Lieutenant General Ronald R. Blanck, D.O. (Ret.)

Written by the ACLU for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

The following distinguished flag officers in the United States Armed Forces have signed a letter of support for the pending Shaheen Amendment to the FY 12 National Defense Authorization Act (S. 1867) that would provide servicewomen and military dependents with abortion coverage in cases of rape and incest.

The letter states as follows:

November 2011
U.S. ARMED FORCES FLAG OFFICERS IN SUPPORT OF
THE SHAHEEN AMENDMENT
TO THE FY12 NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT

Dear Senators:

We, the undersigned flag officers, write in strong support of the Shaheen Amendment to the FY12 National Defense Authorization Act (S. 1867) that provides abortion coverage for servicewomen and dependents who are victims of rape and incest.
It has been our privilege to treat, care for, or serve alongside the brave men and women of our armed forces and we believe that they deserve the best medical care that our country can provide. We also believe that our women in the military, who serve their country and in many cases risk their lives and safety to preserve our freedoms, should have access to the full range of medical care, including comprehensive reproductive health care.

We are greatly disappointed to learn that, by federal statute, the Department of Defense is barred from providing coverage for abortion care except where a pregnant woman’s life is endangered. Unlike the other federal bans on abortion coverage, the military ban provides no exception for cases of rape and incest. The current policy is unjust and unfair.

Restoring abortion coverage to our military women and family members who are survivors of rape and incest would bring the Department of Defense in line with the policy that governs other federal programs, such as Medicaid or the Federal Employee Health Benefit program. At the very least, our military women deserve the same access to care as civilian women who rely on the federal government for their health care.
Our servicewomen commit their lives to defending our freedoms; Congress should respect their service and sacrifice and provide them with the same level of health care coverage it provides civilians.

Additionally, claims that military physicians would be forced to provide abortions even if they have a religious or moral objection are absolutely false and, in this circumstance, are misdirected. The Shaheen Amendment is about insurance coverage. Moreover, military policy has long provided conscience protections for those military health care professionals who object to abortion – these protections were in effect during the brief period when the private funding ban was lifted in 1993-1995 and remain in effect today.
Sincerely,

1. Ronald R. Blanck, DO, Lieutenant General, MC, USA (Ret.), Fenwick Island, DE 19944

2. Robert G. Gard, Jr., Lieutenant General, USA (Ret.), Rockville, MD 20850

3. Claudia J. Kennedy, Lieutenant General, USA (Ret.), Hilton Head Island, SC 29928

4. Harold M. Koenig, MD, Vice Admiral, USN (Ret.), San Diego, CA 92116

5. Donna F. Barbisch, DHA, MPH, Major General, USA (Ret.), Washington, DC 20003

6. Dennis J. Laich, Major General, USA (Ret.), Powell, OH 43065

7. Gale S. Pollock, CRNA, FACHE, FAAN, Major General, USA (Ret.), Falls Church, VA 22041

8. Rabbi Harold L. Robinson, Rear Admiral, CHC, USN (Ret.), Centerville, MA 02632

9. Deborah C. Wheeling, MS, MSN, RN, Major General, Army National Guard (Ret.), Otego, NY 13825

10. Clara Adams-Ender, RN, MS, FAAN, Brigadier General, USA (Ret.), Lake Ridge, VA 22192

11. Evelyn “Pat” Foote, Brigadier General, USA (Ret.), Accokeek, MD 20607

12. Wilma L. Vaught, Brigadier General, USAF (Ret.), Falls Church, VA 22044

Bios of each of the signatories follow below.

Continue reading….

Our vote on the 1% has been vigorous since it started last week, with thousands of people rating nominees representing Wall Street, dirty energy, war profiteering, and more. We’re going to make videos exposing the ones our audience thinks are doing the most to exploit the 99% — and so far, the most unpopular of the bunch are media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the democracy-crushing Koch Brothers.

Murdoch, whom we’ve dubbed “the Propagandist,” has a net worth of about $7.4 billion and uses his right-wing media empire to put ideology over truth. One commenter at our voting website assailed him for using “sensationalism, fear, lies, and distortions to achieve” his ideological ends.

The Koch Brothers, “the Puppeteers,” are familiar to Brave New Foundation fans who have seen our Koch Brothers Exposed campaign, which details how their factories spew obscene amounts of pollution while giving them the wealth (about $50 billion) to bankroll groups fighting worker rights, climate change science, and Wall Street regulation.

We’ve got a lot of great (or rather, awful) nominees, but these two are in the lead because, as commenter Sharonc put it, “they foster and enable all the other people on the list.” On a rating scale of “ho-hum” to “pure evil,” our audience has given both Murdoch and the Koch brothers an average rating of…pure evil.

Who else do you want us expose? Which financial fraudster? Which big polluter? Which union buster? Which hedge fund operator? Tell us by rating our nominees.

Here’s who’s now rounding out the top ten — for now:

• Dick Cheney (Halliburton/White House):  Did business with brutal regimes in Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Burma—then became Vice President and took a massive payday from his former company.
• Rush Limbaugh: Spews racist bile while making about $1 million a week.
• Erik Prince (Blackwater/Xe): Oversaw mercenary force that killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad.
• Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs): Touted mortgage deals while privately betting $10 billion they’d fail.
• Rob Walton (Walmart): Busts unions and underpays workers yet has net worth of $21 billion.
• Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase): Defrauded customers on mortgages, then took $25 billion bailout.
• Paul Singer (Elliott Hedge Fund Management): Buys poor countries’ defaulted debt for cheap and then forces full payment, plus interest.
• Angelo Mozilo (Countrywide Financial): deceived investors into buying risky “subprime” mortgages, leading to thousands of foreclosures and contributing to the recession.

