...may not be exaggerated. But the acknowledgement may be delayed.
David Carter Found Dead In Foreclosed Home As Many As Four Years After Suicide (VIDEO) Huffington Post
By Henry Bradford Feb 6

"Abandoned homes have become an increasingly common sight amidst a national foreclosure crisis. Yet what may lurk forgotten behind closed doors may be much worse than nothing at all.

"A Milwaukee real estate agent entered one such house last month after it was repossessed due to tax foreclosure -- the government can foreclose on a home if taxes and subsequent fees are not paid off within a designated time period -- to find a sight he's not likely to forget soon. The body of the owner David Carter was found on the stairs in a "nearly skeletonized" state after being left there undiscovered for what investigators believe to be up to four years, The Daily Mail reports."

Bradford ties in another story and, in doing so, he creates a new genre, theater of the absurd vérité: "A Florida woman is currently suing her lender, JPMorgan Chase, after the bank mistakenly declared her deceased in 2010, which she claimed ruined her credit score." Seriously, why should there even be a law suit? What is so wrong with JPMorgan that they would not settle this right away. Never mind justice and common decency, this makes them look even worse than they already look.

Welcome to Tuesday Muse, the successor to A Poem for Tuesday. Think of it as "A (Poem + Painting + Spoken Word + Music + Performance Art + Sculpture + Noise + Mash + Animation + Story + Photography + Public Art + Multimedia + Theater Performance + Anything Art) for Tuesday." Today: Playing for Change, whose muse builds a song by having a crew travel the world to record one stellar musician after another, sometimes in remote outdoor locations, in such a way that each musician can hear and play to what the others have done while adding his or her own piece. It's like building a choir a person at a time while leapfrogging assumed barriers of geography, genre, and culture. It's also grown to be about more than songs: PFC is now building music schools in impoverished locales and is sponsoring social-change concerts. Founder Mark Johnson explains here how PFC's recording process works. And here is their version of Gimme Shelter:

Recently a group of scientists at the Royal Society were asked by the UK government to investigate a range of "incapacitating chemical agents" and their uses. Worried about a 2009 shift by the government that relaxed the definitions of chemicals allowable for domestic law enforcement, the experts concluded:

that the Government may be preparing to exploit a loophole in the Chemical Weapons Convention allowing the use of incapacitating chemical agents for domestic law enforcement.

Kevin Drum:

The Corporation for Enterprise Development recently released a scorecard for all 50 states, and it has boatloads of useful information. That includes overall tax rates, where data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy shows that in the median state (Mississippi, as it turns out) the poorest 20 percent pay twice the tax rate of the top 1 percent. In the worst states, the poorest 20 percent pay five to six times the rate of the richest 1 percent. Lucky duckies indeed. There's not one single state with a tax system that's progressive.

Lt. Col Daniel L. Davis has caused a bit of a stir by taking to the pages of the Armed Forces Journal to accuse America's political and military leadership of lying about how well things are going in Afghanistan. His public statements are unusual in the extreme for a serving officer.

During his deployment last year, he writes:

I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.

Advocates of the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine have recently been agitating for a US-led, UN sanctioned military intervention in Syria. Neolibs like Anne-Marie Slaughter, Shadi Hamid and Nick Cohen, all of whom were gung-ho for intervention in Libya too, have pointed out that over 5,000 people have died in Syrian violence so far - and call the death toll sufficient to mobilize militaries and spend millions, perhaps billions, of dollars in order to try to halt the "massacre".

Seriously, how many Iranian "assets" can remain in the US after nearly 35 years of confrontation?

(photo courtesy)

So, I'm led to understand that last night, one group of talentless millionaires defeated another group of even less-talented millionaires, thus earning hundreds of millions of dollars for a cartel of socialist-billionaires. Even deeper irony is that the entire nation stopped for four hours (or more) to watch this spectacle, which included "entertainment" by yet another passel of millionaires on a broadcast that featured hundreds of millions of dollars spent not on improving the country, but on trying to segregate your pocket, green from white.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, By Chris Woods and Christina Lamb, February 4

The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.

