Later On

Dan Froomkin at Huffington Post:

Concerned that President Obama’s deficit-reduction commission is going to look in the wrong places for budget cuts, Barney Frank has appointed his own bipartisan commission.

This one will specifically look at ways to reduce the bloated military budget.

Defense cuts seems to be politically off-limits these days, but the group convened by the outspoken liberal congressman from Massachusetts shares a belief that America is "overextended and overcommitted" and that there should be a "substantial reduction in the reach of American military commitments," Frank told HuffPost.

He expects the group to propose reducing the number of overseas bases, especially in the rich countries of Western Europe and Japan. "There’s a big debate right now about where 3,000 Marines in Okinawa should go. My suggestion is Nebraska," he said.

And he expects it will propose cutting weapons systems that don’t meet any plausible need.. "No matter how good a weapon is technically, we shouldn’t buy it unless it has an enemy," he said.

Frank despairs that the deficit-reduction debate plays out in Washington as if there are only two choices: raise taxes or cut entitlements, such as Social Security and Medicare.

Even President Obama’s proposed freeze on discretionary spending explicitly rules out any defense cuts, which Frank describes as "my biggest difference" with the president since he came into office.

The group has met twice already, and expects to complete its recommendations shortly. Once that happens, Frank said, "what we are going to do is tell the deficit reduction commission that they have to include substantial reductions in military spending if they want our support."

Frank said he imagines many politicians avoid the topic for fear of being assailed as weak on terror. But, he said, "I don’t think any terrorist has ever been shot by a nuclear submarine."

Continue reading. I say, "Good for Barney Frank, and I hope he cuts the Defense budget in half."

The hazards are real and too many kids choke to death. Katie Drummond reports for AP:

Millions of young children continue to be injured from choking-related accidents, and death rates are “surprisingly high,” according to a new report.

“The aspiration and ingestion of foreign bodies presents a potential lethal threat to infants and children,” states the report, published this week in the Archives of Otolaryngology — Head & Neck Surgery.

Researchers at the Children’s National Medical Center and the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington reviewed information from a national database of children’s hospitalizations in 2003.

In a single year, 2.7 million pediatric patients, with an average age of 3.5, were admitted with airway obstructions because of a foreign body. Forty-two percent of the choking culprits were food items, with the rest classified as “inorganic” products, mostly toys.

In 2003, about 42 percent of children taken to hospitals with airway obstructions were choking on food. The rest were choking on toys and other inorganic objects.

The hospital visits that ensued were often lengthy and expensive. Kids were admitted for an average of 6.4 days, costing an average of $34,652.

Around 2,000 children, or 3.4 percent of all those admitted, died from the obstruction. To Dr. Rahul Shah, a pediatric otolaryngologist at the Children’s National Medical Center, and the study’s co-author, that’s unacceptable.

“The death rate, to me, is unbelievable,” he told AOL News. “It just shows that choking is absolutely not a benign health issue, but an extremely serious one.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Follow the family.

Our insane drug laws prohibit the growing of industrial hemp, although industrial hemp itself is quite legal: the US imports large amounts from other countries that are not quite so stupid as the US. Lately, I’ve been drinking Tempt brand hemp milk—the plain kind is quite tasty—and I noticed the link to VoteHemp.com, which turns out to be a web site devoted to promoting industrial hemp.

You may recall that South Dakota farmers petitioned the DEA for permission to grow industrial hemp (which has no psychoactive properties). The DEA, after an interminable period of inaction, refused. The DEA is, of course, continually seeking to grow its budget and mission, so the decision really should have been made outside that department.

In any event, check out the website and, if you’re inclined, try Tempt hemp milk. Quite tasty.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

When the U.S. Supreme Court denied Charles Dean Hood’s appeal last week, it was done in a one-sentence, unsigned order. Hood is a Texas death-row inmate who was convicted of murdering two people in 1990. Long after the conclusion of the trial, it became clear that his trial judge and prosecutor had been secretly involved in a years-long extramarital affair. Because they were both married, they denied the affair—even to Hood’s death-penalty lawyers. After the clandestine relationship finally came to light, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Hood’s challenge in two curt sentences last September, finding that his lawyers had waited too long to raise the issue on appeal. How Hood was to have raised the conflict of interest when the existence of the affair was not conclusively established until 2008, when the judge and prosecutor were forced to admit it under oath, is not explained.

