A bit of this and that

Some stories that caught my eye during my Big Picture break...

-Army Guard units said not combat ready, according to Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum's testimony to Congress. The budget won't allow the military to complete the personnel training and equipment repairs and replacement that must be done when units return home after deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan, say Army officials. This was after his colleagues revealed that two-thirds of the ACTIVE Army's units are not combat ready either. Let's hope we don't have a real national emergency in the interim.

-While units are not combat ready, personnel stretched to the breaking point due to the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and military recruiters cutting corners to meet numbers, you'd think the military would welcome any qualified potential member into its ranks. But no, they insist on purging qualified gay soldiers from the ranks under the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' farce. The number of gays discharged from the armed forces in 2005 increased 11 percent from the year before. Some 11,000 of 'our heroes' have been kicked out of the military solely because of their sexual orientation since this ridiculous policy was implemented. Maybe instead of going after soldiers for being gay, they should focus more on rooting out rape and other sexual assault. Maybe they should focus on actions instead of beliefs.

-One gutsy US Military Academy student wrote a controversial thesis challenging 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.' He rightly argued that the policy was not only immoral but harmed the Army. To its credit, West Point gave the cadet an award for the best senior thesis in the art, philosophy and literature major in the academy's English department. So maybe there is hope that the arguments against this counterproductive policy will get a fair hearing.

-The far right attacks on al-Jazeera have baffled me. Well, they don't baffle me so much as they further expose the far right's well-known contempt for a free and independent press. When al-Jazeera first appeared, it was widely praised by the west. It was praised because for the first time, there was a serious and credibile alternative to the state-controlled broadcasters that dominate the Middle East. Al-Jazeera regularly hosted talk shows and other shows which featured critics of the various Arab dictatorships and were widely vilified in the official state media outlets for exactly that reason. In many ways, the arrival of al-Jazeera was one of the most important things to happen in the Middle East in the last 10 years before it introduced the concept of (gasp) criticizing your government. To a large extent, al-Jazeera is the democratic reflection of Arab street, the first true pan-Arabic forum for exchanging ideas. American officials rightly praised this. But once al-Jazeera started offering criticisms the American government's foreign policies, the 'democracy' advocates of the neo-con charade flipped out. Suddenly, al-Jazeera wasn't the embodiment of a free press or the new Middle East; it was bin Laden's mouthpiece. Some can never break the simplistic 'either you're with us or you're with the terrorists' dichotomy. Yes, al-Jazeera reflects the cultural assumptions of its viewership just as any commercial network in any country does. A good piece in Foreign Policy systematically rubbishes the neo-con attacks on the network. Al Jazeera’s programs about Western politics have done more to inform Arabs about democracy than any nation or station. Why? Because it has credibility. It has credibility because it's not a mouthpiece of Arab governments. It would lose that credibility if it became a mouthpiece of the Bush administration.

-Maybe al-Jazeera were more sycophantic to the Bush administration like Fox News (sic), the far right wouldn't be so upset. After all, two Fox news producers recently resigned because what they consider to be the channel's grotestquely biased coverage of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. In their resignation letter, they wrote to their former bosses, "Not only are you an instrument of the Bush White House, and Israeli propaganda, you are war mongers with no sense of decency, nor professionalism." Bear in mind, these aren't liberal activists but people who know FNC from the inside.

-Al-Jazeera is even trumping Rupert Murdoch in England. The Arabic network's English service is increasingly drawing viewers away from Murdoch's Sky Sports because of its better coverage of English soccer.

-Another conservative boogeyman is Venezuela's democratically-elected leader Hugo Chavez. I've never been a huge fan of Chavez, simply because of my deep suspicious of populist demagogues who shroud themselves in a cult of personality. His frequent attacks on the United States seem more designed to bring attention to himself and boost his own ego than anything else. Which is not to say his antipathy toward US government policies is irrational; the Bush administration did back a coup to topple the Venezuelan president (further hypocrisy from the so-called neo-con 'democracy' advocates). Despite my contempt for el presidente's flamboyance, life is slowly improving for the oil-rich country's large masses of poor people because of his government's policies. A good article in AlterNet takes a look a Venezuela which is more than just Hugo, Hugo, Hugo. In rhetoric, you could call Chavez the Western Hemisphere's Robert Mugabe. But unlike the Zimbabwean dictator, Hugo has actually improved his country's standard of living.

-Finally, props to New York Gov. George Pataki for signing a bill that strengthens the state's freedom of information law (FOIL). In the past, municipalities could deny FOIL requests arbitrarily without consequence. For example, when the Fort Ann town government denied a FOIL request about a destroyed dam based on bogus 'security' reasons. Now, governments could be fined for such obstructionism and coverups if they had no 'reasonable basis for denying access' to public records. The state's newspapers will see it as a victory as they editorialized heavily encouraging Pataki to sign the bill.