Human rights groups say US forces have systematically used loud music against hundreds of detainees in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. Now, artists are joining together to demand an end to the practice. Long overdue.
The New York Times is reporting that President-elect Obama will name Nobel Prize winning physicist Dr. Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy. Dr. Chu is currently Professor of Physics and Molecular and Cellular Biology of University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 then as a Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University (technically, Dr. Chu is on extended leave from Stanford, his wife is the former Director of Undergraduate Admissions) for his research in laser cooling and trapping of atoms. At Stanford, Dr. Chu spearheaded the Bio-X program bringing together scientists from physics, chemistry, biology and engineering backgrounds to work on complex issues such as climate change and alternative energy development. As director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Dr. Chu was instrumental in forging a research pact reached between UC Berkeley, oil industry giant BP, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the University of Illinois to develop technologies to reverse climate change. Under Dr. Chu, Lawrence Berkeley Lab has also been conducting research into bio-fuels and solar technologies.
The other three selections are all veterans of the Clinton Administration: Lisa Jackson for EPA administrator, Carol Browner as his energy ”czar,” and Nancy Sutley to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
– Lisa Jackson, who would be the first black person to lead the EPA, is a former New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection commissioner who worked at the federal agency for 16 years, including under Browner when she was Bill Clinton’s EPA chief. Jackson is a co-chairman of Obama’s EPA transition team, and currently serves as chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine. A New Orleans native, she grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward, the area stricken by Hurricane Katrina. She holds chemical engineering degrees from Tulane University and Princeton University.
– Carol Browner, who served as EPA chief for eight years under Clinton, will become Obama’s go-to person in the White House overseeing energy issues, an area expected to include the environment and climate matters. Now chair of the National Audubon Society and on the boards of several other environmental groups, Browner has been leading the Obama transition’s working group on energy and environment.
– Nancy Sutley, the deputy mayor for energy and environment in Los Angeles and the mayor’s representative on the Board of Directors for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, is the first prominent gay to earn a senior role in Obama’s new administration. She was an EPA official during the Clinton administration, including being a special assistant to the EPA administrator in Washington. She also previously served on the California State Water Resources Control Board and was an energy adviser to former Gov. Gray Davis.
Still left to fill is the Interior Department, which oversees the management of federal lands. Overall, it’s an interesting mix of picks. One very outside the beltway for Energy and three others with ties to the Clinton Administration.
Indonesian president Susilo Yudhoyono has invited representatives from 33 countries to the first Asian Democracy Forum on the island of Bali. Indonesia has a history of unrest and conflict but the world’s third largest democracy is now seen as one of the more stable countries in the Asia-Pacific region. But as Step Vaessen reports for Al Jazeera, even some within Indonesia’s government are arguing that democracy comes at an economic price.
From the Jakarta Post:
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono officially opened a forum on Asian democracy, dubbed the “Bali Democracy Forum”, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Nusa Dua, Bali, on Wednesday.
“This forum is a platform for dialogue and discussion on developments in democracy. Many Asian countries have adopted democracy, adapting it with Eastern values,” Yudhoyono said in his opening speech, as quoted by Antara news agency.
The forum, organized by the Foreign Ministry, was attended by representatives of ASEAN member states and other Asian countries including China and Japan, as well as representatives and observers from non-Asian countries including Italy, Austria, Sweden and Canada, Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said earlier.
Under the theme, Building and Consolidating Democracy; A Strategic Agenda for Asia, the ministry hopes the forum will provide a platform for its official participants to share experiences in the development of democracy in their respective countries of origin.
The above video is a Jindal for Governor campaign commercial from 2007 attacking Louisiana’s culture of corruption.
The publication Corporate Crime Reporter crunched Department of Justice statistics in 2007 to rank the 35 most populous states of the nation by corruption. The publication calculated a corruption rate, which it defined as the total number of public corruption convictions from 1997 to 2006 per 100,000 residents.