Hood has already been granted a new sentencing hearing because the Texas appeals court has acknowledged that the jury instructions were improper, but prosecutors say they will again seek the death penalty. In any event, resentencing Hood doesn’t resolve the fundamental problem with the case. The issue here is whether any reasonable person would believe that a criminal trial at which one’s prosecutor and judge are secretly in love could ever be fair. And that’s the issue the courts keep refusing to address.

Last year, the Supreme Court handed down a blockbuster opinion in Caperton v. Massey, a case testing whether a justice on West Virginia’s highest court should have recused himself from hearing an appeal in which one of the parties—Don Blankenship of A.T. Massey Coal Co.—had just donated $3 million to his judicial election campaign. Writing for a sharply divided 5–4 court, Justice Anthony Kennedy called the appearance of a conflict of interest in this case so "extreme" that the judge’s failure to recuse himself undermined the constitutional right to due process. The Hood appeal to the Supreme Court essentially asked whether a judge might be as compromised by great sex as by big money. In his filings, Hood argued that the trial judge’s "long-term, intimate sexual relationship and later close friendship with [the prosecutor] attuned her to his professional and personal interests and made those interests her own." Hood said that unlike the Caperton case, in which Blankenship’s financial support of the judge was a matter of public knowledge, the Texas judge was more compromised because she kept her relationship a secret.

If the facts of the Caperton case were sufficiently shocking to become a John Grisham novel, the facts of Hood’s trial would make a sizzling movie for Lifetime. You don’t even have to take a position on Hood’s guilt, innocence, or the efficacy of the death penalty to recognize that when a judge and prosecutor are secret paramours, the integrity of the whole judicial system suffers. Texas law requires a judge’s recusal whenever "his impartiality might reasonably be questioned" or if "he has a personal bias or prejudice concerning the subject matter or a party." The test here isn’t whether the judge thinks she’s biased (although Hood’s judge later admitted she should have recused herself). It’s a constitutional "ick" test: How bad does the conflict of interest look?

The facts of Hood’s case look very bad. That’s why his appeal to the Supreme Court was supported by 30 top legal ethicists and an array of high-profile judges and prosecutors, including former FBI Director William Sessions and former Texas Governor and Attorney General Mark White, who supports capital punishment.

In his compelling new book, The Autobiography of an Execution, Texas death-penalty lawyer David Dow condemns a system of capital punishment built on evading responsibility at every stage of litigation: Jurors duck behind other jurors. Judges take refuge behind jury verdicts. The appeals courts wordlessly affirm the trial judge. Then the Supreme Court hangs out a sign that says GONE FISHIN’. Since everyone is fairly certain the accused probably killed someone, the fact that along the line an injustice may have occurred just doesn’t matter. But if you believe that a one-sentence disposition of his case is more justice than a Charles Hood deserves, you’re still asking the wrong question. Hood may be sentenced to die in a justice system where outrageous judicial bias merits only a sentence. The rest of us have to go on living in it.

I tend to trust James Fallows, and I note this recommendation:

I mentioned several weeks ago that when I met Karl Marlantes in graduate school in the early 1970s, he was talking about his recent service as a Marine in Vietnam and his intention to write about it some day. Through most of the intervening years, he has been working on his novel, Matterhorn.

It’s a long book, which I have read obsessively this past week. It is truly a magnificent work.

As almost every review has mentioned, the book’s first few pages are somewhat labored, introducing a cast of characters (who after first mention are last-name-only through the rest of the book) and doing organizational setup. They do not suggest the narrative velocity and emotional and moral richness of what comes after that. I predict that if you get twenty pages in — to roughly the episode with the unfortunate Marine named Fisher and the leech — you will want to keep on until the ending, 500-plus pages later.

This is certainly one of the most powerful and moving novels ever written about Vietnam, and its description of combat rivals anything I have read on the topic — by Erich Maria Remarque, Norman Mailer, James Jones, James Webb, John Keegan, Paul Fussell, anyone. I’ve mentioned before that my personal test for the quality of fiction is whether I find myself remembering a book — characters, scenes, choices — months or years after I’ve put the book down. I expect to remember this one.

