Truthout - Opinion

E.J. Dionne, Jr. | A Bet on Japan

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 10:01:14 -0400

Washington - Your initial impression of a country is often hard to shake.

Late on my first night in Japan in the 1990s, I was staring out the window of my room on a high floor of a downtown Tokyo hotel. What I saw was a vast, sprawling, modern city of twinkling lights that radiated human and technological energy.

Body Bagger in Iraq

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:19:54 -0400

Jess Goodell enlisted in the Marines immediately after she graduated from high school in 2001. She volunteered three years later to serve in the Marine Corps’ first officially declared Mortuary Affairs unit, at Camp Al Taqaddum in Iraq. Her job, for eight months, was to collect and catalog the bodies and personal effects of dead Marines. She put the remains of young Marines in body bags and placed the bags in metal boxes. Before being shipped to Dover Air Force Base, the boxes were stored, often for days, in a refrigerated unit known as a “reefer.”.

Nuclear War and Peace

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 08:59:41 -0400

Fuzzy Privatization Math

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 09:28:48 -0400

On May 31, 2010, Governor Chris Christie’s New Jersey Privatization Task Force reported that more than $210 million would be saved by privatizing work that had traditionally been performed by government workers. The report even set out specific figures for some of the cost savings it identified, while others said savings were “TBD” – “To Be Decided”.

Tea Party

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 11:05:56 -0400

Two Ghouls

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 10:00:46 -0400

I've spent the last few days walking around my quiet little Boston neighborhood looking at the houses, the cars, the shops, the trees. I look at my wife, my neighbors, my cat. Then I close my eyes, and in that darkness I see it all wiped out, washed away, obliterated, shattered to kindling and utterly gone. I see a moonscape of annihilation, no reference points in sight, nothing familiar. I see the day after the end of everything, and the horror of it comes nowhere close to the reality that is Japan.

There are no words for this. Only the pictures can tell the tale, but you can't photograph radiation, so even that falls short. It is, quite simply, one of the worst events I have seen in my life, and I am half a planet away.

NPR: The Saga Continues

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 09:57:18 -0400

There’s no more scrupulous or versatile broadcast journalist than NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling. He is one of those reporters who keeps his eye on the sparrow – that is, on small details from individual lives that add up to significant issues of public policy. As he described in a special report this week how the United States Army is clarifying guidelines "that should make it easier for soldiers with traumatic brain injuries from explosions to receive the Purple Heart," it was mind-boggling to think that right wingers in Congress were at that very moment voting to eliminate the modest federal funds that make such essential and authoritative reporting available to anyone in America who cares to tune in.

David Sirota | Mad Scientists in the Laboratories of Democracy

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:39:49 -0400

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that states are the "laboratories of democracy." Oft repeated over time, the aphorism has helped impart legitimacy to the rough and tumble of state lawmaking. We've heard "laboratory" and we've imagined staid scientists in white coats rigorously testing forward-thinking theories of societal advancement.

Alexander Cockburn | Here, on the Other Side of the Ring of Fire

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:32:16 -0400

Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask, "It's happened there; can it happen here?"

Along much of California's coastline runs the "ring of fire," which stretches round the Pacific plate, from Australia, north past Japan, to Russia, round to Alaska, down America's West Coast to Chile. 90 percent of the world's earthquakes happen round the ring.

The Last Iceberg: Nature Sculpts Itself, Then Dies

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:07:29 -0400

"This is my planet. If I can make a connection to people that this is our home, I've succeeded." -Camille Seaman, artist

With an ancestry of African-American, Italian and Shinnecock Indian in her veins, perhaps it should come as no surprise that photographer Camille Seaman feels a deep connection to the earth, which she affirmed in a recent conversation. Looking me straight in the eye, "This," she said with noble conviction, "is my planet."