Speaking of the homeless and the presidency, “mentally ill homeless” Timothy Wade Pinkston was still in Florida last August — which is crazy in itself — when he issued threats against President Bush. Despite his bipolar disorder and a substance abuse problem, he was taken seriously.
Now he’s headed to federal prison for five years. From Breitbart (sh, don’t tell the AP):
Timothy Wade Pinkston threatened in August to go to Washington and shoot Bush. At the time, the 48-year-old was committed to a hospital psychiatric unit.
Court records say he repeated the threat to Secret Service agents, saying he didn’t like the president’s foreign policy or his handling of the war in Iraq.
Pinkston told a federal judge in Tampa on Wednesday that he is HIV-positive and bipolar and has a substance abuse problem. He said he’d been taking drugs and drinking when he made the threat and didn’t know what he was saying.
After a few drinks, we’ve been known to do things that were not knowing and willful. But we’re wise enough not to do so when the Secret Service is around.
On the upside, Pinkston will no longer be homeless.
Military Told Media and Family That It Was ‘Friendly Fire’ — But It Was Murder
By Greg Mitchell
Published: June 20, 2008 10:25 PM ET updated Friday
NEW YORK For five years now, E&P has been chronicling the disturbing number of “noncombat” deaths in Iraq, often suicides, which usually come to light only due to the diligence of local newspapers. As part of that effort, last August I briefly described yet another case, involving a 20-year-old Texas woman named Kamisha Block, who apparently was much loved in her Vidor hometown. It was said to be death by “friendly fire,” which officially is fairly rare in Iraq, so I kept an eye on it for days, in case of an update.
Many more nonhostile deaths arrived, and so I forgot about Kamisha. Today, a reader sent me a link to a report on Vidor, Texas, TV station, which in turn led me to a news article in yesterday’s Beaumont Enterprise.
Forget friendly fire. It turns out that Spc. Block was actually murdered, and the killer, another soldier, Staff Sgt. Brandon Norris, then turned the gun on himself.
And more: Her parents were misled at the start, and only after the mother noticed a suspicious head wound at the funeral (it turns out she was shot five times) and asked why, were they informed a few days later about the murder angle.
In fact, the Enterprise, too, was lied to by the Pentagon. Last August 21, the paper reported: “The U.S. Defense Department has confirmed two fatalities on Aug. 12 by friendly fire, but has not officially released names or the cause of death.”
That same article quoted her aunt, Kathy Byerly: “She was shot in the chest by friendly fire. They haven’t told us anything else - the rest is under investigation. We just want to know the truth about it.” Norris, too, was listed simply as a “noncombat” death.
The Enterprise in an editorial today charges: “There is no excuse for the U.S. Army’s shabby treatment of Kamisha Block’s parents and others who cared for her. Her commanders knew right away that she had been killed by a fellow soldier in Iraq, who had been harassing her. It was a standard murder-suicide. Incredibly, the Army first told her parents that it was an accidental death due to friendly fire.”
Reporters Say Networks Put Wars on Back Burner: here.
Canadian role in Kandahar may heat up as allies agree on U.S.-backed energy route through land-mine zones and Taliban hot spots
SHAWN MCCARTHY
June 19, 2008 at 2:30 AM EDT
OTTAWA — Afghanistan and three of its neighbouring countries have agreed to build a $7.6-billion (U.S.) pipeline that would deliver natural gas from Turkmenistan to energy-starved Pakistan and India – a project running right through the volatile Kandahar province – raising questions about what role Canadian Forces may play in defending the project.
To prepare for proposed construction in 2010, the Afghan government has reportedly given assurances it will clear the route of land mines, and make the path free of Taliban influence.
In a report to be released Thursday, energy economist John Foster says the pipeline is part of a wider struggle by the United States to counter the influence of Russia and Iran over energy trade in the region.
The so-called Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline has strong support from Washington because the U.S. government is eager to block a competing pipeline that would bring gas to Pakistan and India from Iran.
Remember Bush apologists going hysterical whenever someone in the peace movement said: “No blood for oil”? As, “of course” the war had nothing to do with oil, and everything with Bush’s deep love for “anti terrorism”, human rights, women’s rights, etc. etc.?