Matterhorn is in a strict sense apolitical but can be read as a complete indictment of the Vietnam War in concept and execution (the action concerns the taking, abandonment, and devastatingly bloody re-taking of a hill that doesn’t matter to either side) — and also as the most moving description of heroism and sacrifice by men at arms. It richly deserves the acclaim it is receiving.

Interesting:

What Are Intellectuals Good For?
by George Scialabba

A review by Philip Christman

“I find conscientious qualification much sexier than resonant exaggeration,” writes George Scialabba, and he’s not kidding. This book, culled from nearly thirty years’ worth of reviews for magazines like the Boston Review and Agni, is proof. For a writer as intelligent as Scialabba, forced by inclination or happenstance to chart his intellectual evolution in 400-3000-word chunks, polemical distortion must present an appalling temptation, but he has mastered it. Once in a while his scrupulous care with others’ arguments is even a little exhausting: reading his magisterial takedown of William F. Buckley, for example, I felt a simultaneous admiration and dismay, as if I were watching the world’s greatest epidemiologist patiently explain disease-causation to a mountebank.

Scialabba writes as if he’s trying by sheer example value to will a smarter, more honest, more aesthetically and morally sensitive Left into being. Such a Left would replace the one whose twentieth-century failures — of omission and commission — bedevil this book, and which leads him to ask the question: What are intellectuals good for? One thing they’re not good for, argues Scialabba, is constructing secular substitutes for religion. Whether they’re Marx’s, Kant’s, or someone else’s, accounts of justice, human nature, or rights that try to specify once and for all the nature of human life are doomed to failure. This theme emerges again and again. His considerations of various political thinkers are judicious, quotable, and clear, conforming to his own description of the book reviewer’s task — he “limns the relevant controversies,” “hazards an original perception or two,” and “causes fifteen to forty five minutes’ reading time to pass almost unnoticed.”

One could quibble with one or two of his critical judgments. (Is Alexander Cockburn really that good a prose stylist?). One could question the short shrift that he gives to some thinkers, and in particular to multiculturalists. (He laments especially their jargon. Point taken, but, as a Walt Whitman enthusiast, Scialabba should know that you simply can’t tell the story of the United States honestly without reference to the works and days of its varied constituents.) My more serious objection would be that, throughout the book, Scialabba, a non-tenured thinker in the Dwight MacDonald mode, nevertheless indulges in a number of annoying seminar-room habits. He grants entirely too much explanatory power to conjure-words like “modernity” and “modernization” (this latter term, essentially meaningless, has caused especial problems for historians). He is a victim of that process of socialization that seems to make all tenured people fans of Nietzsche, despite his cruelty, and of Freud, despite his analytical near-uselessness. (Freudians positively exult in the Great Man’s unfalsifiability, while insisting that we receive Freudian critiques of shopping malls or amusement parks with the same guess-that’s-settled shrug we give the New Scientist.) “The most compelling and influential account of morality yet produced is Nietzsche’s,” he writes, astonishingly, of the man who considered ethical obligation an invention of scheming Jews.

Read the rest of this entry »

Check out these photos. Also, the Ant Nebula is quite cool (and named because of shape, not size).

Lee Fang at ThinkProgress:

On Thursday, President Obama announced his commitment to pass sweeping legislation to reform Wall Street and to create a new regulatory structure meant to avert another economic crisis. However, the financial industry is fighting back, hoping to obstruct legislation, water down the bill, and possibly kill effective reform.

The legislative battle is multifaceted. Frank Luntz, a consultant who is paid by financial services firms, wrote a messaging memo now used by opponents of reform to confuse the public and smear the legislation. As Talking Points Memo revealed earlier this week, a K Street PR firm known as the DCI Group — with ties to Wall Street — is working with a front group to run ads against reform. And recently, Republicans have met with top bankers and representatives from the banking industry to trade campaign dollars for a promise to fight reform.

