The Mound of Sound

“Our troops should never be used as props in our domestic political landscape“

– Liberal leader, Stephane Dion

Right you are, Stephane. We should only use them as props for the international political landscape and, of course, for dodging unwanted elections.

With that pronouncement, Stephane Dion acknowledged that his opposition and Stephen Harper’s government are snugly in the same olive-drab sleeping bag on the Afghanistan mission extension. Needless to say, the remainder of the “debate” on Afghanistan will be a real yawner with the truly relevant questions neither asked nor answered.

British scientists have discovered a way to accurately judge the age of human corpses by looking into their eyes.

It seems that carbon isotopes were released into the atmosphere by nuclear weapons tests half a century ago. That isotope, C-14, level has been declining ever since. If you were born after 1950, you absorbed a certain amount of that isotope in the first two years of life. So, by measuring the amount of isotope in the lens of an eye, it’s possible to determine the year of birth.

The technology is expected to be useful in aiding in the identification of bodies after tsunamis and other disasters.

If you watched 60 Minutes last night you saw an expose on the political set up and take down of Alabama Democrat and ex-governor Don Siegelman. It was a story of an atrocious abuse of power by Republicans – federal attorneys, state and federal operatives and politicians and even Karl Rove – to railroad a political threat who may not have even committed a crime yet now sits behind bars.

TPM Muckraker is reporting today that the CBS 60 Minutes broadcast was actually blacked out last night in northern Alabama by the Republican-owned CBS affiliate. When an uproar ensued, the station said it had suffered a technical glitch and rebroadcast the show at 10 p.m.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. Like the Bismark at the end, circling haplessly, its rudder jammed, and firing its cannon desperately in all directions, Hillary Clinton seems reduced to mocking her rival, Barack Obama, with a desperate barrage of sarcasm while she circles, waiting for the end.

I’m not counting Hillary out but that’s not the impression she herself is giving. The public has already shown they have no appetite for this approach and it does have a sad emptiness to it, as though Ms. Clinton has run out of anything else with which to lure support to her faltering campaign.

Mockery exudes desperation and fear, not the hallmark qualities of a come-from-behind presidential aspirant. Besides, it’s far too easy for Obama to swat away like nothing more than a pesky fly. He gets to focus on his message, she’s forced to focus on him. That’s a losing hand at any table.

What’s the tab going to be for George w. Bush’s eternal “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, writing in The Times of London, figure it’ll come to at least $3-trillion. That’s three thousand billion dollars or, if you like, three thousand thousand million dollars. Figure that out at roughly $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America, $32,000 for a family of four, and it’s all borrowed money so there’ll be plenty to be paid in interest before that’s ever squared away.

So, you’re probably asking yourself, who are Joe Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes? He was chief economist at the World Bank and won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001. She is a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The right-wing nutjobs (like our own SHarper) constantly rave about “socialist plots to transfer wealth.” Here’s a transfer of wealth on a previously unimagineable scale – except its from the taxpaying working and middle classes to the already enormously wealthy, taxation exempt, investment classes, America’s rentiers, the guys who own big hunks of Halliburton or Blackwater or Lockheed Martin.

Remember when Rumsfeld boasted that the Iraq war would cost the US $50-billion, $60-billion tops? Remember when Larry Lindsey, President Bush’s economic adviser and head of the National Economic Council, suggested that they might reach $200 billion and got ridiculed and sacked for it?

At the moment, the operating costs for the US war in Iraq is running at $12.5-billion per month and the bill for Afghanistan is actually higher – $16-billion per month. But it still seems a long reach from $29-billion a month to $3-trillion. That, according to Stiglitz and Blimes, is in what’s not included in the operating expenses.

To put this in perspective, $3-trillion is way more than the US bill for Korea or even its war in Vietnam. It’s more than US costs for WWI. Only WWII, which cost a grand total of $5-trillion USD was more expensive.

“From the unhealthy brew of emergency funding, multiple sets of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources required to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify how much we have been spending — and how much we will, in the end, likely have to spend. The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions. They are conceptually simple, even if occasionally technically complicated. A $3 trillion figure for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and probably errs on the low side. Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq.”

By the time the America people are finally asked to begin paying off this colossal debt, the profits will be long gone, fltered out to Bush’s “base” in bloated dividend cheques and squirreled away in offshore tax havens.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/77663/?page=entire

Ralph Nader has returned, throwing his hat into the ring in yet another Quixotic run for the White House.

The now clearly messianic, 73-year old, consumer crusader says he’s running because the other contenders are too close to big business, aren’t tough enough on ending the Iraq war and aren’t bold enough in their healthcare proposals.

Republican candidate Mike Huckabee welcomed Nader’s declaration noting the obvious – that he inevitably does far more harm to the Democrats than to the Republicans.

It’s been twenty years since the Exxon Valdez veered off course and ran onto rocks, spilling 11-million barrels of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Now, after dodging its responsibility to those it injured for fully two decades with appeal upon appeal, Exxon has reached the end of the litigation line, the US Supreme Court.

On appeal is the jury award of $5-billion in punitive damages which the company is trying to have the court set aside entirely or at least reduce.

Twenty years. That sounds like a litigation case in India, not a modern, Western nation.

Twenty years that have seen the deaths of nearly twenty per cent of the fishermen, cannery workers, native Alaskans and others who prevailed in the suit. Six thousand of them, in total, haven’t lived to see Exxon finally run to ground.

Exxon’s best line of defence, ironically, lies in 2oo-year old maritime case law concerning a shipowner’s liability where the crew, once at sea, turns privateer. Hmm – Exxon relying on a piracy case, sounds about right, eh?

It remains to be seen now whether Exxon has hit a wall or sailed into a safe harbour – the Supreme Court dominated by rightwing judges of the likes of Roberts and Scalia. A huge corporate defendant couldn’t have asked for more.