Blogging backlog

Been preoccupied with midterms and pitching a story to Free Speech...now to imporantant blogging business.

Follow-up:

-Posada faces deportation, after 2 months of being in the U.S. without government action...the question is whether he'll be sent to Venezuela to face murder charges in connection with the downing of a Cuban airliner. The administration is between a rock and a hard place--concede to Chavez and Castro's wishes, or violate its own policy and harbor a terrorist.

-Senate Democrats charge that Bolton perjured himself, lying about seeking George Tenet's help to discipline a dissenting intelligence officer. Have any democrats pointed out that as UN Ambassador, Bolton, with his petulance and recklessness, would be a threat to national security? Security is an idea that's been co-opted by the right, but for all their talk, security is subverted by hardliner ideology and poor policy and funding.

As for the Newsweek scandal--

FAIR points out:

"Newsweek was right to retract the Quran story--mainly because the magazine claimed to have 'sources' for the information, when Newsweek's subsequent descriptions of how it acquired the story mention only a single source. But it's far from clear that Newsweek's source was inaccurate in saying that U.S. investigators had uncovered abuse of a Quran in the course of a recent investigation; similar allegations have repeatedly been made by former Guantanamo prisoners."

Why denounce government policy that perpetuates an illegal war and human rights violations when you can attack the "liberal media"?

from Alternet:

"It's part of the tried-and-true strategy of demonize, disguise, and divert. Demonize the news media to disguise the real causes of the resistance to occupation and divert attention from failed U.S. policies. The irony is that the U.S. corporate news media deserve harsh criticism for coverage of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- not for possibly getting one fact wrong, but for failing to consistently challenge the illegality of both wars and the various distortions and lies that the Bush administration has used to mobilize support for those illegal wars."

Emphasis on this one incident ignores that broader reality that the riots were more in protest of the U.S. occupation in general, than the specific Koran desecration:

"The frustration with U.S. policy that fuels these demonstrations isn't limited to the Koran incident, and to reduce the unrest to one magazine story is misleading. Indeed, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference last week that the senior commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Carl Eichenberry, reported that the violence 'was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.'"

So I'm sitting listening to panelists at UCSB's 2nd annual Afrogeeks conference, and a speaker just referred us to blogger La Shawn Barber (she's been endorsed by Michelle Malkin, so you know where she's coming from). She puts in her two cents on the defiling of the Koran, noting "why Islam is disrespected" and self-righteously touting the Christian notion that "the words of the Bible are written in the hearts of the believers" and that to have any other belief is absurd:

"Physical objects are not to revered or worshiped, and they hold no 'sacred' power. Islam obviously teaches something entirely different. I think it’s ridiculous for the United States to cater to prisoners of war in this way, no matter what their religion."

Nevermind the fact that many of these prisoners are held without being charged, and without the chance for a fair trial. And even if they are guilty, torture and disregard for cultural sensitivities are still unacceptable and must stop, at the very least out of concern for the U.S. reputation and future of diplomatic relations, if not out of decency and respect for human dignity.