CNN commentator Roland S. Martin has a piece up today (July 22) entitled, Obama birth issue is nutty that proceeds to make good fun of the wingnuts. But since one of George W. Bush’s first serious actions as President after 9-11 was to arrange the biggest government overhaul since the New Deal – by inventing the so-called “Department of Homeland Security” – there are Americans out in the hinterland who are suddenly quite confused about their legal status. I’m one of them, and so is recent Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Who, like me, actually wasn’t born in the United States of America.

McCain, like me, was a Navy brat. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, I was born in the Philippines. There used to be a clear law on the books that held the children of American citizens born in a foreign country are indeed ‘natural born’ American citizens, even if they automatically get dual citizenship for the country in which they were born. I had that until I was 18, though after that I would have had to formalize, and I was never very fond of Ferdinand and Imelda “Shoe-Lady” Marcos. So I let it slide. Still, if nobody questioned McCain’s citizenship qualification for POTUS, the fervor with which wingnuttia rants about Obama seems even crazier. I mean, even if Hawaii hadn’t been a state when he was born, did not all Hawaiians receive automatic citizenship when it WAS made a state? It was a territory, after all. Like Puerto Rico. Which apparently some wingnuts in Congress think is a foreign country too, thus Judge Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t be a citizen. Weird.

The last day job I held was in the period after 9-11 when DHS became the designated troublemaker for Americans of all kinds. My problems started when Human Resources was informed that my birth certificate didn’t qualify as “proof of citizenship” for me to have gotten the job. So I responded that my state driver’s license and Social Security card should suffice if HR couldn’t manage to read the line that designated US citizenship for both my parents and myself on that Philippine-issued birth certificate. They told me I had to get a birth certificate from a state here in the US. So I asked them which state they’d suggest I pretend to be born in, thinking there must be a racket in California or somewhere that provides fake birth certificates for people like me who weren’t actually born there. They were not amused.

Then they found a “discrepency” on my Social Security card. Seems I had used the name I’ve always gone by in addition to the first name on my birth certificate, when I had the last name changed after I got married back in 1969. I was informed they could no longer make my pay checks out to my legal name (which WAS on the card), and which is the name on my bank account. The bank then proceeded to tell me it couldn’t cash my checks! I was informed I’d have to take unpaid time off work – for which I’d get in trouble because no one would approve it – to stand in line at the SS office to have the name changed again. So I could work. I began to get the very strong feeling they didn’t want me there.

So I wrote a nice missive to HR telling them that I’d been paying taxes for more than 35 years under the NUMBER on my SS card, and that the IRS – a duly authorized agency of the federal government – had never once complained or refused my money. I further wrote that when I got married, I had my named changed to his on that card, and nobody ever asked to see a court order or required me to get one that “legally” changed my last name. In fact, I had dropped my given middle name entirely and used the first initial of my original last name on all legal matters from that time on. Also a CUSTOM, not something for which I ever had to go to court. I further said that if I were to be required per DHS’s audit to legally change my name, they were going to have to go after every single married woman in the country who had ever taken her husband’s name or used their maiden name’s initial for their middle. That’s about 55% of the entire population, not something this nation had the money to accomplish while spending $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I did end up quitting that job just because I know when I’m not wanted. Now write full time freelance, and my boss has never asked me to prove I’m a citizen or argued with me about what name I care to attach. Oh… and he uses direct deposit to pay me, in the account with my terrorist name attached.

I call it my “terrorist” name because DHS was supposed to be chasing terrorists, not messing up the lives and livelihoods of lifelong American citizens and taxpayers in good standing. Thus they must have believed I’m some sort of terrorist. I prefer the title “Terrierist,” since I’m quite fond of small dogs. You’d think these folks would have better things to do in the wake of 9-11, perhaps going after real terrorists or something. Guess that’s what I get for thinking.

