Uncommon Sense Archives - 08/2006
Quick: Name the big media event of last week involving the murder of a pretty little girl? You know it. Creepy wannabe murderer John Mark Karr returned to the United States voluntarily where he faced charges for the killing of JonBenet Ramsey. Thanks to the muckraking efforts of cable news and press reporters, we learned what delicacies Karr consumed during his flight from Thailand, among other details about his personal life. Now: Name the other story last week involving the murder of a pretty little girl. [more]
--Alexandra Walker | Thursday 1:43 PM | Permalink
You can imagine that the latest release of income and poverty statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau landed with a thud at the White House. [more]
--Isaiah J. Poole | Tuesday 2:54 PM | Permalink
It is time to give thanks for the “just us” moment, the time when politicians and other public figures let their hair down and say what they really feel to, you know, “between you and me"—and an often-mortified public. [more]
--Isaiah J. Poole | Monday 12:47 PM | Permalink
After four hellish years in Guantanamo, Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish man with German residency, was released back to Germany this week with a final “f-you” from our government. According to his lawyer, for his flight home Kurnaz was “kept blindfolded and in chains.” Sure, prisoners are often transported in chains (although why the blindfold?) but aside from the fact that sending him back to Germany was pretty much an admission that Kurnaz wasn’t considered “dangerous,” it’s just a plain outrage that our government couldn’t resist getting in one final dig at the guy after reportedly torturing him for years while he was in their custody. But here’s the other outrage: Reuters, which first covered the details about the flight, failed to mention a key fact about Kurnaz: that he was cleared of being al-Qaida and was never charged with any crime. [more]
--Rachel Joy Larris | Friday 12:21 PM | Permalink
One of my favorite writers at Alternet, Josh Holland, does a handy job of explaining why Robert Reich was off-base in his latest piece of advice to Democrats, published earlier this weekon TomPaine.com. In it, Reich urges Democrats to "resist" the temptation to use their increased power on the Hill after the midterm elections for launching investigations and hearings into the Bush administration on any number of issues. As laudable and as justified as such investigations might be, says Reich, they'll have no traction because they'll be perceived as merely partisan attacks. Holland argues, and I agree, that Reich is wrong in framing the Democrats' options as an either/or proposition. [more]
--Alexandra Walker | Thursday 10:10 AM | Permalink
The charter school evangelists, including their high priests in the Bush administration, keep getting doused by the cold rain of reality. The latest report from the Department of Education’s own National Center for Education Statistics puts a further dent in the Bush administration’s attempt to sell charter schools as a panacea for the woes of public education. [more]
--Isaiah J. Poole | Wednesday 1:36 PM | Permalink
Even though Bush could barely bring himself to admit it in public, he seems grudgingly willing to allow adult women to have access to emergency contraception. Looks like there's a trade-off in the making: Bush will allow EC to become available to adults if his nominee to head the FDA, Andrew von Eschenbach, gets confirmed. [more]
--Rachel Joy Larris | Tuesday 2:56 PM | Permalink
Due to a problem with our server, e-mail sent between Aug. 16 and Aug. 21 to TomPaine.com via our Web site, such as through our comment page, or to editor@tompaine.com , may not have reached us. (E-mail addressed to individual TomPaine.com editors is not affected.) If you sent e-mail to TomPaine.com during that period directly through our Web site, please resubmit it. We apologize for any problem or inconvenience that this has created. The problem has been identified and corrected. Thank you for your forebearance and continued support.
--Isaiah J. Poole | Monday 1:57 PM | Permalink
I’m not sure if this is a problem or not, but I noticed that quite a few of the major dailies’ stories about the decision that struck down the warrantless NSA wiretapping included a photo of the judge, Anna Diggs Taylor. The New York Times did, and so didThe Washington Post and the LA Times. The thing is, I don’t recall seeing many other photos of judges in other stories about federal rulings. It does make me wonder—are the papers demeaning the ruling by emphasizing the judge's personality? [more]
--Rachel Joy Larris | Friday 12:26 PM | Permalink
Part of the reason there hasn't been that much attention paid to the new pension legislation signed by President Bush is that it just doesn't affect that many of us. Unless you work for a large corporation or the government, fewer and fewer Americans are enrolled in pension plans, considered the "third leg" of retirement security in America. Most of us don't have any workplace retirement plan at all, according to the Christian Science Monitor. The barely half of us who do are enrolled in a 401(k). The new pension law is predicted to increase that percentage, and in this era of stock markets addled by corporate scandals and deflating housing markets, that's not good news for retiring Americans. [more]
--Alexandra Walker | Friday 11:08 AM | Permalink
It’s kind of like Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football, isn’t it? The government trumpets to the media that they just averted a massive terrorist plot. They then brag about what a great job they have done, while also hinting that this indicates America is still at risk. And then facts slowly leak out that contradict the government’s line on about how immediate these so-called “threats" were. It’s happened in Lackawanna, it’s happened in Miami and now it looks like it’s happening in London. [more]
--Rachel Joy Larris | Thursday 11:19 AM | Permalink
Wednesday was protest day at the AIDS conference in Toronto, as activists made their anger with U.S. government policies known. [more]