The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a ‘targeted, focused effort’ that ‘has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.’

Speaking publicly for the first time on the controversial CIA drone strikes, Obama claimed last week they are used strictly to target terrorists, rejecting what he called ‘this perception we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly’.

‘Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties’, he told a questioner at an on-line forum. ‘This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists trying to go in and harm Americans’.

David D. Kirkpatrick | Cairo | Feb 5

New York Times -
Egypt’s military-led government said Sunday that it would put 19 Americans and two dozen others on trial in a politically charged criminal investigation into the foreign financing of nonprofit groups that has shaken the 30-year alliance between the United States and Egypt. ...

The prosecution could hardly have been better designed to provoke an American backlash. Although the charges against the 19 Americans are part of a broader crackdown on as many as nine nonprofit groups here, its most prominent targets are two American-financed groups with close ties to the Congressional leadership, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. Both are chartered to promote democracy abroad with nonpartisan training and election monitoring.

The Americans facing criminal charges include Sam LaHood, director of the Republican Institute’s Egypt operations. He is the son of Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation and a former Republican congressman from Illinois.

Over at my old place, Newshoggers, I have never missed a Blogroll Amnesty Day and I'm not about to now that I'm here at the Agonist.

I'll let skippy explain:

b.a.d. is the holiday wherein we ask everyone in blogtopia (and yes, we coined that phrase) to link to 5 smaller blogs w/less traffic than theirs (no bad jokes about no blogs having less traffic than yours, please).

It just goes on and on my friends.

The United States’ plan to wind down its combat role in Afghanistan a year earlier than expected relies on shifting responsibility to Special Operations forces that hunt insurgent leaders and train local troops, according to senior Pentagon officials and military officers. These forces could remain in the country well after the NATO mission ends in late 2014.

...Under the emerging plan, American conventional forces, focused on policing large parts of Afghanistan, will be the first to leave, while thousands of American Special Operations forces remain, making up an increasing percentage of the troops on the ground; their number may even grow.

Three things.

1) You just knew this whole new "combat mission ends in 2013, troops out by 2014" was election-year spin, didn't you?

>

And Dubya was the most rightwing Republican president. No surprise in either of those, eh?

As expected by many, Russia and China have refused to back even a watered-down UNSC resolution on Syria, the only two of 15 member states on the council to vote against the resolution.

Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said after the vote that the United States was “disgusted” by the Russian and Chinese vetoes. The council has “been held hostage by a couple of members,” she said, adding that “these members stand behind empty arguments and individual interests while seeking to strip” any resolution of meaningful terms.

From the NYT:

A record number of Afghan civilians were killed in the conflict here last year, the majority at the hands of the Taliban and other insurgent groups whose use of homemade bombs became more prevalent and whose suicide bombers killed more people each time, according to the annual United Nations report on civilian casualties.

Although the number killed — 3,021 civilians — represented a relatively small 8 percent increase in casualties over 2010, it was the fifth straight year in which civilian casualties rose. The overall trend suggested that the fighting was worsening and that, for all the talk about peace efforts and a drastic increase in the number of insurgents that NATO had killed and captured, day-to-day dangers for Afghan civilians were rising.

Here's the rub: the fact that most civilian casualties are caused by the insurgency doesn't matter. NATO and its allies are supposedly still there because they are protecting the Afghan populace so they get the blame from Afghans for failing to do so. That means they become ever more disenchanted with the coalition and ever more likely to aid the Taliban and other groups, enabling them to make more attacks that kill more civilians and thus driving the cycle ever further down. It's been that way for several years now.

That's just one of the reasons why "Hastening the day Americans stop dying for a lost cause is the right call".

Around here there is much consternation about why Obama hasn't started another war in Syria. No not a direct one but a Libyan NATO-style war. What's holding them up anyway?