The vote is far from over, though. Nominees like Darrell Issa, Pete Peterson, and Hugh Grant (the Monsanto CEO, not the English charmer) are nipping at their heels. But we can expose only the worst ones. Who will it be? Tell us.

Rising up on the folk-rock charts, New York City-based “Metrobilly” band 2/3 Goat has just released a foot-stomping, evocative and inspiring video performance from their breakthrough new CD, Stream of Conscience.

Featuring lead singer/mandolin player Annalyse McCoy, whose golden pipes resound from the hollers with the haunting beauty and power of a young Shawn Colvin and Patty Loveless, Stream of Conscience is an acoustic-driven foggy mountain breakdown that chronicles the ravages of mountaintop removal operations in the Appalachian hills. A reckless strip mining process that has destroyed more than 300 mountains and 600,000 acres of hardwood forests in McCoy’s native eastern Kentucky region alone, mountaintop removal operations throughout central Appalachia have led to a humanitarian crisis of large-scale water contamination, entrenched unemployment, cancer corridors and birth defects, and the largest forced removal of American citizens since the 19th century.

“Music is such an integral part of Appalachian culture and tradition,” said McCoy, who grew up in Inez, Kentucky and also works as an actress in New York City. ” As a child of Appalachia, I felt that there was no better or more natural way to “give back” to try and help my community than through song. Amid all the destruction that mountaintop removal causes — all the thousands of miles of streams that have been buried, all the remaining water that’s been tainted by heavy metals — there is purity and light left in Appalachia; there is Hope.”

2/3 Goat, photo courtesy of 2/3 Goat and Feeling Anxious PR

Flanked by cowriter, singer and guitar player Ryan Dunn, whose confident bluesy licks add a natural Johnny Cash resonance to McCoy’s June Carter, and talented fiddler Ryan Guerra, 2/3 Goat’s new CD was recorded by famed Gin Blossoms producer Chris Mara at the Welcome to 1979 Studios in Nashville.

“Coal has been king for over a hundred years in Appalachia,” the band posted on their website. “Taking rock from under the ground is one thing; but blowing up mountains, burying thousands of miles of freshwater streams, inciting flooding in areas where it’s never been a problem, and causing the highest cancer rates in the nation from industry runoff is another. Mountaintop removal also takes away more and more jobs from an area that desperately needs them. It’s time we take a stand. Our song and music video “Stream of Conscience” are focused on this very topic. Appalachia is Rising!”

The “Stream of Conscience” single was featured last week on AOL Music’s top charts.

Here’s the video:

Alongside the beloved Grammy star Kathy Mattea, Loveless and Emmylou Harris, 2/3 Goat joins other great folk, country and rock acts in the long-time campaign to end mountaintop removal.

“Writing this song, I envisioned the People, this light, flowing down like the cleanest water you’ll ever drink; a Stream of Conscience, descending on the industry that’s dealt them such a terrible hand, saying, “We will no longer be poisoned!” McCoy said. “I can’t wait for that day.”

Here’s another video performance of 2/3 Goat’s version of Darrell Scott’s classic, “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive”:

video courtesy of 2/3 Goat and Feeling Anxious PR

Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily.

by David Harris-Gershon

A rally for Palestine in Iceland. Photo by Karl Gunnarsson.

On Tuesday, Iceland became the first Western European nation to pass a parliamentary motion recognizing Palestine as an independent state. The motion – symbolically passed on the United Nation’s annual day of solidarity with the Palestinian people – backs a Palestinian state on 1967 borders, calls on both Israel and Palestine to reject violence and notes the question of Palestinian refugees.

Calling the vote historic, Foreign Minister Ossur Skarphedinsson indicated that Iceland’s move was precipitated by the Palestinians’ application for full U.N. membership – an application which has not been accepted by the U.N. Security Council.

Icelandic lawmaker Amal Tamimi, who was born in Palestine, applauded the move as a necessary step, stating, “I hope that more countries will follow suit.”

As the Icelandic parliament moved to recognize Palestine, the Palestinian Authority made clear it intends to push forward with its U.N. membership bid:

Palestinian UN observer Riyad Mansour read a message from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at UN headquarters on the occasion of the day of solidarity with the Palestinian people. He reaffirmed the Palestinian’s bid for UN membership, saying it should complement peace negotiations, provided that Israel is prepared to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 borders.

Abbas said the Palestinians are not seeking “to delegitimize Israel” by applying to join the UN “but to delegitimize its settlement activities and the seizure of our occupied lands.”

With its U.N. bid stalled in the Security Council, it remains unclear whether or not Abbas will push forward with an attempt to secure a non-binding resolution in the General Assembly affirming Palestinian statehood. Such a resolution, if moved upon, would be almost guaranteed to pass despite opposition from the United States.

§

Follow the author – David Harris-Gershon – on Twitter @David_EHG.

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High comedy: so Ginger White’s business partner preferred to date black men, but she disliked black women’s hair. Hmmmm…the plot thickens. How twisted indeed is the intimate relationship between blacks and whites, feet intertwined mid-coitus on the cotton bale, but the mystery of the hair has too much symbolic weight to overcome?

What a sick society we are; white supremacy truly is a poison that has hurt us all.

If the visitor logs to my site We Are Respectable Negroes are any indication, there are many people who are curious as to the race of Herman Cain’s “mistress” Miss Ginger White. As a service, I will try to offer some guidance on this most vexing and pressing issue of public concern.

First things first, there is only one race of people on this blue marble called planet Earth (allowing for hobbits and Neanderthals), and that is the human race.

Clarifications aside, in our contemporary nomenclature while she may be light, bright, and damn near white (as the expression goes), Ginger White is a black woman.