I presume these crazy wingnuts would be doing this same weird Dervish Dance if John McCain were President right now. I mean, he absolutely wasn’t born in the United States, while Barack Obama absolutely was. And while they’re at it, they should make a new law that says the wives of military officers stationed overseas are forbidden to visit them or live with them, on the off-chance a baby might be born somewhere outside of Kansas. Sheesh!

Most of these idiots are so dumb and so ill-educated that they can’t even find California on a map, much less Panama or Philippines or Iraq. Why are they being given time and attention in the media? Shouldn’t we be ashamed of the morons among us, the fact that they represent a good 20% of our population? Is that inbreeding, environmental toxins, or just insane?

Whatever it is, I’m glad I’m not one of them. And I think there should be an IQ test administered to all employees of the Department of Homeland Security to ensure we don’t have to actually deal with any of these defectives in our day-to-day lives.

A new day has dawned, we have a new President-elect coming into office on January 20, and a couple of too-long ongoing wars in far places to bring to as honorable an end as possible, as soon as possible. With a hearty shout-out to all our veterans, especially those with whom we served all those many decades ago. Here’s hoping the new day will bring about the ‘right thing’, despite the distractions of economic meltdown. Real help for the tens of thousands of returning veterans from our current wars who have suffered grievous injuries. Schooling and re-training for all. Treatment for PTSD, even for the oldest veterans among us, war does terrible things to people’s minds.

So, in honor of our nation’s brave veterans, what follows is an edited repost of my experience the first time I visited ‘The Wall’ – the Vietnam War Memorial. It was May of 1985, we had been called to D.C. to testify at a hearing. We brought the kids, 15 and 16 at the time, since they had few memories of when we’d lived close enough to Washington to be there for the 4th of July, to visit the Smithsonian museums regularly, to picnic and fly kites on glorious spring days on the Mall.

Because it had been more than a decade since we’d visited, we of course had to make the pilgrimage to The Wall – the Vietnam Memorial finally installed below a berm years after that ill-advised war was over. The overall impression of the polished black granite wall etched with the names of the dead is somber, almost buried, unspeakably sad. My Vietnam-era veteran husband and I were in tears before we even got close enough to read any names.

The cherry blossoms were still hanging on, loosing wafts of pink petals elsewhere to entice the normal crowds of tourists on that day, at the time we got to the wall. So we had it practically to ourselves, a few individuals and small clusters of people here and there along its length.

Today is Veteran’s Day, when honoring those brave men and women who have fought our wars and defended our country since before we even had a country to defend, is the traditional activity. When my husband stopped with the kids to look at some of the little shrines of homemade crosses and flowers and notes folded and stuck into the joints of the wall, I walked on to find the name I’d come to touch. They would catch up.

They’re alphabetical, those tens of thousands of names. So it wasn’t hard to find the one I sought, even as the ghosts of those names I was not seeking floated past my eyes and through my mind in a seemingly endless stream. So neatly capitalized. So many.

When I found him, I reached out to touch him. Remembering a life, not an ugly death. I ran my fingers over the etched letters of his name, nestled so comfortably amidst so many others and not out of my reach. I closed my eyes and leaned into that half-buried wall knowing it would never yield to my weight of pushing back. My hand on his name, tears quietly flowing down my cheeks, falling like rain on the cobbles at my feet. It felt good to cry. It was a good time and place to cry.

As I stood silently weeping a large, warm hand covered my own and I felt the closeness of a man next to me, his other hand resting lightly on my shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw the age in that hand covering my own, knew this was a stranger reaching out with me. For some long moments we stood there leaning together into the name on that wall, until his touch lifted and my tears slowed. I turned to him, thinking to express my thanks – if I could find the words.

Tall and thin, I had to look up to see his face, the tears rolling down his cheeks. It was Jimmy Stewart. Yes, THAT Jimmy Stewart. Before I could get any words past the lump still in my throat, he squeezed my shoulder gently and walked on, not looking back. We’d not spoken a word, we had just shared a grief. I was, to put it mildly, rather amazed. What a very odd thing, on a day when so few people were here, to have shared those tears with this famous, kindly and so fatherly figure.