However, as with the health reform debate, there is a large, more subterranean effort from industry to kill reform. As the Politico Playbook reported yesterday morning, “financial-services giants are going grassroots” to lobby against reform. ThinkProgress has learned that the banks and financial conglomerates are using the same stealth lobbying operation the health insurance industry employed last year to mobilize opposition. Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Master Card, and other industry players are working through “Democracy Data & Communications” (DDC) — a firm that specializes in helping corporations activate their employees and customers into grassroots advocates — to join the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s effort to kill reform. The domain list of the DDC server, obtained by ThinkProgress, contains various Wall Street websites, including one seemingly named after JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, which all transfer visitors to the Chamber’s anti-reform campaign:

www.bankofamericavotes.com
www.dimonvotes.com
www.aftermarketvotes.org
www.mastercardvotes.com

USAA, the financial services corporation, also employs DDC for its grassroots lobbying and mass e-mailed its customers Friday morning to call lawmakers and oppose reform (view a copy here). Last year, DDC helped JP Morgan Chase coordinate a stealth campaign to kill efforts to tax banker bonuses.

The banks are conducting a two-faced campaign to kill reform. In public, the banks pledge to fully support reform. However, behind closed doors, the banks — many of which were bailed out with TARP money and have not paid back taxpayers — are funding the Chamber’s attack ads and are connecting their network to the Chamber’s grassroots lobbying campaign.

The Chamber’s agenda on Wall Street reform is clear. On Wednesday, the Chamber’s political director Bill Miller met with Wall Street executives, Karl Rove, and other Republican operatives. The next day, Miller fired off an e-mail directing Chamber members to fight reform, declaring that the Chamber “fundamentally” disagrees with President Obama’s approach and that the legislation cannot be improved. Miller characterized reform as a “federal takeover of our financial industry” that “won’t do the one thing America needs most: create jobs.” Of course, the Chamber was one of the main lobbying fronts used by Wall Street to deregulate the financial markets under President Bush — and then demanded bailouts as the market crashed.

Indeed, despite having helped to cause the financial crisis, the Chamber has been running at least $3 million dollars worth of ads against reform, and is spending even more paying high-priced consulting firms to lobby against reform on Capitol Hill.

We’ve seen this act before. Health insurance companies told the President, the media, and the public that they would fully support efforts to reform the healthcare system. However, starting in 2009, health insurance companies laundered up to $20 million dollars through the Chamber to run anti-health reform ads, used firms like DDC to scare customers and send their employees to anti-health reform town halls and rallies, and worked closely with front groups to viciously smear reform legislation.

Bad news, reported by Kathleen Doheny in WebMD:

A potentially deadly airborne fungus, widely dubbed the killer fungus, has infected more than 50 people in the U.S., according to the CDC, and is expected to spread from the Pacific Northwest where it first surfaced.

Even so, public health officials say, there is cause only for concern and awareness, but not for alarm.

The killer fungus, which first surfaced in Canada in 1999, appeared in the U.S. in Washington in early 2006. Since then, reports of cases have occurred in Oregon and Northern California.

"We wouldn’t recommend that people change their habits in any way," Julie Harris, PhD, MPH, a staff epidemiologist with the CDC, tells WebMD. "We wouldn’t recommend people stay indoors or don’t go hiking or don’t go outdoors."

The fungus species triggering the infection is Cryptococcus gattii, which can cause pneumonia or meningitis. But the infection ”simply is not common enough for people to warrant changing behavior," Harris says. "It’s still very rare. People should be concerned but not alarmed."

At a news briefing Friday, Katrina Hedberg, MD, MPH, interim state epidemiologist for the Oregon Department of Health Services Public Health Division, told reporters that it’s also rare that people exposed to the fungus end up getting sick.

While the CDC wouldn’t specify the number of deaths, citing incomplete data, Hedberg says that ”of the 50-plus cases, around 10 of them have died."

Twelve of those 50 cases, including three deaths, have been in the state of Washington, according to Nicola Marsden-Haug, MPH, an epidemiologist with the Washington State Department of Health, Shoreline.

Marcia Goldoft, MD, a medical epidemiologist with the department, urges people to keep the threat in perspective. "The benefits of outdoor activity and exercise far outweigh the risks of a rare disease such as C. gattii."

Tracking the Fungus
Researchers in the U.S. have been studying the fungus, traditionally located in tropical locations, for several years, says Joseph Heitman, MD, PhD, chair of the department of molecular genetics and microbiology at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

The fungus, he tells WebMD, ”originates in soil and is associated with certain tree species, and becomes airborne."