As a student of race, and a keen practitioner of “race science,” her features, habitus, and “energy” are dead giveaways to my eye.

Does she claim the tribe? I do not know.

Yes, there is a long history of passing in the black community (as well as in others too).

Could Ginger White play that game and slip by the hypodescent rule, crossing over to whiteness in New Orleans, and dancing at an octoroon ball? Damn straight. Could she go to Latin America or Brazil and reverse the one-drop rule, where any bit of “white” ancestry makes you anything but “black?” Absolutely.

Could Ginger White move to New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles and reinvent herself as a “white woman,” turning her back on her kin and people? Yes. It happened all of the time.

Folk wisdom and life experience are also good aids in matters related to the race game. I asked my mother, a black woman from the South, about Herman Cain’s habits. She said months ago that he was a womanizer and had an “arrangement” with his wife. I ask moms if she thought Ginger White was black. She laughed and reminded me that a man of Herman Cain’s age and social background would see a “high yellow,” and “damn near” white woman who had “good hair” as the ultimate prize. He would mess around with a white woman, but Cain would keep a light-skinned woman as his status symbol.

Commonsense goes a long way on these matters. It can also be easily deceived and tricked. So folks, what clues do you use to win the “guess what box to put this racially ambiguous person in” game? Is it their energy and way? Skin color? Cues and hints in speech? Other tricks?

And when we play this game, we are often wrong. One, either because said person refuses to acknowledge their racial group, and gets upset when “outed.” Or two, our lens is just off, and sometimes we encounter a person whose lineage we just can’t place.

Do tell, I bet you have some legendary faux pas to report…all players in the race game do.

Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily.

by Ralph Seliger

It would be a very bad idea for either Israel or the US to attack Iran; today’s NY Times op-ed article by Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, a Norwegian security expert, reinforces this conclusion. But an article in Salon by Gary Kamiya, “The Boys Who Cry ‘Holocaust’,” conveys a wrong-headed notion that the crisis about Iran’s nuclear program is all Israel’s fault. Yes, Netanyahu and the neocon hawks need to be countered, but not like this, in a way that removes the onus from Iran.

Jeffrey Goldberg (a liberal, not a neocon) is absolutely correct in this statement, quoted by Kamiya only to dismiss it:

“Umbrella Man” Does His Thing at JFK Assassination Scene

More and more, one is struck by the extent to which the New York Times is disassociated from reality. One might judge the paper’s publishing of official falsehoods as the occasional and accidental byproduct of the pressure to produce so many articles, were it not for the consistency and rigidly sclerotic way it loyally foists patently untrue material upon the public.

I say this as someone who still reads the Times, still has friends working there, and still retains some isolated pockets of fondness for it.

But it is hard to overlook these constant transgressions. As we note here at WhoWhatWhy, these range from ignoring the real reasons for the invasion of Libya to apologizing for fraud perpetrated by its favorite Afghanistan propagandist (and theauthor of Three Cups of Tea). It surely includes the paper’s failure to share with its readers overwhelming and constantly refreshed documentation of an organized coup that resulted in the death  of President John F. Kennedy and the end of meaningful reform in America. I addressed that latter issue in the article,  “NY Times’ Ostrich Act on JFK Assassination Getting Old.”

Far from proper journalistic curiosity, the paper sees its job as enforcing orthodoxy, and shutting down consideration of anything untoward. According to the New York Times’s peculiar brand of journalism, coups and plots happen with regularity abroad, but never, never, in the United States.

It is important to include the pejorative phrase “conspiracy theorist” in every article, even acknowledging concern about the health of democracy in America. It is important to have a good laugh at the expense of those poor souls who trouble themselves inquiring into the darker precincts of this country’s history.

So it is with the 48^th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. Instead of assigning a single reporter to scrutinize the hundreds or thousands of meaningful, documented facts that do suggest more than “the lone nut did it,” the Times gets busy with the disinformation business.

Here are two Times “contributions” on this occasion:

UMBRELLA MAN

On the 48^th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder, the Times ran an op-ed piece and short film by documentary maker Errol Morris about another man’s research into “umbrella man.” Umbrella Man is the nickname for a fellow who famously brought an umbrella on a sunny day for the president’s visit to Dallas November 22, 1963, stood on the “grassy knoll,” and, just as the president’s car passed, he opened the umbrella and pumped it in the air.  Many have speculated as to the significance, or lack of significance, of this strange behavior. Some wonder if Umbrella Man was  part of the assassination scenario, perhaps signaling to shooters. There was even the September 1975 Senate intelligence committee testimony by Charles Senseney, a contract weapons designer for the CIA, that the agency had perfected an umbrella that shoots undetectable poison darts that can immobilize and kill, raising questions about whether this was in play that day.  (See P. 168 in the Senate committee testimony, where Senseney explains specifically about the agency’s use of a toxin and the ability to fire it from a modified umbrella.)

The self-described Umbrella Man, Louie Steven Witt, came forward to offer his testimony in 1978, or three years after the CIA expert provided this now forgotten testimony on umbrellas as weapon. Umbrella Man came forward just as a special House Select Committee on Assassinations was focusing on the possibility of a conspiracy (which, it concluded in its final report…was likely.) (You can order a video of a report on Witt’s testimony, by then ABC News reporter Brit Hume, here)

The counsel for the Assassinations Committee, remarkably, does not mention the prior Senate  testimony by the CIA weapons expert that such an umbrella device did exist, and instead quotes a more shaky claim by an “assassinations critic” regarding such a device.

Mr. GENZMAN. Mr. Witt, exhibit 406 is a copyrighted diagram

drawn by assassinations critic Robert B. Cutler which shows two

umbrellas with rocket and flechette attachments. Mr. Witt, do you

know what a flechette is?