Of course I wondered why he was there that day. Just in town, sight-seeing? Visiting old friends and colleagues from his days as Brigadier General in the USAF Reserve? Making a round of memorials after visiting his own and remembering the 60 B-17 flight crews – his own men – lost on that fateful mission he led in 1943 to bomb the German ball bearings works in Schweinfurt on “Black Thursday?”

It was not until years later that I discovered Stewart’s son Ronald McLean was killed in action in Vietnam in 1969. He’d been there grieving too, as privately as me. Perhaps felt a need to make that simple physical connection with me, for those few precious moments. He was a a courageous warrior and career veteran whose face and bearing are familiar to generations – a famous man. I was no one at all, just someone touching a name on a wall, crying.

Perhaps that is something all of us who remember can share. For all the dead in all the wars, all the veterans coming home from current wars who will have no monuments of remembrance with which they can connect, for those wars are not scheduled ever to end. When will we ever learn?

Sure, there have been tin-foil hat conspiracy theories aplenty for as long as anyone alive can remember. The Jewish bankers got together with the German Illuminati and plotted the ‘New World Order’, getting its first nail in the coffin in 1913 with the Federal Reserve, going straight from there to instigating WW-I with a well-planned assassination in Sarajevo, culling the first wave of accumulated wealth in 1929 to start the Great Depression, which could only be alleviated in the end by WW-II.

And they needed an excuse to overrule America’s strong isolationism at the time, so they didn’t bother to do anything about the incoming Japanese fleet as it sailed en masse toward Pearl Harbor. Not exactly a “false flag” operation, but certainly despicable. REAL false flag operations got famous when the wholly fictional Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ allowed the US military to ensconce itself in perpetuity in South Vietnam, admittedly (by several ‘memoirs’ since, by people who could know) for the purpose of testing the nifty new armaments and chemical warfare agents amassed when they ‘forgot’ to cut the wartime military budget after Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war.

Then there was 9-11. A textbook case made for tin-foil speculation, undoubtedly. Huge skyscrapers imploding perfectly from jet fuel in the upper stories, a whole different, un-damaged skyscraper that mysteriously collapsed in the same fashion late that afternoon for no apparent reason, a hole in the danged Pentagon but zero signs of anything that might have caused it, etc., etc., etc. I doubt anybody’s unaware of the grand conspiracy theories for that dreadful day.

Then, just a week later, some journalists and a congresscritters received letters in the mail containing weaponized anthrax spores and badly printed notes from what we were told was just another Arab terrorist. Only that wasn’t true either, as quickly became known. Why, it turns out that the weaponized anthrax spores came from the US Army’s own bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

At first the FBI fingered an Egyptian researcher for the dirty deed, but couldn’t make a case of it. They looked for a short time at an Israeli researcher too, but backed right off that one quick. So they went after a regular American researcher in the lab, and paid him nearly $6 million just a couple of months ago for ruining his life. Desperate, they settled on another guy, and he is said to have killed himself last week with Tylenol (something not fun, takes about 5 days to die). Which must of course make him the lone gunman in this particular incident, right?

If you agree, you’ll just love the incredible amount of gossamer ‘evidence’ being used to convict a dead guy who held high enough clearance to work in an Army bioweapons lab for 28 years, was in all appearances an upstanding family man, and had ZERO run-ins with the law – all on the highly dubious ‘testimony’ of a highly suspicious non-professional psychiatric ‘babysitter’ (now in hiding) with a rap sheet for DUI and domestic violence as long as your arm – is quite absurd. They’re really losing their touch at this late date. This stuff is way, way flimsier than magic bullets, perfectly ‘dropped’ skyscrapers and dead terrorists that turned up alive and well.

