American "close air support" killed 95 children in Afghanistan last week, and when Karzai's demand that bombing cease was brushed off as usual by Obama's National Security Advisor ("We can't fight with one hand tied behind our back"), the Afghan House of Representatives (Wolesi Jirga) issued an ultimatum: Within one week all American forces in Afghanistan will be subject to Afghan law.

This is one jump away from throwing us out of the country, or at least trying, and not even Obama and David Axelrod can sell an occupation that's even at war with its own puppet government!

So noise had to be made, and what's the cheapest dog-and-pony show that will save our puppet Karzai and shut up the Wolesi Jirga?

For anybody who still keeps score...

Pro Publica has posted a survey of various estimates of all the many bail-outs aimed at the financial services industry, and if you take the average of the three figures which they consider...$3.2 trillion, $4.17 trillion, and $4.43 trillion... you arrive at a composite estimate of $3.93 trillion.

Even if a very generous $1 trillion is assigned to Bush/Paulson, that still leaves more than $2.9 trillion on Obama's tab, and in order to achieve that titanic give-away after only 110 days in the Oval Office, Mr. Obama has had to deliver more than $1 billion per hour, and more than $24 billion per day, which would only add up to $2.64 trillion for his 110 days in the White House.

More than $1 billion per hour, 24/7, for 110 days.

So I guess you could say that Barack Obama is a very good friend of the banks.

Obama is about to nominate Mignon Clyburn to the FCC, and for those of you who want the internet to turn into a low-rent version of cable TV, dominated by Rupert Murdoch and a few other right-wing billionaires, this is very good news.

For the rest of us, it sucks.

Bruce A. Dixon at Black Agenda Report, a progressive "journal of African American political thought and action," has graded the first 100 days of Barack Obama's Presidency on 18 general issues...

1. Health Care Reform (9 points)
   
2. Creating New Jobs and Preserving Old Ones (5 points)
   
3. Fully Funding and Preserving Public Education (6 points)
   
4. War & Peace (9 points)
   
5. Transportation (5 points)
   
6. Caribbean and Latin America (4 points)
   
7. Obama's Africa Policy; Our Brotherman and the Motherland (5 points)
   
8. Wall Street Bailout (6 points)
   
9. Debt and Foreclosure Crises (6 points)
   
10. Investigating Bush-era Crimes (5 points)
    
11. Criminalizing Immigration, Militarizing the Border (5 points)
    
12. Broadband For Everyone and a Just and Fair Media (5 points)
    
13. Environment (5 points)
    
14. Agricultural Policy, and Policy Toward Black Farmers (5 points)
    
15. Mass imprisonment (5 points)
    
16. Employee Free Choice Act (5 points)
    
17. Urban Policy (5 points)
    
18. Privatization of Government Agencies and Services (5 points)

Out of 100 possible points, 55 was considered passing.

Obama scored 22.5

This is so far down in the failing scores that the most appropriate letter-grade is probably...

F-

I, for one, am not surprised Souter retired.  "Above the Law" has been reporting for weeks that Souter had not hired any new clerks, was late in (not) doing so, and they took this as a sign of his coming retirement.  (I did, too.)

From their most recent post more on the issue:

"Souter's retirement is not entirely surprising to regular Above the Law readers. Earlier this month, we (and Underneath Their Robes) told you that Souter hadn't hired any clerks for the October 2009 term."

 For the last 8 years, even the best newspapers in the United States have mostly "reported" a rehash of whatever official sources announced or leaked to them, but at least the New York Times still apparently understood what it was reporting.

And now the Times has published this bizarro fable from Helmand Province in Afghanistan...

In a five-day battle, the British killed 120 Taliban fighters and wounded 150. Only one British soldier was wounded.

But if 270 "Taliban fighters" had actually shot at British troops, you have to wonder how 269 of them missed everything they shot at, because...

"Taliban fighters" somehow conquered Afghanistan in 1996, and drove out exactly the same warlords whom the United States re-installed in 2001...

And if 270 "Taliban fighters" could only hit one British soldier, before British soldiers killed all 270 of those same "Taliban fighters"...

Then you would have to wonder how "Taliban fighters" ever conquered anything, much less a country like Afghanistan, which is notoriously hard to conquer.

So unless you believe that the "Taliban fighters" were shooting rubber bullets out of toy guns...

The only reasonable explanation is that there were no "Taliban fighters" shooting at anybody, and the British have committed yet another massacre in Afghanistan, and killed 270 civilians.

The Times supplies its story with a screaming headline...

Banned Techniques Yielded `High Value Information,' Memo Says

Torture works! Who knew?

The source of this garbage is Admiral Dennis Blair, who is deeply committed to giving everybody who tortured detainees a free pass.

"I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past," he wrote, "but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given."

