* Portraits of Courage, Struggle, and Defiance This is the mug shot of Joan Trumpauer, a 19-year-old Duke University student and SNCC member who was arrested by the Jackson, Mississippi, police with eight other activists as they arrived on a train from New Orleans to...
Levees Not War
As We Enter 2012, Best Wishes to All
May the new year bring you all the good things you wish for. We’ll be brief with our greetings and good wishes, as last night’s champagne slowly wears off, and as there’s some house-cleaning to do before guests arrive for the New Year’s Day dinner . . . For all our...
How Many U.S. Soldiers Were Wounded in Iraq?
500,000 vets may suffer from PTSD, depression, or traumatic brain injury Dan Froomkin, senior Washington correspondent for Huffington Post, reports at Nieman Watchdog that the Pentagon’s figure of 32,226 wounded seriously undercounts the true casualty rate. Possibly...
Tom Piazza on Writing for HBO’s “Treme”
“New Orleans has a mythology, a personality, a soul, that is large, and that has touched people around the world. It has its own music (many of its own musics), its own cuisine, its own way of talking, its own architecture, its own smell, its own look and feel. . . ....
Eisenhower on Military Hyperpower and Dictatorship
The “Crushing Weight of Military Power” “Any person who doesn’t clearly understand that national security and national solvency are mutually dependent and that permanent maintenance of a crushing weight of military power would eventually produce dictatorship should...
Retrieved from the Spam Filter
On the lighter side of Giving Thanks, and in the holiday spirit of giving, we were moved to share with you our dear readers some of the expressions of gratitude and encouragement we’ve received in recent weeks. Somehow these comments were caught up in the spam filter....
“We Cannot Fail to Try”
A Break from “Hell No You Can’t” ”We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.” —John F. Kennedy, July 15, 1960 * Every year about this time we set aside our JFK assassination...
Today. Now.
“We Want Something Different”
Yearning for a New Kind of Society The ever-sharp Matt Taibbi has written incisively, in sometimes R-rated language, about Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, and other Wall Street investment banks—who can forget his description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped...
NYPD Occupies Zuccotti Park; OWS Evicted in Night Raid
[ see livestreaming via GlobalRevolution ] photographs © Levees Not War 2011 * “What are their [NYPD’s] demands?” asked social historian Patrick Bruner. “They have not articulated any platform. How do they expect to be taken seriously?” “I suppose they have a...
In Honor of Veterans
A Salute to the Living and the Dead Today—the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year—we pause to honor the veterans of wars, especially Americans in uniform since the Great War, World War I, whose ending on November 11, 1918—the eleventh hour of the...
As “End” of Iraq War Is Announced, U.S. Digs In, Warns Iran
* [ cross-posted @ Daily Kos ] * “In August [2002] a British official close to the Bush team told Newsweek: ‘Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.’ ” —Paul Krugman, “Things to Come,” March 18, 2003 * Where’s That “Mission Accomplished”...
How Occupy Wall Street Is *Not* Like the Tea Party
In a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times, replying to an Oct. 22 front-page article titled “Wall St. Protest Isn’t Like Ours, Tea Party Says,” Oberlin College professor of politics Stephen Crowley points out an essential distinction: There is another crucial...
Iraq War Veteran Injured by Police, in Critical Condition, after Crackdown of Occupy Oakland
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZLyUK0t0vQ * Police Use Tear Gas, Flash Bang Grenades on Occupy Oakland Protesters Scott Olsen, a Marine Corps veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq who is now involved in Veterans for Peace, was critically wounded by Oakland police...
“Romney is improbable, but his rivals are impossible”
Credit Where Credit Is Due Dept. It is rare to the point of Almost Never that NYT columnist Ross Douthat writes something not annoying, so when he says something we find intelligent and worth quoting, we want to be nice and share. Likewise, the so-called candidates*...
Occupying the Street Is Not Enough
“Occupy” Dialogue Continues “[S]imply being in a public place and voicing your opinion in and of itself doesn’t do anything politically. It is the prerequisite, I hope, for people getting together and voting and engaging things. . . . I welcome the [Occupy] Wall...
Ten Years of U.S. War in Afghanistan
“While post-9/11 veterans are more supportive than the general public, just one-third (34%) say that, given the costs and benefits to the U.S., the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have both been worth fighting.” —Pew Research Center, “War and Sacrifice in the Post-9/11...
Occupying Wall Street with Nurses, Teachers, Transit Workers, and the Rest of America’s Middle Class
“We are the 99% . . . You are the 99%.” “Banks got bailed out / We got sold out!” “Whose street? Our street!” * This Is Not the Fringe. This Is the Middle Class. Yesterday into last night we gathered near New York’s City Hall and marched with what looked and felt...
Conservatives, Please Help Conserve Louisiana’s Coast
“What is a conservative after all but one who conserves, one who is committed to protecting and holding close the things by which we live?” —Ronald Reagan, 1984 “Louisiana’s voters must find, nominate and elect conservatives (aka, Republicans) who understand there’s...
Talk of the Social Contract Should Not Make Rightists Reach for Their Guns
Daily Kos reports: After a video of [Elizabeth] Warren talking about the deficit and the social contract went viral last week (see above), Rush Limbaugh, the Fiscal Times and Rich Lowrey all spent time attacking her. Now, Lowrey has decided to spend another column...