While the fungus was typically seen in tropical areas of South America and other tropical and subtropical regions, it surfaced in Vancouver Island, Canada, in 1999, says Heitman, the senior author on a report on the fungus published online this week in the journal PLoS Pathogens.

"It is a microbial pathogen that can cause significant illness and even death, but it is very uncommon," he says…

Continue reading.

Interesting article by John Parker in Intelligent Life:

In the Indian state of Orissa, the black-headed oriole is the messenger of spring. It appears in the villages in January to greet the season’s start and flies away to the forest in March, signalling its end. Richard Mahapatra’s mother used the oriole’s fleeting appearance to teach her son about the natural rhythms of the world. “People like my mother remember six distinct seasons,” says Mahapatra, an environmental writer who now lives in New Delhi. After spring (basanta) and summer (grishma) came the rainy season (barsha). Between autumn (sarata) and winter (sisira) came a dewy period called hemanta. Each season lasted two months and the appearance of each was marked by religious festivals. “She had precise dates for their arrival and taught me how to look for signs of each.”

Damselflies gathered thickly a week before the rains began. Markers of the monsoon, they did not cluster at other times. The open-billed stork alighted on the tamarind tree on Akshaya Trutiya, a festival which usually fell in April or May and traditionally marked the start of the agricultural year. Farmers said that if you forgot the day, the bird would remind you, so predictable was its arrival. In the Mahapatra family’s garden, the nesting of bats in the peepal tree marked the onset of winter; when the tree flowered, it was midsummer.

Lately the heralds of the seasons have become unreliable. Damselflies swarm not only in the rainy season but in winter, the driest time of year. The stork no longer appears just on Akshaya Trutiya, but at other times, too. Villagers hear the song of the oriole in summer and the rainy season, not just spring. And this, Mahapatra says, is because spring is no longer a distinct season. Instead of six periods of equal length, Orissa now has two, a brief rainy season and a burning eight-month summer. Winter is a mild transition between the two, and spring, autumn and hemanta have been relegated to little-noticed interludes of a mere week or so.

“When I return home”, says Mahapatra, “my mother mourns the death of the seasons. Her memories of Orissa’s climate are alien to the generation I belong to. For me, my childhood Orissa is dying. The state now has a new and strange climate that nobody can understand or predict.”

MAHAPATRA’S experience is far from unusual. Round the world, people think the seasons are shrinking and shifting. Spring is starting earlier in most of northern Europe: in Britain the horse chestnut, ash and beech trees burst into leaf a week earlier in 2009 than in 2001. In Nepal everything is later.

Villagers say that margha(January/February) is becoming falgun (February/March) and falgun is becoming chaitra (March/April). Transitional seasons are dwindling to insignificance, notably in Orissa but also in Malawi, where the four rainy seasons are running into one another. Unseasonable storms are more frequent in Vietnam, meaning weather patterns seem to be changing the character of each season, as well as the annual cycle.

Worried about the impact of global warming, the British charity Oxfam asked thousands of farmers in a score of countries to recount their experience of climate change in the past two years. Many of the villagers talked not about global warming—a generalised increase in temperature—but disruptions to the natural cycle. Seasonal shifts, they said, were more disturbing than global warming.

“Originally, there were very distinct seasons and we were very sure when things would happen,” Julius Nkatachi, a 70-year-old farmer in Balaka, southern Malawi, told Oxfam. “Now the seasons are not distinct, especially the hot and cold seasons.” “I have noticed that the rains no longer have a particular pattern,” added 86-year-old Wilson Chiphale, also from Balaka. “Sometimes they come early when people have not prepared. Sometimes they end too soon and the maize wilts.”

Thousands of miles away, in north-eastern Nicaragua, …

Continue reading.

I watch this DVD last night and found it of great interest: a history of martial arts in entertainment. I had not realized, for example, what a force Tsui Hark was in Hong Kong cinema, and how he brought along many other filmmakers. (Nor, on a lesser note, did I realize how to pronounce "Tsui"—sounds like "choy".) Well worth renting, especially now that martial arts choreography appears in all sorts of movies—in the Dollhouse series, for example.

Late start—and I note that a strong wind seems to be blowing in from the right in the photo (see the brush). I guess after giving it a shake I let it dry in an awkward position. But the Duke 3 Best worked like a charm, generating a great lather from the Figaro almond-scented soft soap. I do like Figaro a lot. Then the Futur did a fine job: three smooth passes to a very nice shave. A splash of New York and I’m (at last) good to go.