Mr. WITT. I do now. I did not prior to our interview yesterday

evening.

Mr. GENZMAN. Did the umbrella in your possession on  November

22, 1963, contain a flechette, or a rocket or a dart?

Mr. WITT, No, It did not.

Mr. GENZMAN. Has exhibit 405, the umbrella, ever contained -a

flechette, rocket. or dart?

Mr. WITT. No. Not since it’s been in my possession.

Mr. GENZMAN. Did the umbrella in your possession on November

1963; contain a gun or weapon of any sort?

438

Mr. WITT. No.

Mr. GENZMAN. Has exhibit 405 ever contained a gun or weapon

of any sort?

Mr. WITT. This umbrella?

Mr. GENZMAN. Yes.

Mr. WITT. No.

Mr. GENZMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Witt.

Mr. Chairman, I have no further questions.

Is the Times at all interested in the credibility of this purported umbrella-bearer? Absolutely not.

Instead, the Morris video presents the idea that sometimes, the most ridiculous scenarios are the truth. And so it presents the ridiculous, and asks us to believe it. Cutting to the chase, the man seen opening an umbrella comes forward to explain why he did it. Reason: in 1963, he was still mad at Britain’s pre-war Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement of Hitler, and held JFK’s father to blame as US ambassador to England in that period. Chamberlain was famed for carrying an umbrella. So—get this—Umbrella Man, hoping to make a statement about what happened in the late 1930s to JFK in 1963, pumped his umbrella at the time the fatal shots were fired…only for this obscure purpose.

The Times passes the responsibility for this travesty to Morris, who passes it along to Josiah Thompson, a former Navy underwater demolitions expert turned Yale philosophy professor turned private investigator, who appears on-screen to ruminate about “Umbrella Man.” He is happy to accept the Chamberlain story as “delightful weirdness.”

Watching this, one gets the sense that Thompson believes there was no conspiracy in JFK’s death. But what the Times implies with this little piece is false. In fact, Josiah Thompson is known for documenting the exact opposite. He wrote a serious investigative book in 1967, “Six Seconds in Dallas,” full of evidence and specifics, in which he concluded there was a conspiracy to kill JFK—involving three different shooters. But the New York Times is not interested in that, only in this new, droll dismissal of another piece of the puzzle.

I called Thompson to ask him about the Morris video, and he pronounced himself delighted with it. I asked him how he knew that the man who came forward to identify himself as Umbrella Man and present the Neville Chamberlain story was actually the same man in the fuzzy photo of many years earlier.  By way of explanation, he mentioned hearing a story from a well-respected JFK researcher who in turn had heard that Umbrella Man had told his dentist years earlier that he was umbrella man. Pressing Thompson, I learned that the man who came forward as Umbrella Man never provided proof that he was in fact the man with the umbrella. Even the dentist story is third, fourth, or perhaps fifth hand, not verified by Thompson or his researcher friend. All of which proves nothing, and all of which suggests that maybe, just maybe, the man’s improbable, “delightful” story of Neville Chamberlain is, indeed, fabricated.

Just because Errol Morris is a master of the documentary art does not make him any kind of authority on what should be the province of careful investigators. Just because a story is absurd does not make it real, or “delightful”, as the Times video would like us to consider—and many did, with thousands emailing the Times piece to friends. This is something well understood by the game-players of the covert operations house of mirrors: the jesuitical contortions that can be made to twist any credible scenario.  

Here are some things you should know about the man who came forward to identify himself as Umbrella Man and tell this ludicrous Neville Chamberlain story:

His account of his activities that day don’t track with what Umbrella Man actually did, raising questions as to whether this man who volunteered to testify to the assassination inquiry is even the real umbrella-bearer, or someone whose purpose was to end inquiries into the matter.

The man who came forward, Louie Steven Witt, was a young man at the time of Kennedy’s death. How many young men in Dallas in 1963 even knew what Neville Chamberlain had done a quarter-century before?

In 1963, Witt was an insurance salesman for the Rio Grande National Life Insurance company, which anchored the eponymous Rio Grande Building in downtown Dallas. It’s an interesting building. Among the other outfits housed in the building was the Office of Immigration and Naturalization—a place Lee Harvey Oswald visited repeatedly upon his return from Russia, ostensibly to deal with matters concerning the immigration status of his Russian-born wife, Marina.  Another occupant of the Rio Grande Building was the US Secret Service, so notably lax in its protection of Kennedy that day, breaking every rule of security on every level.

A major client of Rio Grande was the US military, to which it provided insurance.

It’s worth considering the roles of military-connected figures on the day of the assassination. These include Dallas Military Intelligence unit chief Jack Crichton operating secretly from an underground communications bunker; Crichton’s providing a translator who twisted Marina Oswald’s statement to police in a way that implicated her husband;  and members of military intelligence forcing their way into the pilot car of Kennedy’s motorcade, which inexplicably ground to a halt in front of the Texas School Book Depository (where Lee Harvey Oswald’s employer, a high official with the local military-connected American Legion, managed to find a “job” for Oswald at a time when his company was otherwise seasonally laying off staff.) Oh, and it’s worth contemplating JFK’s titanic, if under-reported, struggle with top Pentagon officials over how the US should interact with Russia, Cuba, and the rest of the world. You can read more about all this in my book Family of Secrets.

Is this concatenation of facts too crazy to consider? More crazy than that Neville Chamberlain story?

THE JACK AND JACKIE LOVE STORY

Not content with having Morris, who is no Kennedy expert, put out this misleading video on Umbrella Man, the Times earlier featured Morris’s book review of Stephen King’s novel imagining Lee Harvey Oswald. So now you have a man who knows little about the real story, getting people to read the imaginings of one who also knows little of the real story. Another way to look at this is that the New York Times is really, really interested in an occult novelist’s take on the death of a president, but just totally uninterested itself in looking into that death.