For those of you who like a thoroughly twisted Ludlum plot as well as a seriously holey conspiracy theory, don your tin-foil beanies and follow some of the links below to the ongoing drama. Looks like I’m not the only person who keeps a big salt lick handy when the gub’ment starts handing out badly crafted lies…

Links:

WSJ: Bruce Ivins Wasn’t the Anthrax Culprit [Opinion, Richard Spertzel, head of biological weapons section Unscom '94-'99]
NYT: Anthrax Evidence Called Mostly Circumstantial
Salon: Glenn Greenwald on the anthrax investigation
John McQuaid: Bentonite and ABC’s credibility
BuzzFlash: Jean C. Duley… tell us again…
Anthrax Vaccine – Meryl Nass
The Hidden Anthrax Letters Suspect
The Death of Mr. Ivins

It seems that Bush’s visit to Europe last week has produced some recommitment to his ever-expanding Mid-East War, at least from the Brits. I’m figuring that Palau isn’t quite ready to invade Iran for us. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, however, did promise tougher sanctions on Iran and an increase in its troop strength in Afghanistan. Brown announced that he has ordered a freeze on the assets of Iran’s biggest bank.

The New York Times reported Monday that Brown sought to speak directly to the Iranian people during the joint Bush/Brown press conference.

“We will take action today that will freeze the overseas assets of the biggest bank in Iran, the Melli bank, and secondly, action will start today for a new phase of sanctions on oil and gas.”

Bush reiterated that “all options” were on the table in regards to U.S. actions against Iran, which includes military strikes. Brown committed to increased troop strength in Afghanistan as NATO began redeploying forces to meet a new threat there as hundreds of Taliban fighters took over villages in the south over the weekend during heavy fighting, releasing hundreds of insurgents from the Kandahar prison.

U.S. troops are primarily bogged down in Iraq, supplying the bulk of troops in that country, with fewer than 20,000 troops in Afghanistan. This years after “success” of the missions was declared – it looks like we’ve had less trouble ejecting leadership in those countries than we’ve had in “securing the peace” in either. Some troops have done as many as six tours of duty and are being prevented from leaving the service by “stop loss” directives.

Where the heck is he planning to get troops to deal with Iran? I mean, if he just sends in the Air Force to bomb them, what makes him think the Iranian Army won’t cross into Iraq and Afghanistan to wreak havoc on our troops there?

Despite Bush’s desire to leave America in much, much worse shape than he found it in 2000, opening yet another front in his ‘forever-war’ isn’t a very good idea. Will Congress act to prevent it this time?

So, just to get us started focusing on what needs to be focused on, here’s Johnny McCain telling us why it’s “not too important” to get our troops out of Iraq any time soon…

It’s Memorial Day and we are not in Oklahoma or Kentucky to manicure gravesites or to solemnly place flags and poppies to honor our fathers for their service, or to recall our lifetimes of love and caring. We instead spent the weekend joyfully hosting the New Princess of the Universe (our newest granddaughter) and her beautiful, hopeful young parents.

The Oklahoma gravesite was manicured and decorated by family anyway, the Kentucky one – now so full of family that there’s no one left to tend it – was no doubt trimmed and swept as part of the spring duties of the groundskeeper, just brass plates in the ground beneath that weathered white marble angel in the sorrowful pose. Funny how life – and generations – go on as the past slips ever farther into the mists of time.

Since Memorial Day of last year, 624 soldiers, sailors, Marines, reservists and guardsmen have been killed in our “occupation” of Iraq. Diarist clammyc has details on each one, including age, date of death, branch of service and home town.

Today, when you’re watching the parade or grilling some dogs or enjoying the sunshine in a park or in the woods, remember these fallen and the fallen of all our endless wars – right or wrong – who answered the call and gave their lives. Maybe say a little prayer in hope that someday soon the world and all the generations alive in it may discover peace.

The web page for Forever Friends Pet Cremation Services explains…

Pet cremation is a clean, sanitary way of saving your pet’s remains. Pet cremation is environmentally sound, providing an alternative to placement in municipal landfill sites, or for those who do not have adquate space for burying their pets.

