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Movie Review: 'Boys of Abu Ghraib' |
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Sunday, 30 March 2014 14:58 |
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Jenkins writes: "Essentially a one-man show, writer-director-star Luke Moran's Boys of Abu Ghraib observes a soldier's deployment at the prison during its most notorious post-Saddam year, 2003."
Jack Farmer (Luke Moran), a kind-hearted member of the Military Police stationed at Abu Ghraib, finds himself questioning the jail's culture. (photo: Boys of Abu Ghraib/NPR)
Movie Review: 'Boys of Abu Ghraib'
By Mark Jenkins, National Public Radio
30 March 14
 ssentially a one-man show, writer-director-star Luke Moran's Boys of Abu Ghraib observes a soldier's deployment at the prison during its most notorious post-Saddam year, 2003. As such, the movie works pretty well. But spotlighting a single GI sidesteps the group dynamic of what happened at the U.S.-run jail, where poorly supervised guards incited each other to behave in ways that were, at the least, unprofessional.
Jack Farmer (Moran) introduces himself in voiceover, preparing for a farewell party that just happens to occur on the Fourth of July. He's leaving his supportive father (John Heard) and loving girlfriend (Sara Paxton) in search of meaning and adventure. Next stop is Abu Ghraib, where his new commanding officer barks, "Within these walls, the war on terror will be won."
For Jack, though, fighting terror means working in the motor pool. The routine is punctuated only by mortar attacks and his unit's grisly barracks: They bunk where Saddam Hussain's sons used to supervise torture, and the blood stains and charred-flesh smells remain. There are no phones or running water, and promised leaves and redeployments are delayed or rescinded.
Bored, Jack volunteers for Military Police service at "the hard site," home to prisoners said to be "the worst of the worst." He's soon a witness to stress positions and other "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Jack is untrained as an MP, and receives only a cursory introduction to his new job from a veteran guard, Tanner (Sean Astin). It seems that the cynical Tanner will serve as a dramatic foil to the kind-hearted Jack, who instinctively recoils against mistreatment of the inmates. But Tanner soon disappears, and no significant character replaces him.
Instead, the focus switches temporarily to Jack's relationship with an English-speaking prisoner, Ghazi (Omid Abtahi). Guards are not supposed to speak to prisoners, but Ghazi is thoughtful and sympathetic, and Jack needs a friend. He assumes that the inmate is innocent, but later has cause to doubt that.
At one point, Jack arrives for his shift and replaces a female MP. But she's the only woman ever shown at the prison, and the party atmosphere documented in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs is never invoked. In fact, Moran offers an alternative, and unpersuasive, explanation of how at least one of those photos was made.
Shot in New Mexico on a limited budget, Boys of Abu Ghraib is a credible depiction of the tedium, frustration and humiliation of wartime service. (Jack gets coated in human excrement not once but twice.) Naturalistic scenes of boxing, bantering and masturbation, set to a rap and hard-rock score, emphasize that these boys are young American everymen.
But if Jack is just a regular guy, Abu Ghraib is not just another post. This is Taxi to the Dark Side territory, where questioning became torture, rape and sometimes murder. Compared to that harrowing documentary, Boys of Abu Ghraib looks like a protracted stay at a crummy summer camp. Jack's troubles feel real, yet they're merely a sidebar to the main story.
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FOCUS | The GOP Courtship of Sheldon Adelson |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Sunday, 30 March 2014 13:29 |
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Pierce writes: "The New York Times today has a lovely look at yet another wonderful byproduct of our bright new age of campaign finance."
Chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corporation Sheldon Adelson watches a lion dance at the opening ceremony of the Sands Cotai Central in April 2012 in Macau. (photo: Aaron Tam/AFP/Getty Images)
The GOP Courtship of Sheldon Adelson
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
30 March 14
 he New York Times today has a lovely look at yet another wonderful byproduct of our bright new age of campaign finance. The party of Christian values and self-reliance and personal responsibility gathered its elite to pay homage to creepy old gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, who can personally finance an entire presidential campaign from his vast treasury of sin-laden cash.
Mr. Adelson's effort officially kicked off on Wednesday, when lawmakers, including a senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has accepted tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the businessman and his family, introduced legislation originally drafted with Mr. Adelson's lobbyist. The bill would close a three-year-old loophole in federal law by banning online gambling - a growing industry that Mr. Adelson argues is bad for casinos and gamblers - and shutting down online gambling in a handful states that recently legalized it. The dispute has already largely sidelined the industry's powerful trade group, the American Gaming Association, after Mr. Adelson threatened to withdraw from the organization if it continued to back expanded online gambling, according to several industry executives.