These are the results:
1. Louisiana(7.67)
2. Mississippi (6.66)
3. Kentucky (5.18)
4. Alabama (4.76)
5. Ohio (4.69)
6. Illinois (4.68)
7. Pennsylvania (4.55)
8. Florida (4.47)
9. New Jersey (4.32)
10. New York (3.95)
11. Tennessee (3.68)
12. Virginia (3.64)
13. Oklahoma (2.96)
14. Connecticut (2.80)
15. Missouri (2.79)
16. Arkansas (2.74)
17. Massachusetts (2.66)
18. Texas (2.44)
19. Maryland (2.31)
20. Michigan (2.14)
21. Georgia (2.13)
22. Wisconsin (2.09)
23. California (2.07)
24. North Carolina (1.96)
25. Arizona (1.88)
26. Indiana (1.85)
27. South Carolina (1.74)
28. Nevada (1.72)
29. Colorado (1.56)
30. Washington (1.52)
31. Utah (1.4117)
32. Kansas (1.4109)
33. Minnesota (1.24)
34. Iowa (0.91)
35. Oregon (0.68).
I’m surprised by Connecticut at number 14. How very unYankee. Though I now consider myself a Californian, I grew up for a time between New York and Rhode Island. Happy to see that The Ocean State wasn’t on the list. On New York, I’m not surprised. Ten of the top twenty states are in the South. And 13 out of the 14 states that most observers include as being “southern” states are on the list. The sole exception is, surprisingly, West Virginia.
The Chicago Way, on Tape
From the Wall Street Journal:
If convicted, Mr. Blagojevich would be the second consecutive Illinois Governor to be found guilty of a felony, and the fourth in 35 years. We’d ask if it’s something in the water, but that would be unfair to the Chicago River. It is certainly something in the Chicago political culture, where money and government power seem especially fungible.
Ouch.
Governor Blagojevich, resign
From the Chicago Tribune:
The governor must resign immediately. If he doesn’t, the Illinois House should begin proceedings to impeach him, and to ask the Senate to try him.
That’s not just our judgment. Many of the state’s leading politicians, Democrats and Republicans, have called on the governor to step down. In the words of Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan: “Our worst fears have been realized.”
Unfortunately for the citizens of this state, that statement could have been uttered too many times in recent decades.
Otto Kerner, the Democratic governor from 1961 to 1968, went to prison after being convicted in 1973 on bribery, tax evasion and other counts.
In 1987, after he left office, former Democratic Gov. Dan Walker pleaded guilty to charges of bank fraud, misapplication of funds and perjury.
In 2006, Republican Gov. George Ryan was convicted of widespread corruption and is now serving a 6 1/2-year term with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
Something is indeed rotten in Springfield.
Roll Over, Abe Lincoln
By Timothy Egan in the New York Times.
Putting aside the peculiar dialect of desperation that made the governor sound like a John Malkovich character in a David Mamet play, the complaint showed a man trolling the depths of darkness.
The beloved Cubs, the sainted Warren Buffett, editorial writers from the Chicago Tribune, even financing for a children’s hospital — all were targets or leverage points for a shakedown.
The surprise is that he didn’t offer to sell out exclusive rights to deep-dish pizza.
If the world was roused by the sight from Chicago barely one month ago, hundreds of thousands of people streaming into Grant Park to celebrate the triumph of possibility over tainted history, the arrest of Governor Blagojevich on a dark and drizzly Chicago dawn was quite the opposite image.
Abe Lincoln may have rolled over once in pleasant surprise at the election of Barack Obama, and another time in revulsion at Blagojevich’s arrest, as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said. More likely, Abe did a triple lutz in his grave on Tuesday.
The Cubs? How can you shake down the Cubs? That’s just unAmerican. Warren Buffet? That takes gumption. Pity this isn’t ancient Rome for surely Blagojevich would be falling on a sword by now.
In the western Indian state of Rajasthan, forced weddings are frequent – with the brides sometimes as young as five. It’s been an illegal practice since 2006, but families struggling to feed their children see little alternative.
