Kristol: Budget Cuts ‘Would Decimate Our
Military,’ But ‘The Savings Are Tiny’

post from ThinkProgress on 06 January 2012 12:00:03 PM. © ThinkProgress

It was fairly easy to predict that the right wing would get hysterical after President Obama and his top defense advisers announced a new military strategy that would rely on a “leaner” force. While some like Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) have focused on the “myth” that the new strategy eliminates the military’s ability to fight two major wars at once (the New York Times notes the “two-wars” strategy “was always an artificial construct intended mainly to ensure the Pentagon got all it wanted”), others have advanced claims about the strategy that are “complete bullshit.”

Bill Kristol joined in last night on Fox News and offered his (albeit contradictory) two cents attack line. One the one hand, Kristol said that the cutbacks in military spending “would decimate our military” and then just moments later, he downplayed the cuts as a deficit reduction measure, saying they are “tiny”:

KRISTOL: This would decimate our military. It would weaken the United States of America. Let’s not kid ourselves. There is no magic. You have don’t cut the ground forces he wants to cut, cut our capacities around the world, tell allies, whoa, you know, you thought in the past ground troops could land if there was a problem. I’m not so sure anymore. [...]
It’s unbelievably irresponsible. The savings are tiny when it comes to the actual budget deficit. The highest number is $40 billion a year when he is running $1.5 trillion deficit when he wasted $800 billion on the stimulus, none of which went to the military. Doesn’t that tell you everything.

Watch the clip:

Max Boot says it’s “impossible” (impossible!) to cut $1 trillion from military spending over the next decade, although he doesn’t exactly say why (it’s actually very possible).

But Kristol’s back and forth highlights the fact that, as this blog has noted numerous times before, those opposed to eliminating wasteful military spending rely primarily on fear mongering, not facts. Taking a line from Kristol, “Doesn’t that tell you everything?”

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http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/01/06/399207/kristol-military-cuts-decimat
e-savings-tiny/

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Great Video of New Hampshire Farmer Trying to
Save Maple Syrup from Climate Change

post from ThinkProgress on 06 January 2012 12:00:03 PM. © ThinkProgress

In the past five decades, winter temperatures in the Northeastern U.S. have risen by 4 degrees F, causing noticeable changes in levels of snow and ice during the slowly shortening winter months. The trend was recently highlighted by 50 scientists in New Hampshire, who wrote an open letter to GOP candidates campaigning in the state, asking them to take global warming seriously.

Along with the impact to tourism and recreation, one of the region’s most culturally-significant products may also suffer from increasingly warm winters: Maple syrup. Producers are noticing shifts in the length of the tapping season, and thus the amount of sugars contained in spring sap dripping from maple trees.

The short documentary film below explores the impact that warmer temperatures are having on this industry. It profiles Martha Carlson, a long-time syrup producer who’s investigating what those changes mean for the future of maple syrup.

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http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/01/06/399193/video-new-hampshire-farmer-save-m
aple-syrup-climate-change/

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Former Gay Staffer Defends Santorum’s
Anti-Gay Views

post from ThinkProgress on 06 January 2012 12:00:03 PM. © ThinkProgress

Former Rick Santorum aide Robert Traynham, who was outed as gay in 2005, continues to defend Santorum’s social conservative views. In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews last night, Traynham downplayed the former Senator’s anti-gay views, claiming he has never condemned gay behavior and that the gay community only opposes him because “he speaks very passionately about the fact he believes that gays and lesbians should not marry.” Watch it:

Of course, contrary to Traynham’s claims, Santorum reiterated just this week that his Catholic faith teaches that “actions are the problem, not feelings,” calling it a “problem” when gay people act on their attractions. (HT: Towleroad.)