So it isn't exactly big news that this guy would claim his top-secret records prove that torture really works, and we're all so much safer because a few raggedy Arabs were (half) drowned, frozen, humiliated, beaten, kicked, suffocated, sleep-deprived, isolated, chained up like pretzels for days at a time and forced to poop and pee all over themselves, while their families were arrested, threatened, tortured, deported, and dispossessed.

 

A week ago, I told you about Energize Clinton County, a grassroots organization run by two recent college graduates (Mark Rembert and Taylor Stuckert) who want to turn their economically devastated community of Clinton County into a Green Enterprise Zone (an idea created by Obama green jobs czar Van Jones).

Mark and Taylor's non-profit organization is currently one of ten candidates for five $10,000 Energize Your Community grants administered by Mountain Dew.  They have one week left to win this grant, which is awarded based on which of the ten community organizations get the most online votes.  I'll let Taylor and Mark take it from here, from an e-mail they sent me this evening:

What happens to the Democrats if there's another major terrorist attack within the United States, during the administration of Barack Obama?

Cheney has already made Obama the fall guy for another 9/11, and Republicans will probably continue to reinforce the meme that Democrats have weakened national security by ending "enhanced interrogations," withdrawing "prematurely" from Iraq, and so on.

Tons of cocaine pour across our borders non-stop, and there's absolutely no way to prevent biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons from following the same channels.

Democrats could make the argument that "enhanced interrogations" wouldn't interrupt the supply of cocaine, or prevent weapons of mass destruction from crossing the Mexican or Canadian borders, and every relatively intelligent person in the United States already knows this...

All 30% of us.

Meanwhile, the same 70% percent who thought Saddam had sponsored 9/11, just because Bush kept saying "Saddam....9/11....Saddam....9/11..." in disconnected sentences...

That 70% would never vote for another Democrat.

So how can Democrats avoid getting swept into the dust-bin of history by another major terrorist attack within the United States?

There's obviously a downside to making it crystal clear that our borders are too porous to defend, because the bad guys are also listening, and even if the relatively intelligent 30% of them already comprehend the porosity of our borders in detail, Republicans could still claim that anyone who discussed border-security had given terrorists a blue-print for terror.

(This message will self-destruct in 15 seconds.)

Siobhan Reynolds is the president of a New Mexico based 501(c)(3) named the Pain Relief Network (PRN). She became an advocate for pain patients after her husband died of a stroke caused by elevated blood pressure from uncontrolled severe pain in 2006.

Although the simple-minded mainstream media have christened some recent legislation on the far frontier of our colonial empire as "the Afghanistan rape law," it's worth noting that the same law that legalizes marital rape (specifically among the Shia) also forbids women to leave the house without permission from a male relative.

Ask Uncle Abdul before you walk out the door!

Meanwhile in the United States, popular revulsion against legalization of marital rape may undermine support for President Obama's troop surge in Afghanistan, since it isn't exactly easy to sell the idea of sacrificing American lives and money to make the world safe for rape.

This problem has produced an expectable wave of crazy excuses from Obama's koolaid-huffing partisans in the blogosphere, and one of the most bizarre is the egregious Jon Taplin's column on Talking Points Memo, "Holier Than Thou."

"We should remember that until 1993 marital rape was legal in North Carolina."

So let's not act "holier than thou" by protesting the legalization of marital rape in Afghanistan, because only 15 years ago, in the former Confederate state of North Carolina... and so on.

But if it were worth asking Mr. Taplin a question (and it isn't), someone might ask...

When is the last time US law forbade women to leave the house without permission from a male relative? Is it supposed to be insignificant that the so-called "rape law" also turns every home into a prison for women?

House-arrest for life!

What a beautiful empire!

So Mr. Obama wants more war in Afghanistan, and 30,000 more American soldiers to fight it, after seven long years of fighting to create a narco-state where 50% of the gross domestic product is produced by heroin, and millions of women will be prisoners in their own homes forever.

It's been a few months since I brought you the story of Energize Clinton County, a grassroots organization in Wilmington, Ohio, dedicated to rebuilding the economically devastated town by turning it into a federally-sponsored Green Enterprise Zone.  The group's founders, recent college graduates Mark Rembert and Taylor Stuckert, deferred their Peace Corps service indefinitely to focus on giving back to the hometown.

Here's Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown talking about how impressed he is with Mark and Taylor:

Last week I held a conference call in my office with two very impressive young men who are a testament to what the Serve America Act is all about. Their names are Mark Rembert and Taylor Stuckert. ... In the midst of an economic disaster in their community, these two young men, Mark and Taylor, decided to serve. They are examples of what inspired this bill and what service to our country is all about.

Now, there's something new you can do to help Energize Clinton County in a big way.