You must read Errol Morris’s review of King’s book, and please explain to me what he is talking about, because I have no idea. One of the few things that registered at all from this confusing mess is a comment about Jack and Jackie:

King has said that he struggled with the idea for this book for more than 30 years. One can see why. In fiction, we can decide who did or did not kill Kennedy. Writer’s choice (and King chooses). But he pays his debts to history in other ways — by showing the machine and, at the same time, the simplest human knots, the love stories behind history: Sadie and George[characters in the novel], Jack and Jackie.

Um, “the love stories behind history…Jack and Jackie”?

This is part and parcel of the Times’s approach: to maintain a feeble, People Magazine-like focus on the JFK-Jackie Camelot love story—which never actually existed. Anyone who has read any of the books featuring interviews with close friends of the couple know that the marriage was a political match for the reticent JFK, never for a minute a fairy tale romance, and that by 1963 the duo could barely stand to be in each other’s presence. If this is news to you, come out of your New York Times cave and read….practically anything else. (One worthwhile account—including Jackie explicitly ignoring JFK’s request that, for appearances’ sake, the First Lady not take off to cruise on the yacht of the caddish Aristotle Onassis in the fall of 1963—can be found in Peter Evans’s book, Nemesis. By the way, Onassis hated—and I mean hated—the Kennedys; RFK had blocked a big Onassis business deal years earlier.)

Or read in Family of Secrets how, since childhood, Jackie had been a friend of George de Mohrenschildt, the “father figure” to Lee Harvey Oswald, or how, the night after de Mohrenschildt’s testimony to the Warren Commission, Oswald’s best friend was invited to dinner at Jackie’s mother’s house, along with the Machiavellian intriguer Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired as CIA director and whom Johnson so shockingly appointed to the Warren Commission investigating Kennedy’s killing—a man who surely is at the top of most people’s lists of those behind the assassination.

If you appreciate these sorts of things, it is striking to learn that Onassis was a business partner in oil deals in the Caribbean prior to Castro’s revolution, with….Oswald’s best friend George de Mohrenschildt, and that Onassis’ brother-in-law was the cover employer of CIA coup plotter Al Ulmer, who just happened to be visiting the Dallas area the week of Nov 22 1963 from abroad.

So, please, can we get past this “love story” pabulum and at least do just a teensy bit of investigating these odd and flagrantly suggestive connections? Maybe they’re all odd coincidences, but at least they seem, intuitively, worth pursuing, at least as much as those  “delightfully weird” Neville Chamberlain umbrella stories.

The real danger of a video like the one about the Umbrella Man is that it encourages people to stop questioning, stop investigating. Just laugh it all off. There’s no trouble here in the land of the free, the home of the brave. Nothing to see here, folks, move along, move along.

***

It’s time to stop treating the New York Times as the slightly daffy uncle who is hard of hearing. There’s something more insidious going on, and every single person who works there and refuses to care bears some responsibility. Ditto with the rest of the media, which still takes this institution as its guide on what to cover—and what not to uncover.

GRAPHIC: http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/02/Ppl-0003.jpg

WhoWhatWhy is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news site founded by Russ Baker. Follow it on Facebook andTwitter or visit WhoWhatWhy.com

In a blatant disregard of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, among other regulatory guidelines, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) has quietly entangled itself in an inane and potentially deadly coal slurry scandal.

If allowed to continue construction under its violation-ridden Emergency Permit, the 80-foot-high impoundment of toxic coal slurry inside the town limits of Hillsboro, in central Illinois — covering one square mile — would rank as one of the most disgraceful monuments to corruption and regulatory negligence in the Quinn administration.

“It is one thing to have staff at our state mining regulatory agency whose background and allegiance is with the coal industry. It’s another thing to have a state agency that is not protecting our state environment and not doing their job for the public,” said Joyce Blumenshine, the Mining Issues Committee Chair for the Illinois Sierra Club. “These mines will be toxic legacies for generations to come. Future generations will have to pay the environmental damages whether it is to their own health, to the viability of the lands these toxic time-bombs sit on, or the loss of ag lands and water resources.”

On October 11th, as if to mock the health and safety of Illinois citizens on the anniversary of the Martin County, Kentucky coal slurry disaster, which dumped 300 million gallons of toxic sludge into the area’s waterways in 2000, the IDNR held a public hearing to assure local citizens that its oversight and Emergency Permit for the violation-ridden construction of the “High Hazard” dam was safe and legal.

Stunned by the state agency’s exemptions and permit modifications, local resident Mary Bates testified, among a growing chorus of outraged Hillsboro town residents and besieged farmers, on the IDNR’s “bait and switch” tactics:

“Did anyone on the county board or city council read the first 399 application? That application called for a non-impounding impoundment. That’s the bait. IDNR approved it without asking the question “Where’s the slurry impoundment?” Now we have a Class 1 high hazard dam which has the potential, in the event of dam failure, for the substantial loss of life and/or property downstream.”

One thing is clear from the hearing transcripts in Hillsboro: If local residents and farmers hadn’t intervened and served as watchdogs, the reckless state agency would rubber stamp virtually every demand and infraction and lawless maneuver by a coal company that has already racked up water pollution violations in the nascent stage of production. (The Deer Run Mine, in fact, owned by billionaire Appalachian coal baron Chris Cline, is overseen by CEO Dwayne Fransico, who was formerly the president of Massey Energy’s criminally convicted Aracoma Coal Company.)

