Sunday, February 16, 2014

Hejira

Today in Iraq, at least 42 people died violent deaths while nineteen more were left injured.



National Iraqi News Agency reports 1 Mukhtar was shot dead in Himps Village, an armed attack in Abu Shaheen left 1 person dead and another injured, a Falluja bombing claimed 1 life and left six more people injured, a Mosul battle left 1 police member dead and another injured, Thanon Ahmed Hassan corpse was discovered today (he was kidnapped Thursday and he had been the manager of the Ministry of Commerce's Monitoring Department), Baghdad Operations Command stated they killed 4 suspects in Baghdad, Nouri's "elite forces" killed 12 suspects in Ramadi, the Ministry of Interior states 4 suspects were killed in Sulaiman Beg, a suicide bomber took his own life and the lives of 2 police members (three more injured) to the north of Ramadi, 1 person was shot dead in central Baghdad, a battle in Riyadh left 2 Iraqi soldiers dead and three more injured, 1 person was shot dead in Abu Ghraib, a Mosul suicide bomber took his own life and left four Iraqi soldiers injured, a battle in Taza left 5 police members dead, a Hilla attack left a father and son dead, a Baghdad sticky bombing left 1 person dead and another injured, 1 police member was kidnapped in Kirkuk, and 1 beheaded corpse was discovered in Taji.

Through Saturday, Iraq Body Count counts 430 violent deaths for the month so far.

Today's big story in the Western press?

Moqtada.  We noted it yesterday.

It takes them awhile to catch up, apparently.

Not only did cleric and movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr announce yesterday he was leaving politics immediately but, today, All Iraq News reports that Sadr bloc MPs Hussien Alwan al-Lami,  Hussien al-Mansouri and Hussien Hamim held a press conference and declared that, in respect of Moqtada's decision, they were resigning from Parliament.




I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some cafe
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
-- "Hejira," written by Joni Mitchell, first appears on her album of the same name

 The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4489.



On this week's Law and Disorder Radio,  an hour long program that airs Monday mornings at 9:00 a.m. EST on WBAI and around the country throughout the week, hosted by attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Michael S. Smith and Michael Ratner (Center for Constitutional Rights) topics  addressed include illegal spying, Guantanamo, Occupy and much more.

There are serious problems with Blogger/Blogspot tonight.  I keep getting kicked out -- logged out -- and having spent the bulk of the day helping with Third, I'm not in the mood to monkey around on the laptop now.  So we're going to wrap up quickly.

First, there will be a snapshot tomorrow.  It is a US holiday, I'd love the day off.  But with Nouri doing the assault on Anbar, we have to have a snapshot.

Isaiah plans to do a comic for President's Day (tomorrow's holiday).  New content at Third:






The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.






 














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How stupid is POLITICO?

That POLITICO would serve up a ridiculous article wasn't surprising.  It does that daily.

That it would be on Barack?  See above.

But how stupid are they?

I'm not talking about opinion or whoring.

I'm talking about basic facts.

In their too long  "Barack Obama's Paragraph:  Ten leading historians assess Obama's rank in the pantheon of American presidents," they allow Stephen Sestanovich ("author") to offer this:

There’s a reason Obama is so frequently compared to Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. For all three, the first order of business on becoming president was to bring ends and means into balance after a period of costly excess and chaotic decisions. In different ways, all sought to rebuild White House dominance over the rest of the executive branch.

Are POLITICO and Sestanovich complete and  utter morons?

Do they even understand American government?

It's like we need to get them copies of the DVD of My Favorite Brunette so they can hear Peter Lorre explain separation of powers.


The White House is at the top of the executive branch.


They never, ever have to assert that.  When the day comes that they do?  They'll fire people.  Nixon did just that when his AGs refused to be as crooked as he wanted them to be.  (See the events known as both "The Midnight Massacre" and "The Saturday Night Massacre.")  


I'm having a real hard time grasping how anyone could be so damn stupid.