Check this out.

Steve Benen:

A Reuters report yesterday pointed to an insurance company practice that’s so awful, it’s almost hard to believe. Reporter Murray Waas explained that WellPoint, an insurance powerhouse, apparently developed a policy of targeting customers with breast cancer, and then launching fraud investigations against them so their coverage could be dropped.

The practice is just breathtaking. According to government regulators and investigators, the affected customers had paid all their premiums and had no problems with their insurer, but WellPoint decided their breast cancer treatment would be expensive. It was easier to investigate them, rely on "erroneous or flimsy information," and drop the customers before the medical bills started piling up.

It’s "rescission" at its most offensive.

Obama administration officials contacted WellPoint about this today, and White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer posted this item:

Just yesterday, we read with great alarm a news report that WellPoint, one of the country’s largest health insurers, is routinely dropping coverage for women that are diagnosed with breast cancer.

These are the kinds of scenarios that motivated the President to work so long and so hard to pass health reform. And because of the health reform legislation passed last month, the worst excesses and abuses of the insurance industry — including what WellPoint is said to have done — will soon be reined in by new tough consumer protections.

Yesterday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote a letter to WellPoint’s CEO urging her company to immediately end this harmful practice.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was outraged, too.

"WellPoint’s practice of dropping anyone’s coverage when they get sick – whether a woman with breast cancer or any other patient – is exactly the kind of insurance company abuse our new health care law prohibits.

"Soon every American can be secure knowing that their insurance companies cannot cancel their coverage because of an illness.

"And when Republican leaders call for repeal of the health reform law, they are endorsing a return to these abusive policies that have no place in our medical system."

I still occasionally find it hard to believe health care reform was deemed unnecessary by so many.

As you can see, businesses care for nothing more than increasing profits, and if they must do that via morally outrageous actions, so be it. They don’t care. Profit outweighs everything for a business. This is why businesses must be watched, regulated, and slapped down when they break the rules. It is important, I think, that the officers of a business (the board of directors, the CEO and other chief officers) be jailed for serious transgressions. A business will pay a fine with no problem, but when the officers go to the slammer, it makes it real. Just ask Dennis Koslowski of Tyco International.

Greenwald:

The New York Times‘ Scott Shane reports today that Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army microbiologist, testified Thursday before a panel of the National Academy of Sciences examining the FBI’s scientific claims in the anthrax case, and said "it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Dr. [Bruce] Ivins’s laboratory"; that "[a]t the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Maryland, . . . among the senior scientists, no one believes it‘;" and when "[a]sked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, [he] replied, ‘Absolutely not‘."  Ivins’ hometown newspaper, the Frederick News Post, has long provided excellent and skeptical coverage of the FBI’s case, and provides more details about Heine’s testimony.

Shane details the reasons for Heine’s emphatic doubts and calls his testimony "a major public challenge to [the Government's] conclusion in one of the largest, most politically delicate and scientifically complex cases in F.B.I. history."  It is that, but Heine’s extreme skepticism is hardly unusual.  As I documented on Wednesday, equally serious doubts about the case against Ivins are found among countless leading scientists, bioweapons experts, establishment media outlets and political officials in both parties.  The NAS panel is "review[ing] the bureau’s scientific work on the case, though not its conclusion on the perpetrator’s identity."  There has been, and apparently will be, no real investigation of the FBI’s case against Ivins because President Obama has threatened to veto any such investigation on the ground it "would undermine public confidence" in the FBI’s case.  In a rational world, with a President committed to transparency and accountability, that would be a reason to have an investigation, not a reason to obstruct one.

Of course, Obama has already dictated that past crimes should not be investigated (unless the crime was whistleblowing that embarrassed some agency).

Dan Froomkin at Huffington Post:

Earlier this month, the whistleblower website WikiLeaks released a deeply disturbing video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly machine-gunning a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then opening fire on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men. (Here’s my article about it.)

The two Reuters employees were killed. But Reuters, which had been asking to see the video for two and a half years, didn’t have much to say right away.