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/01/06/399121/former-gay-staffer-defends-santor
ums-anti-gay-views/

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Songs to Fight the Plutocracy By: Have You Been
to Jail for Justice

post from They gave us a republic... - Front Page on 06 January 2012 12:00:00 PM. © They gave us a republic... - Front Page

By @KYYellowDog

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video details and more

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheyGaveUsARepublic-FrontPage/~3/2wTF59V_WWI/songs
-to-fight-the-plutocracy-by-have-you-been-to-jail-for-justice

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How To Defeat Mitt Romney

post from DemConWatch on 06 January 2012 12:00:00 PM. © DemConWatch

If you're not a dog lover you know somebody that is. Watch this and pass it around. One dog was so mad that he started a website about it.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.DemocraticConventionWatch.com/diary/5013/how-to-defeat-mitt-romney

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Santorum Picks Up Steam in the Palmetto State

post from The American Prospect on 06 January 2012 11:54:51 AM. © The American Prospect

Judging from the latest Rasmussen poll of South Carolina Republicans, Rick Santorum?s near-win in Iowa has generated a huge amount of momentum for the former Pennsylvania senator.

Read The Full Article:
http://prospect.org/article/santorum-picks-steam-palmetto-state-0

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Take Time To Look At The Big Picture

post from Texas Liberal on 06 January 2012 11:44:36 AM. © Texas Liberal

Here is a picture I took in Houston a few days ago. It helps to stop and take a look at the big picture. I took this photo in Eleanor Tinsley Park.

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http://texasliberal.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/take-time-to-look-at-the-big-picture
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International Adoption or Child Trafficking Ask
Erin Siegal.

post from The American Prospect on 06 January 2012 11:36:55 AM. © The American Prospect

Between 1998 and 2008, nearly 30,000 Guatemalan-born children (mostly infants and toddlers) were adopted by U.S. parents. In some years, that meant that an astonishing one out of 100 children born in Guatemala was adopted by an American family. For most of that time, everyone but the prospective adoptive parents knew?or in some cases actively chose to ?unknow??that the country's international adoption system was a cesspool corruption and crime, and motivated by money. NGOs and news organizations reported in detail, repeatedly, that the country's babies were systematically being bought, coerced, or even kidnapped away from families that wanted to raise them. But because healthy babies and toddlers kept on coming at a regular pace that kept up with demand in America, and because powerful Guatemalans were getting enormously rich off the baby trade, the system did not shut down until January 1, 2008.

Finding Fernanda is a true-crime page-turner about two mothers?Betsy Emanuel, an American, and Mildred Alvarado, a Guatemalan?accidentally united by a horrible adoption kidnapping. First-time author Erin Siegal uses the moving story to deliver investigative reportage at its finest, examining in tremendous detail exactly what happened to Betsy, to Mildred, and to the daughter that both of them lost. In doing so, Siegal writes the definitive book on the Guatemalan international adoption system's endemic difficulties. In documenting exactly how Mildred Alvarado?s two youngest children were stolen, and by tracing Alvarado's desperate search to regain them, Siegal exposes how Guatemalan crime rings and official corruption enabled children to cross borders and change identities without their families? permission. And by showing how hard it was for Betsy Emanuel to find out what went wrong when she adopted Alvarado?s children, and how impossible it was for Florida to shut down Emanuel?s U.S. adoption agency, ?Celebrating Children??notorious for its involvement in suspect adoptions, and which Siegal definitively links to the Alvarado kidnapping?Siegal reveals the tremendous gaps in U.S. laws and regulations on international adoption.

Full disclosure: In 2009, soon after I published an article about troubling international adoptions, ?The Lie We Love,? in Foreign Policy, Siegal called me to discuss her work. I was impressed by her thoroughness and courage for reporting this story from one of the most dangerous countries in the Western hemisphere. Every time we talked, Erin was chasing down some detail or character; as far as I could tell, she read every document and talked with every source or expert even remotely connected to her project. Deeply struck by her indefatigable reporting and ambition, we brought her on as an unpaid fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where I was then associate director (and remain a senior fellow). I knew from listening to her that she would get the facts right. But since I never read her writing, I wondered whether Siegal could tell a story as well as she could unearth it.