“Early in the mine permit process for the Deer Run Mine, citizens pointed out that the proposed coal slurry impoundment was not adequate for the operations that were proposed,” Blumenshine said. “We had a volunteer civil engineer assess the plans. We knew this was a bogus design and listed the coal waste area issues in our legal challenge to the mine permit. All along the way, the IDNR Office of Mines and Minerals staff defended the design. Well, the permit was approved in February 2009, and by 2010, the mine had filed for the big change in the coal slurry impoundment. If we had had on paper at the time of the permit public hearings that the mine was going to build an 80-foot-high, thousands-of-feet-circumference toxic slurry stew container plunked on the flat land local citizens might have had a little more interest in this issue. This is worse than bait and switch. This is outright deception and makes liars of the coal company and the IDNR, because IDNR never challenged the inadequate design they approved in the permit.”

Under attack by devastating longwall mining plans, farmers and residents in central and southern Illinois are closely following the Illinois Supreme Court, as it finally deals with the 1999 coal slurry tragedy in nearby Clinton County, which contaminated the Pearl Aquifer with toxic coal waste, and ruined the lives of many Illinois citizens in one of the state’s most shameful legacies of regulatory negligence.

Ten days after the October hearing in Hillsboro, on the anniversary Aberfan coal slurry disaster, which took the lives of 144 school children and town residents, respected Illinois engineer Robert Johnson responded to the IDNR’s clear efforts to limit public participation and access to information on the coal slurry site, and delineated the numerous levels of violations, incompetence and wildly outdated state regulatory process. In particular, Johnson noted:

The application form, on which Permit No. 399 Significant Revision No. 1 was prepared, developed by the Office of Mines and Minerals apparently decades ago, is seriously deficient… Once a person becomes experienced with SMCRA rules and, therefore, the intended purpose of IDNR’s application form, it becomes more apparent that the purpose of the form is to camouflage SMCRA requirements and allow the mine to operate without full compliance to SMCRA regulatory provisions.

The IDNR is not the only entity attempting to restrict public discussion on the coal slurry impoundment — the Hillsboro’s Journal-News refused to publish Johnson’s letter to the editor or other critical letters and editorials on the slurry impoundment and related longwall mines.

Blumenshine concluded:

How can citizens think the state offices that approve mine permits can ever be trusted when you see the fiasco at the Deer Run Mine? First in 2010 the IDNR Office of Mines and Minerals approves a series of ‘Insignificant Permit Revisions’ that let the coal slurry design be totally changed and that let the entire base be constructed. This is done without any chance for the public to request a hearing. Then in 2011 the Office of Water Resources, who is the state expert agency on high hazard dams, issues a Cease and Desist construction order to the mine, because all this work has been done without the OWR office ever issuing an approved permit. Then weeks pass and the IDNR issues a statement that the Cease and Desist order was premature and months later issues an emergency construction permit approval for this monstrous 80-foot-high coal slurry impoundment, that, oh, by the way, is being built in the city limits of the town of Hillsboro. And then in the fall of 2011 IDNR Mines and Minerals holds a public hearing on this high hazard dam coal slurry impoundment saying that they are just in the beginning steps of reviewing the project and that they can make changes yet.

The IDNR public hearing process is worse than a joke. They hold hearings in an attempt to look like the coal companies are not running the agency. Basically whatever the coal companies do, they know they will get it approved by the state. Citizens in Illinois should be aghast. Our precious water resources and our prime farmlands, not to mention the health and safety of many citizens in coalfield communities, are just collateral damage to the mine permitting charade in Illinois.

Mickey McCoy, the former mayor of Inez, Kentucky, which bore the brunt of the Martin County disaster a decade ago, added:

The mayor of Hiillsboro better seek a grant to supply each household with a water craft to escape when the dam breaks. And while he’s at it find funds to train the folks in another livelihood for after the flood of toxic waste; the land will forever be unfit for farming and the water will be filled with carcinogenic heavy metals. I’ll be praying for Hillsboro.

The pharmaceutical industry had two things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving season. Three new wrongdoing settlements that broke right before the holiday were buried among yam and traffic jam news–and a new sleeping pill that isn’t new at all but just Ambien with a new name became a leading “news” story.

Of course everyone knows that the time for corporations and governments to dump bad news is Friday at 5:00 PM because no one hears the tree fall in the forest and by Monday something else will have happened. Did anyone notice that Merck pled guilty to criminal marketing of the painkiller Vioxx and agreed to pay $950 million before the holiday? In addition to the $4.85 billion it has already paid to victims?

Vioxx was billed as a “super-aspirin” for everyday pain until it was removed from the market in 2004 for doubling heart attack risks and causing between 27,000 and 50,000 heart events and deaths. Merck knew the heart risks and pushed Vioxx for non-approved uses according to published reports, but no corporate executives ever went up the river. “There was no basis for a finding of high-level management participation in the violation,” Merck’s pre-Thanksgiving news release self-congratulates.

Then there’s Pfizer. The drug giant agreed to pay more than $60 million to resolve federal probes into alleged bribes to overseas doctors to use Pfizer drugs, reported the Wall Street Journal before the holiday. Penalties were probably reduced because Pfizer was willing to help the government by “ratting” on its competitors, says the Journal.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune reported before Thanksgiving that Abbott is about to settle lawsuits that it illegally marketed the epilepsy drug Depakote to nursing home directors, geriatric doctors and other long-term care facilities and greased palms with kickbacks.  Abbott has set aside $1.5 billion for a settlement, says the Trib.

While the Merck, Pfizer and Abbott settlements may look sizeable, copping to a settlement allows drug companies to keep the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement which is their lifeblood. Profits from the alleged wrongdoing usually dwarf penalties, too. “Even with these large fines, it is still good business to promote drugs illegally,” says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, director of PharmedOut, a project at Georgetown University Medical Center.

