Nine years after America invaded Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, American and NATO troops remain involved in heavy fighting. One year ago, President Barack Obama committed additional troops to the war while vowing to begin reducing levels in 2011. Though Obama revised “success” from creating a democratic Afghanistan to a stable one, grim news continues to emerge from Afghanistan. Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University and former U.S. Army Colonel, thinks that even President Obama’s pessimistic predictions for the country are too optimistic.
I would recommend that every one who reads my blog watch this video, and I would like to hear your comments on this. I really think that President Obama, in his heart, knows that this is the reality, and that he is in denial, afraid that if he alters his course it would destroy his presidency and set back whatever progress he has been able to make so far. I think that if he went to the American people and told them the truth and the hard facts they would stand behind him.
Please click on the link below and watch the video. In the second half of Bill’s program on Friday April 10th on PBS he interviews author Louise Erdrich and they talk about her new book – Shadow Tag. I finished reading it last night and recommend it to everyone.
What I cannot understand is why decent people really organize to combat the filth and nonsense spewed by the teabaggers. They have become the darlings of the media – and not only the right wing media. Why isn’t there more outrage? It’s a scenario in miniature of what happened in Germany during the last days of the Weimar Republic.
Eric E. Schmidt is the CEO of Google. He has been in the news lately because of his resistance to censorship by the Chinese Government. He recently made these remarks at the Davos Conference, and they have a message that everyone should be interested in. Click the link below and read what he has to say.
I’ve been remiss - I really haven’t given too much attention to my blog, although I apparently have quite a few readers. The problem is that the ones who do read it and post comments send in mostly spam – a lot of it comes from Eastern Europe. Naturally I delete this stuff so it won’t be posted, so if the spammers are reading this they may was well cease and desist, as their junk will not be posted.What I will try to do from now on is to post something on the blog as often as I can something that I think will interest my readers and hopefully I will get some interesting and intelligent comments posted that my readers would be interesting in seeing. I will also now put a signature on all of my outgoing e-mails directing the recipients to my blog and hopefully will increase the readership. It would be nice if those who do read the blog as a result of this will forward the address of my blog to their friends so I can increase my readership.
So here goes:
In this week’s current edition of The Nation Magazine ( www.thenation.com) there is an interesting article about ACORN, the group involved in communiy organizing. As you probably have read, a couple of right wing advocates went around to their offices trying to entrap some of their people by creating outrageous situations and secretly filming them and later posting the films on youtube. Congress reacted, and cut off some of the federal funding they were using to register voter, working for the 2010 Census \.
Contrast this with the government’s handling of Blackwater, the private mercenary force used in Iraq and Afgahnistan to perform work that should be done by the military. A recent federal audit suggest that Blackwater may owe the government $55 million dollars for failing to meet the terms of just one of their federal contracts. Five of their employees face murder charges for their role in the murder of several Iraqi citizens. Yet Blackwater’s $217 million dollar contract was just extended by the Obama administration. Also, consider the fact that Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s company, which received $80 million in contract bonuses to provide electric wiring in Iraq. Sixteen soldiers and 2 civilians have been electrocuted because of this faulty wiring. Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant was just fined 2.3 billion dollars in a fraud settlement, and yet had more than 73 million dollars in federal contracts in 2007 alone.
The only comments that I have been getting lately are spam, which, of course, are deleted immediately and not posted. It would be nice if those of you who read my blog and have some relevant things to say would post something.
Working on another project – I have about a hundred color slides of my dad’s paintings. What the titles of them, when they were painted and where they presently are were never catalouged. I am currently scanning them and putting them in a web album. You can view the ones I have done so far by going to this link: http://picasaweb.google.com/danvolper/PaintingsByIVVolper