Well, purely technically speaking, this is not blood for oil. It is Canadian soldiers’ and Afghan civilians’ blood for the Afghan gas profits of Unocal corporation and other oil and gas capitalists.
Turkmenistan is a dictatorship … well never mind. In Pakistan, Bush’s crony Musharraf is still the dictator … never mind. In Afghanistan, foreign occupation, warlords, drug lords, and fundamentalist theocracy like during the Taliban days rule … never mind.
TORTURE AND PRESIDENT BUSH… Andrew Sullivan tries to explain the deliberately confusing detainee bill. Then, Anderson Cooper interviews the Canadian that was detained, tortured, then found innocent.
WASHINGTON ― Military officials tasked with training U.S. troops to evade enemy interrogations provided Pentagon lawyers a list of abusive tactics that could be used in prisons like Guantanamo Bay, a top Senate Democrat disclosed Tuesday.
Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said the harsh techniques were then pursued despite strong objections in November 2002 by the military’s uniformed lawyers.
“If we use those same techniques offensively against detainees, it says to the world that they have America’s stamp of approval,” said Levin, D-Mich., at the onset of a committee hearing.
“That puts our troops at greater risk of being abused if they’re captured. It also weakens our moral authority and harms our efforts to attract allies to our side in the fight against terrorism.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the administration’s legal analysis on detainees and interrogations following the Sept. 11 attacks will “go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation’s military and intelligence communities.”
Kwame Ture - known until the late 1970s as Stokely Carmichael - was arrested while pressing for the right of African-Americans to vote in the South. Elected chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, the FBI sought to silence and discredit him.
When I was an organiser in Greenwood, Mississippi, [SNCC organiser] Bob Moses informed me that I should report the beatings, the shootings, and the burnings to the FBI. But I didn’t want to waste my time. They never did anything with the reports. And we saw the FBI exactly for what it was. We saw its racism. We saw its defence of segregated policies. At first, we would present the facts to the FBI. But we learnt that it would endanger the local person who saw it. Whatever we told the FBI, its agents told the local police. But nothing the FBI did stopped us from organising. Later, when I had disputes with SNCC, the FBI manipulated them to wreak havoc on us. I can remember when it spread three rumours about me at the same time: I bought a $70,000 house; I ran away to Africa ; I was a CIA agent. It had informers in every city and every organisation. All the FBI had to do was send out one memorandum, and overnight a rumour was dropped everywhere, and it appeared to be the truth: “It is also suggested that we inform a certain percentage of reliable criminal and racial informants that ‘we heard from reliable sources that Carmichael is a CIA agent’. It is hoped that these informants would spread the rumour in various large Negro communities across the land.” You really can’t fight this. How can you go to every large city and say, “It’s not true. The FBI said it.” You can’t. Some people in SNCC actually believed all that about me. We were unified against local southern sheriffs and the Ku Klux Klan. But the FBI was able to split us on every conceivable issue with their channels to the press and their informants inside our organisation.
In the McCarthy era, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) blacklisted actors, and those deemed “subversive” quickly found themselves unemployable.
I was an actress and I had a decent career in New York. But after the HUAC hearings, I couldn’t get any real work. From 1947 till 1963, I was able to play only one part on night-time television. An agency sent me for a big part on the Philco Playhouse, in a script written by Paddy Chayefsky. I thought, “See, by God, I’ve sneaked through.” That spring, the same agency said they had a part for me in Marty. Chayefsky had written it with me in mind, and all they wanted was script approval. And then the process started: “Call us back in an hour.” They finally said they were very sorry. Someone else had been cast in the part. Then they recast the first Chayefsky programme: I was out. The terrible thing about the whole business is what it did to people. It made the victims of the blacklist suspicious and fearful. For example, I remember well the time that I got my first important job in a Broadway play in 1962. There was a lovely woman who understudied me. We were in the dressing-room we shared, and I suddenly felt, “What if she’s from the FBI?” I had nothing to conceal whatsoever, and yet I had this sense that she was put there. You found yourself worried because there were things that had to be protected: children had to be protected, your livelihood had to be protected. I went from being an open, free, healthy, outgoing person to suddenly having these walls around me.