So much of the money primary in the 2016 Republican primary nomination fight is being conducted on the Planet Of The UltraGreedheads. That's wonderful just on its own, but get a load of the very conservatives folks who are lining up to kiss ol' Shel's, ah, ring.
Mr. Adelson's political prominence will be on display Thursday in Las Vegas at the start of the four-day meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition - an event that has attracted several 2016 presidential prospects, including Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida; Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey; Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin; and Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio. Mr. Adelson, whose $38 billion fortune makes him among the richest men in the world, poured roughly $100 million into Republican campaigns in 2012, and he is known for pushing ideological fights in Washington. The battle over online gambling shows how he also lobbies for his business.
Good family-values types, the lot of them, dedicated to re-energizing the spirit of American entrepreneurship and self-reliance, one chip at a time.
A new group bankrolled by Mr. Adelson, the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, is wooing socially conservative lawmakers opposed to gambling, along with some Democrats who are worried about possible online gambling by minors. But it also features a former New York governor, George E. Pataki, a Republican who presided over a sweeping expansion of gambling in that state, including online bets on horse racing. Rival casinos and online poker companies are counterattacking through the Coalition for Consumer and Online Protection. The group has signed up two Republican former House members, Michael G. Oxley of Ohio, who a decade ago led efforts to outlaw online betting and accused companies selling such games of "gobbling up victims in the United States," and Mary Bono of California. Mr. Oxley, who retired from Congress in 2007 and now works as a lobbyist, said in an interview that he believed state-regulated online gambling was now the best hope of countering the rapid expansion of illegal online gambling.
Nice job by Oxley there, lobbying for an industry you tried to ban while you were in office. The American Political System -- a whorehouse with a thousand piano players.
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The Single Payer Movement Expands |
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Sunday, 30 March 2014 08:18 |
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Sokolow writes: "Even as the Affordable Care Act is in its nascent stages, some states are already looking toward 2017 when they can request waivers to opt out of the healthcare exchanges."
Kelly McNayr, center, shouts with the crowd during a health care rallying 2010 in Vermont, where several hundred single-payer health care system supporters gathered believing that the federal bill didn't go far enough. (photo: AP)
The Single Payer Movement Expands
By Julie Sokolow, Open Mike Blog
30 March 14
ven as the Affordable Care Act is in its nascent stages, some states are already looking toward 2017 when they can request waivers to opt out of the healthcare exchanges. And a small, but persistent, movement has popped up toward a single payer system as an alternative to participating in the exchanges.
That grassroots movement is taking place in Pennsylvania.
In March 2013, a report exploring the single payer system in Pennsylvania was created by Gerald Friedman, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He found that a single payer system would cost $128 billion in 2014 as opposed to the current system, which costs $144 billion. It would save 11 percent ($16 billion) of healthcare costs in 2014, mainly by lowering spending on administration and reducing drug costs.
But adopting a single payer system would dramatically change the business of healthcare. And the examples to follow are nearly non-existent.
While rumblings of moving to a single payer system have been heard in states such Hawaii, Oregon and New York, only one state – Vermont – has passed legislation to move toward actually creating a single payer system.
Vermont, which already has 93 percent of its population insured, passed Act 48, which allows the state to begin preparing a single payer system. It requires the state to set parameters for minimum benefits, create a finance plan and put out a contract for an administrator of the program, and allows the state’s current insurance regulatory body to create a benefit package.
Robin Lunge, Vermont’s director of healthcare reform, said that Vermont’s goal is to move the issue of healthcare completely away from the employer. Vermont’s single payer system, she said, would be similar to the one state employees are already on. It would be financed through an employer and individual tax as well as the premium tax credits and subsidies provided through the exchanges.
In Pennsylvania, the single payer system Friedman based his report on would be funded through a variety of means, including a 3 percent income tax on individuals, a 10 percent payroll tax for employers and various federal and state funds.
The state’s Medicare, Medicaid and Veteran’s Administration programs would continue to operate as usual under a plan similar to Vermont’s. In Vermont’s potential single payer system, the system would act as a supplement to government insurance and cover everyone who is uninsured or part of the current state health exchanges.
The big losers in a Pennsylvania’s potential single payer system would be insurance companies, Friedman said. They would lose a big chunk of their business and profit.
“Insurance companies are the victims there,” he said.
Drug companies may also stand to lose profits, Friedman said. One of the biggest savings in the Pennsylvania estimate is $8 billion from reduced medication spending. This would happen because there would be one large pool that would have greater negotiating power (much like the VA, which Friedman said spends 41 percent less on medications than other providers).
Some of the bigger hospitals that can now charge monopoly prices in a market would also have a more difficult time doing so under a single payer system.
Primary care providers would come out better in a single payer system, but specialists might fare worse as payments are leveled out among providers.