Some more reading:
Child Marriages, Though Illegal, Persist in India
“I want to go to bed,” she cried. “Please, Mama, Papa. Let me sleep!”
Bafflement can only have worsened the ordeal, since Hansa, the youngest of six sisters being married in a joint ceremony to boys from other villages, was only 4. Her husband was 12.
Such weddings are common in Rajasthan, a state known for its desert landscapes, hilltop forts and maharajahs’ palaces, as well as its persistence in feudal traditions, including child marriages, that have kept Rajasthani women among the most socially disadvantaged in India.
Indian law sets 18 as the minimum age for a woman to marry and 21 for a man. When India’s Parliament adopted the Child Marriage Restraint Act in 1978, legislators hoped that the statute would curb child marriages and the social ills they perpetuate.
Concern focused on an arc of populous northern states where child marriages are most deeply rooted: Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, with a combined population of 420 million, about 40 percent of all Indians.
The illegal child brides of India:
Thousands of children get married in India every year, and as soon as they reach puberty, they are expected to conceive. According to the census of 2001, 300,000 girls under the age of 15 had given birth, some for the second time. Now, five years later, the number could be as many as half a million. With their bodies underdeveloped and often malnourished, early childbirth can be fatal. Some 100,000 mothers and one million babies die in India every year.
Manemma’s marriage ended in disaster, before she could have a baby. After a couple of years, her 20-year-old husband wanted a more sexually mature woman and sent her packing. “How did your husband treat you?” I ask Manemma. I did not want to ask her directly whether he tried to have sex with her. Doctors had told me of the frequent cases of rape of prepubescent girls in her situation, but it is not a question you can ask in India.
Manemma squirms with embarrassment. “I don’t want to talk about my husband,” she says. She is still traumatised by the experience and shakes her head when I ask her if she will ever get married again. Throughout India, during the May festival of Akshaya Tritiya, the auspicious day in the year for weddings, streets resound to the cacophony of steel bands, firecrackers and women’s voices singing as they prepare young brides to meet their grooms.
Behind closed doors in the town of Jaipur, two sisters, aged 11 and 13, Anjali and Vinisha, bow their heads as family members anoint their heads and limbs with a mixture of yoghurt and turmeric. Their hands and feet have already been covered with swirling patterns of henna. “Of course I’m nervous, wouldn’t you be?” the older one says, irritated and frightened about what is about to happen to her. “We haven’t even seen our husbands, let alone met them.”
She explains how she loves her home, her sisters and her school, and now all that is to come to an end. “There’s no chance of going to school at my in-laws’ place. I’ll just cook and do the housework. Nothing else. I shall have to cover my head with a veil and do whatever my mother-in-law says.”
Child weddings are illegal in India. The Child Marriage Restraint Act, passed during British rule in 1929, specified that a girl must be 18 and a boy 21 before they can wed. Since independence in 1947, however, Indian governments have done little to implement the rule. During the wedding season, hundreds of mass ceremonies involving children as young as four take place across the country.
“I’ve got this thing,” Mr. Blagojevich is heard saying on one recording, according to the affidavit, later calling the seat “golden” and saying “I’m just not giving it up.” He added: “I can always use it. I can parachute me there.”
It’s fair to say that chute didn’t open and the political career of Illinois Governor Blagojevich has gone splat. And if that chute has opened, it’s about to land inside a Federal penitentiary. It’s also fair to say that the troubles of Rod Blagojevich are just beginning. Yesterday, he was the largely unknown though already under investigation for corruption governor of the nation’s fifth most populous state. Today, he is the public face of political corruption and a household name if even most of us can’t pronounce it correctly. It’s pronounced bluh-GOY-uh-vich.
There should be no tolerance within the Democratic party for Blagojevich, he should be jettisoned with yesterday’s trash. Today, Democrats from Harry Reid to Barack Obama called on Governor Blagojevich to resign and step aside.
Sixty years and yet so much more to do.