MoJo Articles

Coming Soon: 'Judge Sonia'?

By Stephanie Mencimer — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Monday kicks off the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor, and by all accounts, the event promises to be a snoozer. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee will speechify about empathy and legislating from the bench. They'll demand to know what Sotomayor thinks about Roe v. Wade or probe her reasoning in the infamous Connecticut firefighters case. And like all prospective justices, her answers will be unsatisfactorily vague. Republicans are no doubt longing to take swipes at President Obama's first nominee, but they don't have the votes to block her appointment, so they'll probably pull their punches to avoid alienating Latino voters with gratuitous attacks. Sotomayor has also given them precious little material to work with.

But there is one question to which Sotomayor might have to provide a straight answer—and that could trigger some drama. Her response could shed light on what kind of a justice she'll be and, at least in one respect, how she'll differ from the man she's replacing, Justice David Souter.

High Sierras

By Josh Harkinson — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:44:36 -0700

EARLY ONE MORNING in August 2005, a small team of game wardens and deputies climbed through coyote brush and manzanita in the Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve outside San Jose, California, searching for an illegal pot farm. As they crested a ridge, they discovered densely planted rows of cannabis stalks. Suddenly, a high-powered rifle cracked and an officer fell to the ground, shot through both legs. Seconds later, another deputy shot and killed a man wielding a sawed-off shotgun. "It was literally like a jungle firefight," recalls warden John Nores, who fired at the other shooter before he escaped into the woods. Left behind in a meadow just minutes from the heart of Silicon Valley were 22,000 marijuana plants worth some $88 million.

Over the past decade, marijuana patches known as "grows" or "gardens" have sprung up on public lands across the West, including a third of California's national parks and nearly 40 percent of all national forests. Where hippies once grew just enough weed to peace out, traffickers now cultivate more than 100,000 plants at a time on 30-acre terraces irrigated by plastic pipe, laced with illegal pesticides, and guarded by men with MAC-10s and Uzis. Grows have turned up everywhere from the deepest backcountry to the edges of suburban subdivisions. Farming pot on public land can be more profitable than smuggling it across the increasingly militarized border. The 3.1 million pot plants seized in national forests in the year prior to last September had an estimated street value of $12.4 billion.

Twenty-First-Century Colonialism in Iraq

By Michael Schwartz — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:14:25 -0700

Here's how reporters Steven Lee Myers and Marc Santora of the New York Times described the highly touted American withdrawal from Iraq's cities last week:

"Much of the complicated work of dismantling and removing millions of dollars of equipment from the combat outposts in the city has been done during the dark of night. Gen. Ray Odierno, the overall American commander in Iraq, has ordered that an increasing number of basic operations—transport and re-supply convoys, for example—take place at night, when fewer Iraqis are likely to see that the American withdrawal is not total."

Acting in the dark of night, in fact, seems to catch the nature of American plans for Iraq in a particularly striking way. Last week, despite the death of Michael Jackson, Iraq made it back into the TV news as Iraqis celebrated a highly publicized American military withdrawal from their cities. Fireworks went off; some Iraqis gathered to dance and cheer; the first military parade since Saddam Hussein's day took place (in the fortified Green Zone, the country's ordinary streets still being too dangerous for such things); the U.S. handed back many small bases and outposts; and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki proclaimed a national holiday—"sovereignty day," he called it.

Brodner's Cartoon du Jour: Bob McNamara Passes Through Customs

By Steve Brodner — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:59:46 -0700

"Do you have anything to declare?"

Here's The Fog of War, as recommended by Brian, and me:

The Fog of War - Watch more Politics Videos at Vodpod .

BTW: Robert Scheer on Robert Strange McNamara

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

News Quiz

Today in Pakistan, US drones killed:
A- 12
B- 37
C- 45
D- Some Pakistani heart and mind

Greenpeace placed an Obama banner, with a plea for the G8 to act on global warming, over: A- Mount Rushmore B- Neverland Ranch C- The Society of Illustrators

Later the G8:
A- Blew off CO2 cuts
B- Blamed nonmembers China and India
C- Ate great Italian food
D- All of the above

Public Option Enemy No. 1

By Nick Baumann — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:06:23 -0700

You've probably seen the ads. Ominous voice-overs warn you about how health care reform "could put a bureaucrat in charge of your medical decisions, not you." A massive bulldozer with "government-run insurance plan" written on the side crushes your health care "choices." Canadians and Britons relay horror stories of their experiences dealing with health care in those nightmarish socialist dystopias.

The ads are the product of a multimillion-dollar ad campaign designed to derail health care reform—especially what's been dubbed the "public option," which would set up a government-run plan to compete with private insurers. The man behind this ad blitz is the person who might be Public Option Enemy No. 1: one-time hospital executive and longtime Republican donor Richard Scott.