And let's run this 'logic' out.  If Eisenhower fought to restore the White House as in control of the executive branch?  That would mean Truman had allowed various Cabinet heads -- or maybe a clerk at the Department of Health and Human Services -- to seize control of the executive branch.


This is beyond stupid and only POLITICO would run a column with such a glaring error.


There are three branches of government on the federal level in the US.  The legislative branch is headed by Congress.  The Supreme Court heads the judicial branch.


Eisenhower and Nixon did not "rebuild White House dominance over the rest of the executive branch." They attempted -- Eisenhower via executive order -- to exert dominance over the Congress -- that would be the legislative branch.  Eisenhower also used executive privilege to try to block and control Congress.  
How does an adult teaching politics (Sestanovich teaches at Columbia) not know this?  How does an outlet covering politics not know this?

Even allowing that Sestanovich does know the topics but mistyped "executive" when he meant "legislative," that only excuses him.  He may very well have made an honest mistake.

That doesn't excuse the outlet which should have caught the mistake, contacted the professor and asked, "Is this a mistake we need to fix?"


How stupid is POLITICO and it's staff?


Clearly, they should stick to gossip because they can almost handle that.

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.









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Diverse sexuality isn't alien to Africa - homophobia is (Ken Olende)

Repost from Great Britain's Socialist Worker:




Diverse sexuality isn't alien to Africa - homophobia is

Contrary to current stereotypes, Africa has a rich history of same sex relations that was buried by colonialism, writes Ken Olende

The court of King Mwanga II
The court of King Mwanga II
King Mwanga ll of Buganda in east Africa led a violent campaign to defend traditional values in the 1880s. He executed 22 Christians for opposing same sex relationships. 

If he hadn’t taken this extreme action it’s likely that traditional Bugandan sexual practices would have been written out of history.

Buganda still exists as part of modern Uganda, a state currently identified with anti-LGBT bigotry and laws—against what are supposedly alien LGBT practices brought in from the West.

In the late 19th century Mwanga was worried by the spread of Western influence. Missionaries were making inroads into the kingdom and demanding rights for their converts.

They were the vanguard of imperial occupation by the powers that backed them.

The imperial imposition of new sexual morals on indigenous people was part of a wider process of asserting control. This also saw new laws to control sexual practices in Britain.

The issue came to a head when pages in Mwanga’s own court turned down his request for sex because they were converts. This caused a confrontation that led to his decision to execute them all.

Mwanga was the head of an autocratic class-divided society. Later he would capitulate to the British Empire and convert to Christianity himself. He was no hero of LGBT rights.

But in Buganda the idea of sleeping with people of the same sex had been considered normal for hundreds of years, a reality that is almost forgotten.

Pre-colonial Africa was made up of a wide array of different forms of society. Many of them tolerated or celebrated same sex relations of one sort or another.

Hundreds of African societies record same-sex sexual activity between men and more than 50 have records of it between women.

 Identity

But these societies did not have the concept of a separate LGBT identity.

More than 30 African societies sometimes permitted “female husbands”—where two women marry.

These included the Igbo in modern Nigeria and the Zulu people in South Africa.In the case of the Igbo it was primarily an economic relationship to keep a family’s wealth if it had no sons.

Ethiopian Nuer people questioned in the 1960s said there were no homosexual men among their people.

But there were people born as men who had changed their gender status and were considered to be women.
Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe’s book Boy Wives and Female Husbands brought together anthropological research that had been ignored for decades.

Among the Azande in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo male warriors would often take “boy wives”. They would pay a bride price to the boy’s family and live as a couple.

Again it was not about LGBT people as such.

This was considered to be something that men did before marriage to a woman. It was not an equal relationship—the boys were aged between 12 and 20.

This was a stratified society where most men could not afford the bride price when they were young. Rich men would often have several wives, including young men.

The anthropologist EE Evans-Pritchard did his field research on the Azande in the 1930s, but most of his findings on same sex relationships were not published until the 1970s.

The kinds of relationship described here show how much richer the history of human sexuality is than what “traditionalists” choose to regard as normal.

© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.







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