Where We Are

Not time for much else this Monday morning, so I thought I'd post a few markers to help us see where we are, looking back and ahead, briefly.

This weekend brought us news that by Friday of last week the total number of US military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan had matched the lives lost in the 9/11 attacks: 2,973. Not that we want to tie the two so closely, since Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or any terrorist threat to the U.S., but considering that it was repeatedly used as the rallying point it's not something we can dismiss.

I'm discouraged that despite many strong and serious reservations there's little to no sign of a fight coming from any Democrat over the sham "compromise" deal reached last week, wherein the White House still got what it wanted (a continued license to engage in torture) while the GOP got to play human rights advocates via a small group of Republican resistors headed by Senator John McCain.

"It only takes 30 seconds or so to see that the Senators have capitulated entirely, that the U.S. will hereafter violate the Geneva Conventions... and that there will be very little pretense about it," according to Marty Lederman, an international law professor at Georgetown University School of Law, who suggested that the White House had gotten the better of the rebels.

Please keep in mind that deals of this type are part of an ongoing effort to retroactively save the skins of Bush and other top administration officials by retroactively decriminalizing activities that could, currently, see them up for prosecution.

Meanwhile, we're closing in on the mid-term elections and for a variety of reasons even some Republicans are becoming wary of electronic voting machines. Maybe a select few of them are justifiably afraid. A gambler who's gained from loaded dice is going to be more prone to worry in the future about others discovering the trick and using it to their advantage. Machines without a paper trail - including a viewing window so a voter can see how his or her vote was recorded - should not be in use anywhere.