Steal Back Your Vote

This is NOT a parody. It's for real. Don't let them steal ANOTHER election!

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Shana Tova


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Wall Street Bailout is Chump Change (Compared to the Cost of Iraq)

Congress approved $68.6 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this week--but that's only the iceberg's tip. As has been the case all along, the bulk of the year's cost for waging on Iraq--a country that has never posed an imminent danger to us--will be paid for by supplemental bills throughout the year, just as it's been funded in years past. TomDispatch today notes that a week of war in Iraq costs an estimated $3.5 billion.

Sometime in 2009 the direct costs of the war the Bush administration once predicted would cost perhaps $50-60 billion in total will stand at more than $800 billion, or $100 billion above the cost (if all goes well, which it won't) of the bailout of the financial system now being proposed in Washington.

When true long-term costs (including health care and veteran's benefits) are added in, estimates range in the trillions of dollars, overall.

The money quote from Chalmers Johnson:

Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on present and future wars that have nothing to do with our national security is simply obscene. And yet Congress has been corrupted by the military-industrial complex into believing that, by voting for more defense spending, they are supplying "jobs" for the economy. In fact, they are only diverting scarce resources from the desperately needed rebuilding of the American infrastructure and other crucial spending necessities into utterly wasteful munitions. If we cannot cut back our longstanding, ever increasing military spending in a major way, then the bankruptcy of the United States is inevitable. As the current Wall Street meltdown has demonstrated, that is no longer an abstract possibility but a growing likelihood. We do not have much time left.

Meanwhile, Back in Iraq...

Photo: Reuters

This week news from Iraq had a harder time getting space: even the vanguard McClatchy News dropped Iraq from its homepage navigation spot, at least for the next few weeks (Mark Seibel of McClatchy assured me, when I queried, that it will be returning to the homepage soon. Until then, you can reach the McClatchy Iraq Bureau here).

So what news might you have missed? Bombings have increased since Ramadan began; evening assaults hit civilians out grocery shopping. 12 people were killed by one Baghdad bomb today (Sunday) and 35 injured. UPDATE: 2 more bombings later this evening killed 19 and injured 70 per BBC.

Cholera is on the rise; note that Gorillas Guides editor says the IRIN figure is out of date. Even so, IRIN indicates at least 150 new cases this week.

Can't have clean water without electricity. Arkan Hamed and Dahr Jamail start their latest article with the news that only one of Baghdad Medical City's ten elevators works. (Have you been in a hospital lately? Picture the wheel chairs, the gurneys, the elderly...). But that news pales when we read that it is not safe to drink the hospital's tap water, and that "sometimes doctors cannot find water even to wash their hands. Equipment is often not sterilised." Worse still:

"Most of the medicines we have here are out of date, and we lack almost all basic antibiotics," says Dr. Saad Abu Al-Noor, a pharmacist at the supply warehouse at Baghdad Medical City. "We cannot get medicines from the stores because of lack of security, and because there is just too much corruption all over."
Patients in need or their family members are sent out to the shops to buy catheters, disposable syringes and essential medicines, Dr. Noor said. "If the patient is lucky, he can find the items on the black market. And then the question is if they can afford these things. The price is ten to 20 times higher than it should be."

Sunshine, a teenager blogger in Mosul, records her thoughts about the Ramadan bombings, life without electricity and the rise in kidnappings in a new entry this week. Her cheery news: she's finished her book and has an agent. Here's hoping this strong young voice finds a publisher.

In sports, Rasool Khadim took the silver medal at the Beijing Paralympics for weight lifting, marking Iraq's first win there.

Update on Hate

Now we know who's funding the anti-Islamic hate DVD making its way into family homes in swing states across the U.S. Inter Press writers Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton have learned that a group called the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) has partnered with an Israeli organization Aish Hatorah which has apparently created a shadow company, the Clarion Fund (the DVD creators).

EMET is loaded to the gills with neo-conservatives, including former CIA director James Woolsey, the late former U.N. ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Meyrav Wurmser, wife of Dick Cheney's former top Middle East advisor. Advisors to EMET include three Israeli diplomats, among them Ambassadors Yossi Ben Aharon and Yoram Ettinger. They lobbied hard against the Oslo Accord, as did the group's head, Sarah Stern.

Appointment for Samarra

The Iraqi government announced Tuesday that the Universal Heritage Committee of UNESCO has added Samarra to its list of world heritage sites, the second place in Iraq to receive this designation this month (earlier, the Basrah marshes were added, following years of restoration efforts. Plans are afoot to make that area a national park.

Why is Hate Propaganda Being Delivered to Swing States?

And why did the New York Times deliver 145,000 copies of this dreck in national editions of its paper in 11 U.S. markets?

Kudos to Ali Gharib and Inter Press Service for catching this story. 28 million homes in swing states are receiving a copy of the DVD "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" this month, as an advertising insert in their hometown papers. Writes Gharib:

The documentary, despite an initial disclaimer that the material covered applies only to radical Islamists and not all Muslims, has drawn fire from critics for conflating mainstream Islam with violent and militant tendencies of a smaller subset of the religion. Critics argue that it makes little distinction between the religion of Islam and the political realities that inform terrorism....

"We're getting many concerned calls and emails from Muslims around the country who see this as an attempt to not only marginalize and demonize the American Muslim community, but also to sway the election by targeting swing states," Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told IPS. "People are outraged. I haven't seen this kind of outrage in a long time. It's coming to their homes, it's coming to their neighbors and they believe its going to impact their lives and their children's lives negatively."

One big question is: who's paying to have this slime distributed? One estimate places the distribution costs at 50 million dollars. The makers of the film and its distributor/producer are known to have borrowed the half mil it took to create it. Who's their 'angel' now?



DISGUSTING.