The article that won the first International Labour Organization Journalistic Prize
Can overwork kill you by driving you to suicide? It can in the land of Karoshi. By the word “Karoshi”, the Japanese mean “death from overwork, a serious and profound issue in a country where more than 5,000 suicides per year are the result of depression caused by overwork.
Japan has the highest proportion of employees working more than 50 hours per week. However, after too many victims of Karoshi, Japanese workers are starting to claim their rights and families are starting to claim compensation.
The Japanese journalist Misako Hida investigated the issue of Karoshi from the perspective of international labour standards concerning hours and conditions of work. “When it comes to working hours in Japan, nothing in the way of international labour standards exists, and in recent years an increasing number of temporary workers have been forced to work as long as full-time employees do”, writes Hida.
Similar situations exist in other countries, like in France.
For this item, I linked to the LabourStart website. I have no problem with the professed aim of that site, bringing news on trade unionism worldwide; which LabourStart does mainly by linking to articles in mainly corporate media on trade unions. LabourStart, by the way, is not officially part of any trade union organization.
However, there is a problem with the founder of this site, Eric Lee. He is both a United States and Israeli national. That does not need to be a problem at all, since many people in both countries disagree with their governments’ policies. However, Mr Lee has a record of advocating on LabourStart wars waged by both governments. While trade unions should never support wars, which hurt working people most.
In this way, Mr Lee suppported the 1999 war against Yugoslavia. Later, as George W. Bush started the war against Iraq, Eric Lee advocated that the Left should support that war, from fear of becoming isolated by not jumping on the bandwagon of that presumably successful war.
Quite some people who in 2003 supported George W. Bush’s war have by now apologized or half-apologized for that. Eric Lee, as far as I know, is not among those individuals. From a comment by Lee on the 2008 United States Presidential elections (especially about Senator Edwards, the candidate favoured by Lee; who, contrary to Lee as far as I know, did apologize for his initial support of the Iraq war), it might seem, very indirectly, that he by now no longer supports the war. Then, why not write about that change, at least as extensively as the earlier pro war items? The Internet is big, so, if I missed this, my apologies.
By the way, if the pro Bush war propaganda in the media would have worked much more strongly than it did in practice, and people on the Left opposing the war would indeed have become “isolated”; let us suppose that opposition to the Iraq war would have been reduced to just one individual; then that still would not have changed the bloody facts about the war. That one individual left would have been right.
The book of the former press secretary accuses the White House of intentionally misleading the public in pursuit of an elusive goal: Peace in the Middle East. It even accuses Bush of misleading himself.
by Mark Silva
Scott McClellan, one of the Texans who came to Washington with President George W. Bush, spent a long time defending the administration but now has concluded this his longtime employer misled the nation into an unneeded war in Iraq.
“History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided — that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder,” Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, writes in his book, What Happened, which will be released on Monday. Subtitle: Washington’s Culture of Deception.
“No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact,'’ he writes in the preface of the book. “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.'’
This from a son of Austin who served Bush as governor of Texas, campaigned with him through two elections and served as press secretary into the second term.
Ex-Bush spokesman: White House fed war propaganda to a “complicit” media: here.
Scott McClellan, a former White House press spokesman, has criticised Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, for not questioning her colleagues or George Bush on foreign policy: here.
Whether it’s Heather Mills or Kerry Katona, the celebrities that ordinary people vilify seem disproportionately to be female. Why?
hate, v. 1. trans. To hold in very strong dislike; to detest; to bear malice to
Hate’s a strong word, but how many people in Britain who ever read a newspaper can honestly say they’ve never applied the word to a celebrity - celebrities in most cases that they’ve never met.
From Queen of the Jungle to Tabloid Folk Devil: Kerry Katona as ‘White Trash Mother’
Academic paper on celebrity
And if you’ve honestly racked your brains and come up with a list of the celebrities you “bear malice to”, how many of them are female?
From 