And there was more good news for Pharma during Thanksgiving. A newly approved sleeping pill, Intermezzo, received millions of dollars of publicity from news reports that it was a “new drug” for a “new type of insomnia” characterized by middle-of-the-night awakenings.

Actually, it’s the same drug as Ambien and “middle-of-the-night” insomnia is one of many varieties of insomnia Pharma has rolled out to churn the insomnia drug market. Others are chronic, acute, transient, initial, delayed-onset, and terminal insomnia and don’t forget non-restful sleep which can co-exist with all of the above.

Needless to say,  the only thing more lucrative to Pharma than a new variation on a disease is a new patent on an existing drug because no research and development is necessary. Remember how Prozac resurfaced as the PMS pill Sarafem? The antidepressant Effexor was tweaked into Pristiq? And most recently Neurontin resurfaced as Horizant, a treatment for restless legs (though many say Neurontin causes restless legs)?

Of course, Ambien also has quite a pedigree. It is the drug Tiger Woods reportedly cavorted with his consorts on and the drug former Rhode Island Representative Patrick Kennedy crashed his car on in 2006. He drove to Capitol Hill to “vote” at 2:45 AM.

Nor was Kennedy the only person to walk, drive and engage in purposeful behavior in an Ambien blackout. Law enforcement officials reported that traffic accidents increased under Ambien, with some drivers not even recognizing the police officers there to arrest them. (”Dude–where’s my car?”) Ambien’s manufacturer was forced to publish ads telling people if they were going to take Ambien, to get in bed and stay there after Kennedy’s over zealous parliamentarianism. (Or you’ll break out in handcuffs, added cynics.) The FDA issued warnings about the potential of “complex sleep-related behaviors” on Ambien and other sleeping pills which may include “sleep-driving, making phone calls and preparing and eating food (while asleep).”

Actually, it was EWI–eating while intoxicated or “preparing and eating food (while asleep)”– not DWIs that gave Ambien its worst rap. Fit and sexy people awoke amid mountains of pizza, Krispy Kreme and Häagen-Dazs cartons consumed by their evil twin, on Ambien. Weeks of dieting and treadmill time shot to hell.

In fact, waking up in the middle of the night and “sleep feasting” is such an Ambien side effect, people might need to take Intermezzo for the middle-of-the-night awakening, even though they are the same drug! Unless, of course, they want “Thanksgiving remorse” all year instead of one day a year. END

Martha Rosenberg’s first book, “Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health,” will be published by Prometheus Books this spring.

Since the deficit committee officially failed to produce a plan as of last week, expect the war profiteer spin to hit the fan. Here’s an early warning of what to expect, courtesy of Reuters last week:

Failure of a special congressional committee to strike a deficit-reduction deal is expected to unleash desperate lobbying by U.S. arms makers to get lawmakers to block $600 billion in automatic cuts.

Their weapon of choice: jobs.

Unfortunately for them, War Costs’ new video exposes the truth about massive military budgets and employment: military spending is a job killer.

But, don’t expect the truth to get in the way of a good propaganda campaign.

The profiteer’s agitprop push is already underway. Searching for “defense cuts” on Google early this morning already brings up articles high in the search feed from paid war-industry shills in the top results, notably a lengthy piece from Loren Thompson, perennial paid defender of massive military budgets (himself on the war industry dime). His argument, that Obama could lose the election due to job losses from military cuts, is one you better get used to seeing.

This argument is part of a coordinated effort headed by war industry CEOs and their advocates on Capitol Hill to push elected officials to protect the massive, corruption-filled war budget by slashing social safety nets. This would be a disaster for our economy. As we show in our latest War Costs video, military spending costs jobs compared to other ways of spending the money, and Congress must cut this spending if we are to get out of this unemployment crisis.

Massive Military Budgets Cost Jobs

“If we’re really serious about building anything approximate to a full employment economy, or at least getting us out of the damn recession, the best thing to do is to start cutting the military.”

Robert Pollin is the co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He and his colleague, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, are working on a new update to an employment study that discusses the jobs impact of various kinds of government spending. PERI has a strong message for elected officials: if you are going to cut, cut the Pentagon budget.

Brave New Foundation’s War Costs project spoke with Pollin and other experts several times over the past several weeks as press reports indicated a disposition among the many elected officials to spare the Pentagon from the cuts required to the budget by the debt ceiling law. The consensus of these experts–as opposed to those funded heavily by military money and war profiteers–is that the U.S.’s massive military budgets are terrible for job creation, and that the talking points coming from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the war-profiteer front campaign, “Second To None,” are specious propaganda.

PERI’s study uses Department of Commerce data to determine how many people are employed by various kinds of spending, including military, health care, green energy and education. They also examine the employment effects of basic consumer spending. Their discoveries, validated repeatedly as they’ve updated the study every two years since the original study in 2007, might startle those who bought the Washington consensus on military spending. In short, among the kinds of spending examined, military spending actually costs jobs compared to any other form. It’s the only spending that scored worse than basic consumer spending, and it created far less than half the jobs created by education spending.

Here are the numbers from their latest available study (.pdf):

Job Creation Per $1 Billion Spent:

• Military: 11,200
• Tax Cuts for Personal Consumption: 15,100
• Clean Energy: 16,800
• Health Care: 17,200
• Education: 26,700

In short, at bare minimum, every billion dollars spent on the military costs at least 3,900 jobs compared to other spending types, and if compared to the best job creator from the study, education, $1 billion in military spending costs 15,500 jobs.

And, according to some experts, the actual jobs costs of massive military budgets over the past several decades could be in the millions.

