succession of key leadership posts, and top SCIRI officials were installed in various ministries, the police and the army. In the Shiite-dominated south SCIRI officials were named to run provincial authorities, cities and towns. They were viewed by the United States and Britain as natural allies in the struggle against remnants of the Baath Party and the burgeoning Sunni resistance — precisely the forces that Iran, too, saw as its deadliest foes.

Virtually en masse, Badr officers were recruited to the fledgling Iraqi police and army that were being assembled by the United States. According to Raed Jarrar, the Iraq consultant for the American Friends Service Committee, Badr officers maintained their same ranks when they were inducted into the Iraqi security forces. A particularly nasty part of Badr’s work in Iraq from 2003 to the present has been the operation of death squads. Often, such units were run directly by Iraq’s Interior Ministry, whose Badr-controlled police were blamed for assassinating hundreds of former government officials, ex-military and intelligence officers, and civilian professionals, according to widespread media reports. “I was told in the summer of 2003 in Tehran that the change in regime in Baghdad had allowed Iranian intelligence to identify every single individual who had worked in the Iran section of the Iraqi intelligence service,” says Mahan Abedin, director of research at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism in London. “They were able to get as much detail as possible about their person, their movement, their connections, their mobile number. All that information was collected.” They were eradicated, Abedin says, in a “hidden war.”

I’m not sure if this clip was banned but there’s some good links to some banned clips here: