whimsical dog

Seymour Hersch at the New Yorker's News Desk Blog, submits this post: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/03/the-kill-team-photographs.html Why is the face of the dead Afghan obscured? Sensitivity? I don't think so. Why are the other 3996 photos being withheld? Sensitivity? I don't think so. Why did the flag-draped coffins arrive at Dover Air Force Base in the middle of the night, with photographs disallowed? Sensitivity? I don't think so. I think the answer is blatantly clear to absolutely everyone, both war supporters and war opponents. And it's not sensitivity. It's consequences. The war makers (political profiteers), war supporters (emotional profiteers), war reporters (media profiteers), and the war-equipment suppliers (commercial profiteers) require the up-close-and-personal horror of war be concealed from the view of regular folk. Because... well, I hardly have to state the obvious, do I? Personally, I want every gout of blood, every bit ...

"The Accountability Party? What's that?" you ask, puzzled, thinking you've missed some newsworthy "announcement". You haven't. The Accountability Party is my little fantasy, created at this most opportune moment, when the Dems and Repubs are both out of favor. The Accountability Party is intended to be broad-based, having only two planks, so as to be robustly resistant to destruction -- or irrelevance -- by fragmentation. The AP's two planks are Accountability and Jobs. Every other issue is relevant ONLY as seen through the lens of these two concerns. Otherwise the AP takes no position. "No position" means NO POSITION. No position means being "agnostic" on EVERYTHING else. Individual AP members have their own views of course, but as a unified organization, the AP takes no position on: abortion, taxes, gay marriage, gun rights, defense policy, campaign finance, racial discrimination, immigration, terrorism, hate-speech, Israel, e...