The biggest winners under a single payer system in Pennsylvania would be employers, said Friedman. Employer-provided insurance currently costs about 13 percent of payroll in Pennsylvania, he noted.
David Steil, president emeritus of HealthCare4AllPA, the nonprofit organization advocating for a single payer system in Pennsylvania, and a business owner, agrees with Friedman’s assessment of the benefits to employers. “Businesses shouldn’t be in healthcare,” he said.
But Steil doesn’t take quite as negative a view of the impact a single payer system would have on insurance companies as Friedman does. Steil, a former Republican house representative in Pennsylvania, said insurers would more likely have to change the way they do business.
There are many services that wouldn’t be covered under a single payer plan, like elective plastic surgeries or private rooms, home health visits and ambulance services. Insurers, Steil said, could move to providing supplemental coverage for these kinds of services.
“I think they will have to look at changing their business model, but they won’t go out of business,” he said.
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Barack Obama: The Least Transparent President in History |
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Saturday, 29 March 2014 14:37 |
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Goodman writes: "'My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.' So wrote President Barack Obama, back on Jan. 29, 2009, just days into his presidency."
President Obama being escorted by the Secret Service. (photo: AP)
Barack Obama: The Least Transparent President in History
By Amy Goodman, The Spokesman-Review
29 March 14
  y Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” So wrote President Barack Obama, back on Jan. 29, 2009, just days into his presidency. “Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.” Now, six years into the Obama administration, his promise of “a new era of open Government” seems just another grand promise, cynically broken.
As the news industry observed its annual “Sunshine Week” in mid-March, the Associated Press reported that “[m]ore often than ever, the administration censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act [FOIA].” The AP report continued, “The government’s efforts to be more open about its activities last year were their worst since President Barack Obama took office.”
This comes as no surprise to Ryan Shapiro, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who just filed a federal lawsuit against the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency, seeking public records pertaining to the U.S. role in the 1962 arrest of Nelson Mandela, which would land him in prison for 27 years. When his FOIA requests on Mandela were denied, he sued. “I’m pursuing these records,” he explained to me, “mostly because I’m interested in knowing why the U.S. intelligence community viewed Mandela as a threat to American security and what role the U.S. intelligence community played in thwarting Mandela’s struggle for racial justice and democracy in South Africa.”
Shapiro filed a FOIA request with the NSA, seeking details on the arrest of Mandela over 50 years ago. The NSA wrote in reply, “To the extent that you are seeking intelligence information on Nelson Mandela, we have determined that the fact of the existence or non-existence of the materials you request is a currently and properly classified matter.” Half a century later?
Shapiro also is seeking information on Mandela’s placement on the U.S. terror watch list until 2008, which was years after he had served as South Africa’s first democratically elected president, years after he had won not only the Nobel Peace Prize, but the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. I asked Shapiro why he was chasing down all these documents. “The answer,” he replied, “has to do with this blinkered understanding of national security, this myopic understanding that places crass military alliances and corporate profits over human rights and civil liberties.”
Shapiro has an interesting history and a personal stake in the government labeling activists “terrorists.” In 2002, Shapiro engaged in an act of civil disobedience, infiltrating a farm where ducks are raised for the production of foie gras, exposing what he calls “horrific conditions which are the absolute norm on factory farms.” He said he and other activists “openly rescued, or stole, animals from a factory farm, made a movie about it. I did it as an act of civil disobedience, but it’s a real crime … I did 40 hours of community service, and that was it.” Since that time, state after state has passed so-called Ag-Gag laws, which equate some animal-rights activism with terrorism and which can include incredibly harsh prison sentences.
He says his dissertation in progress, titled “Bodies at War: Animals, the Freedom of Science, and National Security in the United States,” looks “at the use of the rhetoric and apparatus of national security to marginalize animal protectionists from the late 19th century to the present.” Shapiro is seeking a wealth of public documents to answer the question. He has close to 700 FOIA requests before the FBI, seeking 350,000 documents, leading the Justice Department to call him its “most prolific” requester. The FBI has labeled part of his dissertation a threat to national security.
In 2008, when campaigning, Barack Obama was often touted as a constitutional-law professor. As such, we can assume he studied writings of one of that document’s authors, James Madison, the fourth president of the U.S., considered the “Father of the Bill of Rights.” Madison wrote, in 1822, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.” With Edward Snowden’s revelations of massive NSA spying and surveillance, and the administration’s abysmal record on transparency, President Obama has tragically moved well beyond farce.
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hen it comes to fishing, most of the ocean is lawless. Fish in the high seas — the half of the world’s oceans that fall under the control of no single nation, because they’re more than 200 miles from a coastline — are being plundered with aplomb by fishing fleets that observe 