"We Bring Fear"

By Charles Bowden — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:09:30 -0700

THERE IS A MAN DRIVING FAST down a dirt road leading to the border. A rooster tail of dust marks his passage. He is very frightened and his 15-year-old son sits beside him in silence. The boy is that way—very bright, yet very quiet. They are unusually close. The father has raised him as a single parent since he was four.

The father and son are fleeing to the United States. Back in their hometown of Ascensión, Chihuahua, men with assault rifles are searching for them. These men are soldiers in the Mexican Army and intend to kill the father, and perhaps the son, also. As the man drives toward the border crossing at Antelope Wells, New Mexico, he thinks the soldiers are ransacking his house. No one in the town will have the guts to speak up.

The man knows this absolutely.

Las Baladas Prohibidas

By William T. Vollmann — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:36:54 -0700

IT WAS THE GREAT LUPE VÁSQUEZ who first informed me of the existence of the baladas prohibidas. We were at the 13 Negro drinking early in the evening, which is to say that it was not yet midnight and Lupe had not yet blacked out. The jukebox exploded into another happy song, indistinguishable to my ignorance from the others, and the grim field workers at other tables nearly smiled, while the dancing couples on the metal floor grew livelier, and several men shouted along with the singer. Even Lupe, who trudged bitterly through life, cheered up when he heard this corrido, which was naturally so loud that he had to shout into my ear for me to apprehend that it dealt with the demure lady friend of a wanted drug lord who happened to be absent when two federales visited their residence, promising her that they wouldn't hurt him, so she told them to sit down and wait if so it pleased them; but while fixing refreshments she overheard their plan to liquidate her lover, so she sweetly invited them to rest just a moment longer, then strode out and blew them away!

Lupe's hatred of authority exceeded even mine, and for good reason; most days he had to deal with the lordly ways of United States immigration inspectors, of foremen who might or might not offer him a job and who if they did cared about their production quotas, not about his back; of companies who didn't pay him for the hours he had to sit in buses waiting for the frost to melt off the broccoli; and whenever he got a vacation from these entities, he got to visit the know-it-alls at the employment office in Calexico. Now and then he had also enjoyed the hospitality of Northside's police and judges. That was why a few beers at the 13 Negro soothed the pain of the 13 Negro's prices, and when a certain sort of corrido came on the jukebox, Lupe even smiled.

Brodner's Cartoon du Jour: Swine Flu Totem

By Steve Brodner — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:18:11 -0700

Apparently the swine flu is all the rage in London. This from Harper's Weekly:

Officials in Britain said that the number of new cases of swine flu in that country was doubling weekly and could reach 100,000 new cases per day by the end of August; Dr. Richard Jarvis, chairman of the British Medical Association's public-health committee, cited reports of people throwing "swine flu parties" to expose themselves to the virus and build their immunity. "I don't think it is a good idea," he said.

Here's my take (from The American Prospect):

Are Afghan Lives Worth Anything?

By Tom Engelhardt — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:19:57 -0700

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It was a blast. I'm talking about my daughter's wedding. You don't often see a child of yours quite that happy. I'm no party animal, but I danced my 64-year-old legs off. And I can't claim that, as I walked my daughter to the ceremony, or ate, or talked with friends, or simply sat back and watched the young and energetic enjoy themselves, I thought about those Afghan wedding celebrations where the "blast" isn't metaphorical, where the bride, the groom, the partygoers in the midst of revelry die.

In the two weeks since, however, that's been on my mind — or rather the lack of interest our world shows in dead civilians from a distant imperial war — and all because of a passage I stumbled upon in a striking article by journalist Anand Gopal. In "Uprooting an Afghan Village" in the June issue of the Progressive magazine, he writes about Garloch, an Afghan village he visited in the eastern province of Laghman. After destructive American raids, Gopal tells us, many of its desperate inhabitants simply packed up and left for exile in Afghan or Pakistani refugee camps.

Where in the World Are the Federal Trade Commissioners?

By Stephanie Mencimer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:00:00 -0700

Does winter weather get you down? Would you rather spend chilly days at the beach in Cancun or skiing in Quebec rather than sitting behind a desk? Well, maybe you should become a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. FTC commissioners are charged with managing the affairs of the federal government's premier consumer protection agency—a job that seems to entail a significant amount of foreign travel, some of it legitimate, some of it a bit questionable.

On the questionable side: In January 2007, the American Bar Association's antitrust section held its annual midwinter leadership meeting in Aruba at the swank new Hyatt Regency hotel and casino. It was an exclusive group, mostly private defense lawyers who represent some of the nation's biggest companies. But joining the white-shoe attorneys at the beach were two FTC commissioners, Pamela Jones Harbour and William Kovacic, who delivered a private briefing. The group, whose members tend to oppose the agency's regulatory agenda, subsidized the commissioners' travel.