Dr. Lloyd Dumas is a professor of Political Economy, Economics and Public Policy at the University of Texas Dallas and the author of The Peacekeeping Economy. His new book features an extended discussion of what makes manufacturing firms competitive: investment in research and development to develop new tools and techniques to increase product quality, production efficiency and to develop new technologies. He says the massive military budgets of recent years, especially the massive R&D budgets at the Pentagon, have severely undermined this process in the civilian manufacturing sector in the U.S. by luring scientists and engineers out of civilian R&D and into military programs.

“Large military budgets are very bad for job creation especially in the long run, and actually responsible in my view for much of the loss of American industrial jobs…that’s a job killer. …As a matter of fact, cutting defense spending is absolutely crucial to revitalizing American industry and creating millions of jobs that we’ve already lost–getting them back and getting more on top of that.”

Military contractors and their advocates, desperate to prevent cuts to the bloated Pentagon budget, point to critical technological developments that spring from military research. For example, the head of the Aerospace Industries Association, Marion Blakey, said in a recent press conference:

“For decades we’ve seen how investments in military aerospace endeavors lead to breakthroughs that benefit all of us – the Internet and GPS that grew out of DARPA research come to mind.”

Not so fast, according to Dumas. While he concedes that some spill-over effect exists, Dumas pointedly rebuts the implication that we should fund military R&D because of asserted benefits to civilian life. That way of obtaining innovative products is highly inefficient because military application drives research, experiment design and which results get attention. This means that discoveries that could have civilian application come at a much, much higher cost to society than if society sought those innovations directly through civilian research.

Despite the fact that economic data clearly suggest that military spending is a terrible priority for a government supposedly concerned with job creation, and despite the negative effect of this spending on the United States’ long-term competitiveness in the world market, an astounding number of representatives in Congress, Pentagon officials and war industry executives want to protect the military budget from cuts. Even worse, they are trying to wrap their campaign in the one word that certainly should not be applied to military spending: jobs. Add a healthy dose of fear-mongering about security into the mix, and you have a killer message campaign run largely with taxpayer dollars to protect war industry revenues.

The Fear Campaign

War industry CEOs have allies all over Capitol Hill pushing Congress and the administration to protect the bloated military budget from cuts.

For example, House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) recently sent a high-temperature letter to the deficit committee, including the mind-blowing assertion that less military spending will result in longer wars–irrespective of the fact that we’re spending all this money on the longest war in U.S. history in Afghanistan. He’s continued his agitation after the committee’s failure, which isn’t all that surprising considering his massive campaign cash take from the war industry.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has filled the airwaves in recent weeks with sky-is-falling rhetoric, which last week included a flat-out declaration that he sees protecting the business interests of the military contractors as part of his job.

McKeon and Panetta have both included in their scare-mongering the theme that cuts to the military budget would “hollow out” the military. Of course, they always fail to mention that the Pentagon’s budget would only be drawn down to roughly 2007 topline number for the military budget (which, by the way, McKeon enthusiastically voted for–twice), after which it would resume growing again.

The real lipstick that McKeon, Panetta and others put on their propaganda pig, however, is the jobs fiction cooked up by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), a “nonprofit” governed by executives from the major military contractor organizations which advocates for their businesses on Capitol Hill. AIA paid Dr. Steven Fuller from George Mason University to write a paper about job losses that would occur if sequestration–the across-the-board cuts triggered by deficit committee failure–took place. Fuller’s estimate checked in at roughly 1 million jobs.

Pollin, however, takes strong issue with AIA’s methods in the debate, pointing to their study’s total lack of context.

“The real point is to compare the relative employment impacts of military spending versus spending on domestic infrastructure, on the green economy, on health care and on education. …It is fair to say that every time we take money out of these alternatives, it is costing the economy jobs by putting money into the military.”

Long-time war industry observer Bill Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, had a simple description for the Panetta/McKeon/war industry media push around jobs. He called it simply, “a propaganda campaign.”

“To me there’s no question that this scare campaign about jobs by the Pentagon and the industry is a propaganda campaign. And the reason I say that is, first of all, it’s coordinated. So for example, one day an executive from the Aerospace Industries Association says we’re going to increase unemployment 1 percent if we make significant cuts in military spending. The next day, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta calls congress and says, ‘Guess what? We’re going to gain 1 percent in unemployment if we make significant cuts in military spending.’ So they’ve obviously sat down and gotten their stories straight. They’re working shoulder-to-shoulder to scare people into spending more on the military than we need.”

Hartung pointed out the industry’s penchant for inflated jobs numbers, urging readers to take them with a healthy dose of skepticism. (See our latest video for more information.)

Right now, Congress and the administration are the target of a coordinated propaganda campaign involving war industry allies in Congress and the administration, funded in large part by huge corporations whose executives rely on the taxpayer for lavish lifestyles. This spin campaign flies in the face of what economists know to be true: that military spending costs jobs compared to other ways of spending the money. If Congress acts on the “information” they’ve obtained during this propaganda push, there’s a real chance they will protect the worst kind of spending for job creation–the military budget–by slashing other kinds of spending that create far more jobs. This would be a disastrous decision that would prolong and deepen our economic woes.

We’ve got to push back with the truth: military spending costs jobs compared to other ways of spending the money.

In response to this propaganda campaign from the war industry and their allies, Brave New Foundation’s War Costs campaign has launched our own effort to break through to Washington, D.C. with the truth. We have set up a tool that includes a new video about the job-killing impact of war spending, targeted at your elected officials. Please use it today and let them know that you want Congress to make real cuts to the war budget to save our economy.

The clock may have run out on the deficit committee, but the real fight to cut job-killing Pentagon budgets is just beginning, and we need your help. Please watch our latest video and send it to your elected officials today.

Join the War Costs campaign on Facebook, and follow Robert Greenwald and Derrick Crowe on Twitter.