The problem of taking up space in municipal landfill sites must have been a big consideration when an officer accompanying the body of a comrade to his final disposition discovered that the military had contracted with Forever Friends to handle the bodies of US servicemembers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

On Friday [May 9] the Pentagon banned the arrangement, which had been in place since 2001. According to a story in the Washington Post, Some War Dead Were Cremated at Facility Handling Pets, Pentagon officials say they don’t think human and animal remains were ever comingled at the facility. That will probably soothe the outrage of families who might suspect from this news that they’ve got some dog’s ashes in that urn or plot instead of their loved one.

From now on, the Pentagon promises, all cremations will be done by crematories associated with actual human funeral homes. For those who thought it wasn’t a very good idea when these wars of foreign aggression were started that the news media was barred from photographing returning coffins or covering funerals of service personnel killed in those wars, this is just one more reason why it behooves us to pay some real attention to the horrors the new “privatized military” brings. It’s cheaper to cremate dogs than people, so I’m sure some pencil-pusher honestly thought no one would ever be the wiser.

Those whose loved ones were cremated after they were killed in action will no doubt be gratified to know that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates found “the site and signage insensitive and entirely inappropriate for the dignified treatment of our fallen. The families of the fallen have the secretary’s deepest apologies,” Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said at a news conference hastily staged when the news hit the fan.

Worse, had the officer not attended the cremation of his friend (because no family members were present), the situation might never have become known. Lt. General Frank Klotz, Director of the Air Force Staff, said he doesn’t know whether ANY military officer previously had ever inspected the contracted crematories.

David Bose, manager of Forever Friends, said that typically service members would drop off remains at his crematory after he signed the paperwork, and would return the next day to sign for and pick up the cremains. This is contrary to normal procedure described by Gen. Klotz, where the military provides escort for all service members killed overseas during all transport and processing at the Dover mortuary until the deceased returns home for interment.

Wow. My father and father-in-law, whose trifolded flags adorn the mantle in glass cases honoring their service to this nation would be spinning in their graves in total outrage! Or, in the case of my own father who spent 27 years being the best he could be, there would probably be tears and a badly broken heart.

There is something very, very wrong here. It’s been wrong ever since GW Bush launched these ill-conceived oil wars, and it’s still wrong today even though we hear that the Pentagon won’t be cremating our war dead with assorted dead cats and dogs any more since last Friday. I hope some outraged, still-human country in this world takes these war criminals to the Hague someday. They deserve it.

Links:

Some War Dead Cremated at Facility for Pets
Pentagon objects to cremation facilities
Pentagon Shipping Troops’ Remains to Pet Crematory
Forever Friends Pet Cremation Services

The Associated Press reported on Easter Sunday that the American Death Toll in Iraq Reaches 4,000 after a roadside bomb killed four soldiers in Baghdad.

At least 61 other people died across Iraq on Sunday, but the U.S. is not keeping any official records of how many Iraqis pay the ultimate price for the ‘freedom’ we have brought them. …and bought them, at a price so far to American taxpayers of ~$600 billion.

Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, J.P. Morgan upped its bid for the bankrupt Bear-Stearns investment bank to $10 a share, 5 times the negotiated price agreed upon last weekend just in time for the Tokyo stock market opening on St. Patrick’s Day. The unprecedented bailout of an investment bank that is not a member of the Federal Reserve system was seen as necessary to prevent a worldwide financial market meltdown. The Fed is guaranteeing Bear-Stearns’ worthless investments up to $30 billion (of American taxpayers’ money).

Speaking of American taxpayers’ money, the Bush administration assures us that the $200 – $600 in tax rebates set aside earlier this year in hopes of stimulating the economy (perhaps we’ll all go out and purchase shares of J.P. Morgan?) will be mailed in May. Perhaps this will come just in time for millions of soon-to-be homeless Americans to buy a nice three-room tent to live in during the warm summer months. If they’re very careful with their budget, some of those families might save enough to buy kerosene space heaters for their tents before winter!