Today, Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger is out with an opinion column entitled "What I want from the Pentagon". His central point: "What I want from the Pentagon — and from all militaries — is simple: Acknowledgment, transparency, accountability." Here he is on the accountability part:

Let’s dig behind the video. Let’s fully understand the rules the military were operating under. Let’s have a complete picture of what was going through the fliers’ minds. Let’s hear the Pentagon explain its interpretation of the rules of engagement and the Geneva Convention and how the actions either did or did not accord with them in its view. And importantly, let’s keep in mind that while we focus on this particular tragedy, it is the rare circumstance that when a journalist is injured or killed in a conflict area, there is a video of the death, and even more rare as this case demonstrates, for the public to see such a video.

I totally agree. I want what he wants. And here’s something else I want.

I want someone on Capitol Hill to give a shit.

So far (and I’ve done a bit of calling around) I haven’t heard any member of Congress express any intention of holding an oversight hearing into the matter — or even asking any questions at all.

They seem utterly uncurious about how exactly it was OK for a bloodthirsty-sounding helicopter crewman to open fire on a group of (apparently) armed men when all they were doing was milling around on a street corner — not to mention how it was OK to target the Good Samaritan van driver who pulled over to help one of the injured men. (He was killed; his two small children were wounded.)

Even more than that, to be perfectly honest, I want someone on Capitol Hill to give a shit about the gruesome cover-up by U.S. forces in Afghanistan after they massacred five innocent civilians, including three women, two of whom were pregnant — just this past February. Just not on video (as far as we know).

In case you missed it, the very same morning the WikiLeaks video was released, the New York Times confirmed reports by heroic Times of London correspondent Jerome Starkey that American Special Operations soldiers actually dug their bullets out of the bodies of the women as part of a cover-up. NATO headquarters, led by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then backed them up and repeatedly tried to discredit Starkey and his story.

Is that standard operating procedure? Again, I haven’t heard a peep of interest from the Hill — despite the fact that Starkey himself has argued that it was not an isolated incident, and that U.S. and NATO forces are rarely held to account for the atrocities they commit.

Where’s the outrage? Where’s the responsibility? Where’s the oversight? Hell, where’s the basic curiosity? Has anyone on the Hill even asked any questions of the Pentagon or the White House? Hey, President Obama, are you OK with this?

Does your member of Congress give a shit?

Call them and let me know what you find out.

Recommended by Constant Reader, Pirate Radio is a terrific little movie with a great cast and good story.

I’m not much of a baseball fan, but I did enjoy this:

Kimberly Crandell at Scientific Blogging:

Anyone who has worked with children with autism knows that, based on symptoms alone, this disorder is comprised of several different types. Yet, surprisingly, no authoritative study exists to validate this supposition. That is about to change.

For the first time ever, a long-term study of boys and girls with and without autism is being  conducted. Jam-packed with scientific evaluations of each participant that will provide data scientists can use for decades to come, this study is destined to determine once and for all if there are subtypes of autism, and, if so, exactly what those subtypes are.  This ambitious study is taking place at the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute.

Named the Autism Phenome Project (“phenome” means “all observable characteristics”) it is the largest and most comprehensive assessment of children with autism ever attempted. It aims to distinguish among recognized subgroups, or phenotypes, of autism, linking them with distinct patterns of behavior and biological changes. Ideally, the findings will lead to targeted — and thus more effective — treatments specific to each child’s type of autism.

“Some children have autism symptoms from birth, others not until their second birthday,” explains principal investigator David Amaral, who serves as the M.I.N.D. Institute’s research director. “Which ones have gastrointestinal problems or immune problems? Who is more likely to have seizures? At the moment, we don’t really have the big picture.”

“This project is designed to gather sufficient information about a large enough group of kids to parse them into homogeneous, or similar, subtypes,” he adds. “At that point, researchers can explore the causes of each type of autism.”

As co-principal investigator Sally Rogers puts it, “The M.I.N.D. Institute was created to bring scientists together who had expertise among them in all the aspects of autism so that we could look at the whole of autism in a single study, rather than just one part at a time. That’s what the Autism Phenome Project (APP) is all about: parents, children and researchers forming a team to tackle all of autism, at once.”

Led by Amaral, a multi-disciplinary team of more than 50 M.I.N.D. Institute scientists began a pilot study in 2006 of …

Continue reading.