Siegal can indeed tell a story, powerfully so. Finding Fernanda is an astonishing book, essential reading for anyone interested in Guatemala or in the ways international adoption can go wrong. She delivers clear, unsentimental, moving portraits of her real-life ?characters.? In reporting on a July 1999 U.N. Special Rapporteur?s investigation of the Guatemalan adoption system, she explains that the Rapporteur found that:

? a single Guatemalan woman had successfully given up thirty-three children for adoption over the course of three years. They were all supposed to have been her own biological children. No one caught the error because the woman had relinquished two children per month, the legal limit. Since Guatemalan authorities usually didn?t save documentation on children who left the country in adoption ? all thirty-three ?orphans? had been successfully adopted into the United States.

Siegal exposes the many different systems used to separate women from their children, such as the social workers, doctors, nurses, midwives, and employers who insisted that poor young women relinquish their babies to pay a debt, or who told young women that their children had died at birth. Her thoroughness makes it hard to refute when she writes, for instance, that ?ultimately, any child could be declared an orphan if strategic bribes reached the correct hands, according to Guatemalan government authorities, adoption lawyers, and private investigators.?

What?s especially damning is how much the U.S. knew about the Guatemalan baby trade. Using documents that she received under the Freedom of Information Act (after years of effort), Siegal reveals that as far back as 1995 the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala knew that birthmothers? lives were threatened if they tried to reclaim their children. She quotes cables in which Embassy officials worry that they were becoming

tacit accomplices by ignoring what is often right in front of us?. Are we not morally (if not legally) obligated to prevent what is otherwise clearly reprehsnible as well as criminal under any penal code?kidnapping, the illegal separation of biological parents from their children?

A decade later, little has changed. Siegal paraphrases and then quotes a 2008 U.S. Embassy memo:

For the whole country, just five police officers and one police vehicle were allocated to investigating human trafficking?. ?The overall culture of impunity and violence and fear of reprisal discouraged victims and witnesses from testifying and filing legal action.?

If I could wish for one change in the book, it might be a little more perspective. In her steady ?just the facts, ma?am? narrative, Siegal rarely pulls back to offer her interpretation of what it all means, leaving the accumulation of facts to speak for themselves. That?s pure investigative reporting. However, at times I wished for some explanatory journalism as well. While her portrait of the Guatemalan adoption system is appropriately damning?I honestly can?t imagine how it would be refuted, and am curious about how it's being received by the community of Americans who have adopted from Guatemala?she doesn?t offer any sense of where Guatemala fits into the larger and more varied picture of international adoption. Or rather, if I read her right, she seems to think that Guatemala represents most other systems as well. I don't believe that's true.

In my own reporting on the subject, I found other countries whose international adoption systems were troubling, but none as rotten as Guatemala's over such a long period of time. In the past decade, perhaps only Cambodia?s and Vietnam?s came close. When Siegal points out that the U.S. adoption agency that she has damningly linked to Mildred Alvarado's stolen daughters, Celebrate Children, is now working in Ethiopia, she seems to imply that adoptions from Ethiopia will inevitably become as corrupt as Guatemala's were. Again, I'm not sure that's true. There have been some serious and apparently widespread lapses in Ethiopia, but I believe the insider sources who tell me that there are genuine efforts underway now to clean things up. And adoption systems in other countries?Eastern European countries, say?have quite different pitfalls and strengths.

But these are small quibbles with an important and exciting book and author. Siegal gives a clear picture of a putatively humanitarian system when it is deeply distorted. I hope Finding Fernanda gets the attention it deserves. And I cannot wait to see what Siegal tackles next.

Below: Maria Fernando Alvarado's profile when Celebrate Children offered her for adoption. Photo by Erin Siegal.

Read The Full Article:
http://prospect.org/article/international-adoption-or-child-trafficking-ask-erin-
siegal

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Welcome to the Occupy Tacoma Camp A Brief tour

A $100 grocery gift card from Fire Dog Lake's occupy supply arrived just in time for the end of the holiday season at Occupy Tacoma. The camp, which is now the only full time occupation in western Washington State, was delighted to stock up on sorely[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/1g3LoLHZ8Xk/

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