--Naina Dhingra | Thursday 9:30 AM | Permalink
President Bill Clinton came under fire on Monday by AIDS activists for de-emphasizing the impact of PEPFAR’s abstinence-until-marriage prevention policies. President Clinton stated: [more]
--Naina Dhingra | Wednesday 8:50 AM | Permalink
It has become clear that challenging the U.S.'s ideologically driven HIV prevention policy is a common theme of the 16th International AIDS Conference, with sectors of the global community from researchers to activists united in pushing back. [more]
--Naina Dhingra | Tuesday 9:52 AM | Permalink
[more]
--Ethan Heitner | Tuesday 9:45 AM | Permalink
The world of HIV/AIDS—some call it a movement, some call it a turning point in global history and others simply call it a business. It is all of that and more, and this week these different viewpoints will collide as 25,000 people meet in Toronto for the 16th International AIDS Conference. Who are these people? They are activists, researchers, policy-makers, doctors, foundations, non-profits, community-based organizations, corporations, youth and people living with HIV. The world of HIV/AIDS is truly its own world. We speak in our own language. Our celebrities are people like Paul Farmer, Bill Gates and Zackie Achmat. And this week in Toronto is the Academy Awards of the AIDS world. Except there are no awards this year; 25 years into the AIDS pandemic and the global community is still is faced with basic issues of denial, stigma and discrimination. [more]
--Naina Dhingra | Monday 9:10 AM | Permalink
Only the most paranoid might conclude that today’s arrests in Britain in connection with an alleged terror plot was timed to coincide with Republican mobilization for the fall elections. But you have to concede that the timing is at least convenient. [more]
--Isaiah J. Poole | Thursday 10:39 AM | Permalink
As a supplement to Dr. Beinin's insightful article today on TomPaine.com about looking past the inflammatory rhetoric used by Hezbollah and Hamas, there's an excellent short piece by Nicholas Noe on Electronic Lebanon today about how negotiations almost led to peace, if not normalization, between Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Hezbollah in 2000: [more]
--Ethan Heitner | Thursday 9:54 AM | Permalink
It’s very clear now where the dividing line of acceptable and non-acceptable interrogation techniques lies in the mind of Alberto Gonzales and others in the Bush administration. Basically if the detainee isn’t bleeding and isn’t suffering pain equivalent to serious physical injury such as organ failure, it’s not torture. Since it’s clear that Gonzales doesn’t care about any kind of pain other than physical—and even then not until its just short of death—you can see why he’s pretty non-plussed over many examples of degradation and humiliation suffered by detainees that don’t rise to the level of “torture.” [more]
--Rachel Joy Larris | Wednesday 2:18 PM | Permalink
I was heartened to recieve the following e-mail recently: [more]
--Ethan Heitner | Wednesday 11:54 AM | Permalink
Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, and Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, discuss how a campaign to inform his constituents helped lead to Ohio Rep. Bob Ney's decision not to run for reelection. [more]
--Ellen Miller and Roger Hickey | Monday 5:26 PM | Permalink
Ohio Republican Rep. Bob Ney is a genial fellow, and whenever I asked him questions earlier this year about the influence-peddling scandal that was imperiling his re-election bid, his responses—or lack of responses—were smooth and good-natured. But his repeated insistence to me and other Capitol Hill reporters that he would not back off his reelection—under the belief that he could politically weather the taint of his association with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff—turns out to have been hopelessly naïve. [more]
--Isaiah J. Poole | Monday 12:58 PM | Permalink
All this year, President Bush has been able to bamboozle at least some people into thinking that the economy has been humming along just fine for working Joes and Janes. With today’s unemployment report, that spin machine will falter. [more]
--Isaiah J. Poole | Friday 11:34 AM | Permalink
"Even if the United States conquers Tehran, we will still have to live with the Palestinians." So writes Tom Segev, a well-respected Israeli journalist and historian and one of the most important critics of Israel's founding myths, in yesterday's Ha'aretz, succintly summarizing the problem of listening to the neo-con armchair warriors. [more]
--Ethan Heitner | Friday 11:27 AM | Permalink
So the fundamentalist, anti-contraception group the Family Research Council doesn’t seem to understand that when the Food and Drug Administration’s acting chief Andrew C. von Eschenbach says he hopes to resolve the issue with selling emergency contraception (Plan B) without a prescription, he doesn’t really mean it. Because Dr. von Eschenbach is meeting with senators today and wants his nomination to the FDA to move, “suddenly” he has a plan for Plan B. Yeah, right. Like this same exact feint didn’t happen with the last FDA nominee, Lester Crawford. [more]
--Rachel Joy Larris | Tuesday 2:02 PM | Permalink
More than a day after it was first published, a New York Times article on men who are out of the workforce remains as of midday Tuesday the most e-mailed article on the newspaper's Web site. If you haven’t seen it already, this story of how Bushonomics is failing working Americans is indeed a must-read. [more]
--Isaiah J. Poole | Tuesday 12:33 PM | Permalink
Better late than never. With the midterm elections less than 100 days away, and after months of disunity on the topic, Democrats have finally arrived at a coherent position on the war in Iraq. With the costs mounting—in thousands of American and Iraqi lives and billions of U.S. tax dollars—Hill Democrats are finally listening to what many have long been calling for: starting the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq before the year's end. And for that, I applaud them. [more]
--Alexandra Walker | Tuesday 11:22 AM | Permalink