Me, I figure that's it's just about oil. Or rather the lack thereof. But that's an easy armchair analysis. What I really want is something way more cynical. So a post in Counterpunch titled Cynicism Around Syria quickly grabbed my attention. And a subtitle of "Russia as Smokescreen" was more icing on the cake. It did not disappoint so I'm going to quote about a third here and mention that there are still additional good morsels in the rest.

...I think we can all (hopefully) get behind.

PS I work with Mayors Against Illegal Guns. And the ad is still funny :)

By now, you've no doubt heard about Facebook's IPO (intial public offering, or in lay parlance, going public.)

How big is this thing going to be? Well, put it this way: way back in the dim dark past of 2005, an artist was commissioned to paint a mural for the company headquarters.

Since Facebook hadn't even really become a national phenomenon beyond college campuses yet, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered the artist, local graffititian David Choe, the ludicrous option of stock options instead of cash. Two-tenths of one percent of the available shares.

Those options could be worth $200 million at execution, meaning the company could be valued as high as $100 billion dollars.

As the media continues to run lurid stories about perfidious Persians in what Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress describes as a "coercive public diplomacy campaign", it's worth examining our basic assumptions again. Does Iran want a nuke in the first place, is there the political backing for a strike to prevent it doing so, how easy would such an attack be to execute and what would be the blowback?

Congressman Kucinich writes at the HuffPo today:

The headline number from the Unemployment Report this morning showed 243,000 jobs were created, more than the highest estimated increase by any of the economists surveyed before the report was released (the average expected increase from the economist survey was 120,00 jobs). The unemployment rate fell to 8.3%, again lower than predicted, and certainly good news for President Obama. Job growth was nearly across the board – in retail, construction, manufacturing, business services, and the hotel and restaurant industry. You can believe all this if you want, or you can go into the details in the report for some interesting context.

Some good news.

"We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women's lives," a Komen statement said.

Nice to see that people power can still make a difference on occasion in this corporate oligarchy of ours.

Update Oops, not so fast. Greg Sargent and Sara Kliff are both skeptical about whether Komen's statement is anything more than a PR move.

Then there's this:

In addition to pulling funds from Planned Parenthood for The Susan G. Komen Foundation also decided to stop funding embryonic stem cell research centers making it fully transparent the organization has evolved from non-political non-profit to a partisan advocacy organization.

That means the loss of $3.75 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, $4.5 million to the University of Kansas Medical Center, $1 million to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, $1 million to the Society for Women’s Health Research, and $600,000 to Yale University. That’s a loss of nearly $12 million dollars in research money to eradicate breast cancer this year alone.

I hate when my optimism, scarce as it is, is so misplaced.

As the years-long drought in Texas subsides, I feel this would be a good time to remind everyone that water is not only precious, but scarce.

Indeed, Africa is seeing some of the worst droughts in recorded history. Drought doesn't only affect humanity, afflicting us with thirst, famine, and war, but wildlife too. And while the famine in Somalia (not directly water-related, but...) has been declared "over", countries like Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone face dismal prospects for the near future.

An Internet meme of which I am not aware.

Would one of you commentariat please be so kind as to enlighten me to this new trope?

TIA

The aftermath is never as full of rose petals and candy as neo-whatever advocates of the intervention told us it would be.

(Tripoli) - A Libyan diplomat who served as ambassador to France died less than 24 hours after he was detained by a Tripoli-based militia from the town of Zintan, Human Rights Watch said today. Dr. Omar Brebesh, who was detained on January 19, 2012, appears to have died from torture.

A preliminary autopsy report viewed by Human Rights Watch said the cause of death included multiple bodily injuries and fractured ribs. Photos of Brebesh's body, seen by Human Rights Watch, show welts, cuts, and the apparent removal of toenails, indicating that he was tortured prior to death. Human Rights Watch also read a report by the judicial police in Tripoli, which said that Brebesh had died from torture and that an unnamed suspect had confessed to killing him.