Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, news, etc.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Good Morning!
Sunflower "Goldie". August, 2012 by joanneleon
Summer laid her simple Hat
by Emily Dickinson
Summer laid her simple Hat
On its boundless Shelf --
Unobserved -- a Ribbon slipt,
Snatch it for yourself.
Summer laid her supple Glove
In its sylvan Drawer --
Wheresoe'er, or was she --
The demand of Awe?
News
Afghan Militants Hit US Military Chief's Plane
Insurgents fired rockets into an American base in Afghanistan and damaged the parked plane of the visiting chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, the U.S.-led military coalition said Tuesday. The general was safe in his quarters at the time but had to take another aircraft out of the country.
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Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack, which took place late Monday night at the Bagram Air Field outside Kabul, saying Dempsey's plane was targeted by insurgents "using exact information" about where it would be.
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Graybeal cast doubt on the idea that Dempsey's plane may have been hit by any precision attack. He said that insurgent rocket and mortar attacks are "not infrequent" at Bagram and that such fire most often comes from so far away that it's virtually impossible to hit specific targets.
US Drone Strikes Target Rescuers in Pakistan – and the West Stays Silent
Attacking rescuers – a tactic long deemed by the US a hallmark of terrorism – is now routinely used by the Obama administration
The US government has long maintained, reasonably enough, that a defining tactic of terrorism is to launch a follow-up attack aimed at those who go to the scene of the original attack to rescue the wounded and remove the dead. Morally, such methods have also been widely condemned by the west as a hallmark of savagery. Yet, as was demonstrated yet again this weekend in Pakistan, this has become one of the favorite tactics of the very same US government.
A 2004 official alert from the FBI warned that "terrorists may use secondary explosive devices to kill and injure emergency personnel responding to an initial attack"; the bulletin advised that such terror devices "are generally detonated less than one hour after initial attack, targeting first responders as well as the general population". Security experts have long noted that the evil of this tactic lies in its exploitation of the natural human tendency to go to the scene of an attack to provide aid to those who are injured, and is specifically potent for sowing terror by instilling in the population an expectation that attacks can, and likely will, occur again at any time and place: [ ... ]
Obama warns Assad U.S. could act
(Reuters) - U.S. forces could move against Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, President Barack Obama warned, notably if he deploys his chemical weapons against rebels trying to overthrow him.
In some of his strongest language yet on Syria, on a day when U.N. observers pulled out after a fruitless bid for peace and Assad's forces mounted new attacks, the U.S. leader said Assad faced "enormous consequences" if he crossed a "red line" of even moving unconventional weapons in a threatening manner.
The War in the Shadows
by Chris Hedges
The admission by Peter Torbiornsson that he unwittingly took the bomber with him to the press conference was a window into the sordid world of espionage, terrorism and assassination that was an intimate part of every conflict I covered. It exposed the cynicism of undercover operatives on all sides, men and women who lie and deceive for a living, who betray relationships, including between each other, who steal and who carry out murder. One knows them immediately. Their ideological allegiances do not matter. They have the faraway eyes of the disconnected, along with nebulous histories and suspicious and vague associations. They tell incongruous personal stories and practice small deceits that are part of a pathological inability to tell the truth. They can be personable, even charming, but they are also invariably vain, dishonest and sinister. They cannot be trusted. It does not matter what side they are on. They were all the same. Gangsters.
All states and armed groups recruit and use members of this underclass. These personalities gravitate to intelligence agencies, terrorist cells, homeland security, police departments, the special forces and revolutionary groups where they can live a life freed from moral and legal constraints. Right and wrong are banished from their vocabulary. They disdain the constraints of democracy. They live in this nebulous underworld to satisfy their lusts for power and violence. They have no interest in diplomacy and less in peace. Peace would put them out of business; for them it is simply the temporary absence of war, which they are sure is inevitable. Their job is to use violence to purge the world of evil. And in the United States they have taken as hostages our diplomatic service and our foreign policy establishment. The CIA has become a huge private army, as Chalmers Johnson pointed out in his book “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” that is “unaccountable to the Congress, the press or the public because everything it does is secret.” C. Wright Mills called the condition “military metaphysics”—“the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military.”
Occupy Activists Prepare to Protest Political Conventions
Occupy Wall Street activists are preparing to travel to Tampa and Charlotte for the upcoming Republican and Democratic conventions. The group is planning to charter busloads of protesters south as part of demonstrations beginning in Tampa on August 27.
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The biggest lessons learned by authorities following the WTO protests are that containment and pre-protest neutering of activist groups (preferably via slow bureaucratic suffocation) are the quickest, most sanitized way to kill a demonstration. But if that fails, spending around $50 million on “upgrades” including buying a tank works just as well to crush uprisings.
Federal planners gather rail-service ideas in Philly
A new plan for rail service along the Northeast Corridor will begin to take shape early next year.
Federal planners came to Philadelphia on Monday as part of a nine-city visit to gather ideas on how to remake the 457-mile corridor between Washington and Boston with updated equipment, more trains, new stations, possible new routes, and the prospect of high-speed trains capable of cutting current travel time in half.
The Federal Railroad Administration is in the early stages of a 38-month process to figure out how to improve rail travel on the corridor for the next 30 years.
Aetna to buy Coventry in Medicare, Medicaid expansion
(Reuters) - Health insurer Aetna Inc said on Monday that it would buy rival Coventry Health Care Inc for $5.6 billion to increase its share of the fast-growing, U.S. government-backed Medicare and Medicaid programs.
The purchase, which will add more than 5 million members to Aetna's ranks, comes just weeks after rival WellPoint Inc struck a deal to buy Amerigroup Corp in a major expansion of its Medicaid business, administering the government's health plan for the poor.
Ecuadoreans rally behind president over Assange asylum
(Reuters) - Hundreds of Ecuadoreans marched on Monday in support of the government's decision to grant asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a saga that could help President Rafael Correa win re-election.
Ecuador is outraged at Britain for threatening to enter its embassy in London where the Australian anti-secrecy campaigner -- faced with extradition to Sweden for questioning over rape and sexual assault accusations -- has taken refuge.
Blog Posts of Interest
The Evening Blues - 8-20-12 by joe shikspack
Political Prisoner #1: Don Siegelman by One Pissed Off Liberal
Resource list: LGBTQA Children's Literature by rserven
Sioux try to save sacred site in Black Hills from the auction bloc and developers who will follow by Meteor Blades
Raul Midon Sunshine
We are ready for some serious change. We are ready to take up the tools of a free and analytic press to peacefully undermine the stranglehold of the kleptocrats on our battered democracy. We are ready to expose and publicize their greed, lies and illegal machinations and hold their enablers in government and the media to account. Are you in?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead
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