The Pentagon announced on February 11 that it is charging six detainees at Guantanamo Bay with war crimes, and will be seeking the death penalty for all. According to ex-JAG officers, it has already been decided that all will be convicted, and all will die. The highlights will be secret evidence and confessions gathered under torture from people who have been held for years sans habeas corpus.

Ross Tuttle’s Rigged Trials at Gitmo appears online from The Nation. Looks like BushCo are fixing to compound their own war crimes. Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Gitmo’s military commissions detailed a conversation with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes, who now oversees the tribunal process for the Department of Defense…

“[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”

With Bush and his cadre’s recent hyperbolic rhetoric introducing “World War III” in the same sentence with Iran, it looks to me like the various US intelligence agencies don’t plan to be made scapegoat once again for Bush/Cheney’s delusions of Hitlerian grandeur. They all got together this time and reported in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate that Iran does not have nuclear weapons and is years away from having nuclear weapons even if it tries really hard. CNN reported that…

A declassified summary of the latest National Intelligence Estimate found with “high confidence” that the Islamic republic halted an effort to develop nuclear weapons in the fall of 2003.

Worse, this report was prepared in December of 2006. Which explains why Cheney and the boyz were so anxious to keep a lid on it while they beat the drums toward a opening a new front in their forever-war. Ex-CIA counter-terrorism expert Larry Johnson offered this observation:

There are some unsung heroes in the National Intelligence Council who insisted on the integrity of the product. In the face of enormous political pressure to tailor information and pull punches that undermine Bush Administration talking points, the intelligence professionals did their job. They told the truth based on the facts in hand.

If Johnson is right – and he probably is – we should consider that the recent incident of six nuclear-tipped ACMs being wrongly loaded onto the pilings of a B-52 headed to Barksdale may have motivated some end-runs around the stone walls the Bush Administration had erected against releasing any portion of this NIE.

The incident, combined with the infiltration of the USAF Academy by hard-right wing fundamentalist evangelicals and their placement of hand-picked junior and senior officers in sensitive positions, is indeed a serious concern. Particularly if any of those people were involved in this gross breach of fail safes for our nuclear weapons stockpile.

Despite Bush’s insistence that the NIE won’t change a thing about his policy toward Iran, Democratic contender John Edwards scored some points against Hillary Clinton on the subject during the Tuesday NPR debate. Edwards castigated Clinton for her support of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist organization,” thereby justifying war whenever the shrub cares to launch one.

I do expect that seasoned pros at the State Department (in trouble of late for its use of mercenary guards in Iraq), the intelligence services and the military are all wondering where Bush and Cheney think they’re going to get the manpower to launch another front in their war. Our troops are stretched too thin, and the nation simply doesn’t have enough money to fight a proxy war with hundreds of thousands more paid mercs. If they launched a draft they’d be courting some serious civil disobedience and the homeland’s not all that secure these days due to drastic cuts (and more on the way) for first responders, Guard and police. Heck, they’ve hired mercenaries to patrol the Mexican border!

The economy is tanking. Millions of Americans are going to lose their homes, their jobs, and now Bush is cutting payments to teaching hospitals so the indigent won’t even have the ER when they’re sick or injured. The rich don’t like taxes, and Bush has arranged things to their liking. Where is he planning to get the money for further adventures? China? They’re starting to balk at the costs so far. India’s got its own problems we’re not helping with, since we’re officially on Pakistan’s ’side’.

If we had a Congress full of actual public servants Bush and Cheney could be bridled by impeachment hearings. That would at least keep them from screwing things up worse before January of ‘09. Unfortunately, we don’t have a Congress full of actual public servants, so we’re on our own. We’ll need more than luck to make it through the next year.

Links:

U.S. report: Iran stopped nuclear weapons work in 2003

NPR’s Iowa Debate

Right Wing Claims Iran NIE a CIA Plot Against Bush

John Edwards Wins NPR Debate