Broken in Explorer

Waveflux and Internet Explorer don’t get along so good, apparently. Not sure when this happened, as I don’t use IE myself. It wasn’t always broken in IE, that much I know.

I suppose I could try to fix it. I’m more of a mind to change it. That’s what I’ll do, then.

Apologies to all IE users. Things will get better. Sometime this weekend, luck holding.

Vet Net, “Unsung,” and 2000 signatures

Chuc Smith of Veterans for Peace, who co-hosted the airing of Vet Net (station KDHX) in which I was a guest, is pleased to report that the show is now available in streaming audio. It can also be downloaded as a podcast. Our show on LaVena Johnson is the first one available. Get it here!

Last weekend, many visitors came to the petition site by way of an impassioned piece on the LaVena Johnson case posted at Welcome to Pottersville. It was heartening to read, and a fine example of the writing and advocacy many others are doing on behalf of LaVena’s family.

LaVena’s death just eight days shy of her 20th birthday would be an excellent counter recruiting commercial as to why you should do everything in your power to keep your daughter from enlisting. The straight A student, who wasn’t ready for college right out of high school, wanted to travel, earn money for college for later. She was seduced by the siren call of a recruiter at Hazelwood High School who told her only what he wanted her to hear, what she wanted to hear. After her funeral, her father went through her drawer and found a recruiting brochure that said, “Earn $25,000 toward college.” [...]

Gone now are the pie in the sky promises of college and $25,000 for it. Now, her usefulness at an end, the Army cannot and will not even tell her family the truth about her death. Here’s what they will talk about: When LeKesha Johnson, the youngest of the five Johnson kids and the sole surviving daughter, became a senior, the Army began calling the family. When the Johnsons finally told them that they’d already lost a daughter in Iraq and that no one else would be enlisting, the calls kept coming, anyway. Back then, the Johnsons didn’t know they could opt out and prevent the DoD from using No Child Left Behind to get their contact information. Now they know but only too late.

I recommend everyone to read the post in its entirety. Heartfelt thanks to the author, who goes by the non de plume “jurassicpork.” I will gratefully post his actual name here should he grant his permission.

Last night the number of signatures on the LaVena Johnson petition passed the threshold of two thousand. Each name on this list, every concerned person, is valued and important.

Technorati Tags: LaVena Johnson, Iraq

Getting out from under

Have been really busy at work and occupied at home, which accounts for the relative scarcity of posts here and at affiliated weblogs. The workload is not likely to change soon, but blogging will break through the clouds like sunshine, or something, nevertheless.

Richardson has self-esteem issues

For any self-respecting presidential campaign, this is really kind of pathetic:

Richardson Seeks Clinton Scraps

According to the New York Observer, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) is pursuing a second choice strategy in his presidential campaign fundraising.

Said Richardson: “I appeal to funders that say, ‘I’m for Senator Clinton,’ and I say, ‘O.K., that’s fine. But make me your second choice. Help me out too.’”

A more generous viewpoint might see this pitch as frank and realistic, or even engagingly self-deprecating in a Richard Lewis kind of way…but where’s the appeal for cash-flush donors in bankrolling a candidate who declares himself second-rate? Governor Richardson needs a crash-course in selling that touted resume of his.

Failure of duty

The struggle of one family can give light to another

The Army’s belated and begrudged findings of responsibility in the case of Army Ranger Cpl. Pat Tillman should satisfy no one. They certainly do not satisfy Tillman’s family, which responded with a statement calling for a Congressional investigation:

The characterization of criminal negligence, professional misconduct, battlefield incompetence, concealment and destruction of evidence, deliberate deception, and conspiracy to deceive are not “missteps.”

These actions are malfeasance.

In our opinion, this attempt to impose closure by slapping the wrists of a few officers and enlisted men is yet another bureaucratic entrenchment.

The official insult atop the grevious injury done this military family well warrants a cold and justified anger.

In three years of struggling with the Pentagon’s public affairs apparatus, we have never been dealt with honestly.

We will now shift [our] efforts into Congress, to which we appeal for investigation.

Perhaps subpoenas are necessary to elicit candor and accuracy from the military.

Candor and accuracy which even the Army admits is the very least that it owes to service familes:

Acting Army Secretary Pete Geren apologized to Tillman’s family for the delay in letting them know about the circumstances of his death.

“We as an Army failed in our duty to the Tillman family, the duty we owe to all families of our fallen soldiers — give them the truth, the best we know it, as fast as we can,” he said.

It is just possible, however, that this one family’s painful struggle can give light to other families (as we have discussed here) laboring in the darkness of misinformation, deception, and disregard by the military.

We do not think that Pat’s notoriety - about which Pat himself was self-effacing - gives him a special qualification for Congressional attention.

But if that notoriety can serve as a catalyst to open dozens of cases - many of the families known to us - of troops who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by fratricide, and whose families, like us, were deceived about the circumstances of these deaths.

We believe Pat would approve of this.

It will take many voices together - yours and mine - to provide that needed catalyst toward truth. Begin now by signing the LaVena Johnson petition, and learn more about her story and actions you can take on behalf of her family. And, again, thank you.

Technorati Tags: LaVena Johnson, Pat Tillman, Iraq, Afghanistan

Message to the Missouri delegation in Congress

We are informed that members of Senate and House committees like hearing from real people.

This is fortunate for you members of the Missouri delegation to Congress, as there are some real people - the family of Pfc. LaVena Johnson - who would like to talk to you.

In particular:

Senator Claire McCaskill, member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Senator Kit Bond, vice-chair of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

Representative Ike Skelton, chair of the House Armed Services Committee.

Representative Todd Akin, member of the House Armed Services Committee.

Representative William Lacy Clay, who has already expressed an interest in the matter of LaVena Johnson’s death and its subsequent investigation.

We hope that you will act on behalf of a grieving Missouri family, a service family that has lost its daughter, and compel the Army to reopen the investigation into this young woman’s death.

(Readers who are constituents of any of the representatives above are asked to contact them with your concerns regarding Pfc. LaVena Johnson. All Missouri citizens reading this are asked to contact the two senators listed above. Thank you.)

Some discussions are not as useful as others

Those meddling blogging kids

Using today and tomorrow as a fresh-start, clearing-the-desk period, an opportunity to pick up on thoughts left abandoned over the last couple of weeks. One such story is the decidedly reactionary guest commentary on blogs published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch a couple of weeks ago. I snarked at the time that a pro-blogging piece in that paper would be an unlikely occurence, but mirabile dictu, the P-D offered one up, courtesy of another guest:

My problem with Anderson’s argument is two-fold. First, his tone is that of the village scold, berating his fellow citizens for not doing more and for wasting their time on the Internet posting their opinions. Given that a majority of bloggers are under 30, is he saying that teenagers and young adults waste a lot of time, or is he singling out bloggers generally for scorn?

Casting stones at one form of leisure activity is dubious at best, and it’s worth noting that today’s youth devote a greater percentage of their time to volunteer work than any other generation.

More importantly, though, the proliferation of Internet blogs is a sign of a healthy populace involved in an almost limitless range of political and commercial discussions.

Kudos to Jim Durbin, a business blogging expert, for delivering a much-deserved knockdown to the original commenter’s argument; the sad thing is that such a response was necessary in the pages of a major newspaper as, reputedly, the Post-Dispatch. Word arrives slowly to we of the heartland, but it’s rumored that some newspapers have acknowledged the public interest in and potential of blogging as established fact. You’re not likely to read many antiquated “blogging is bad!” commentaries in such papers - guest-written or not - because those papers understand that the story has long since moved on.

Guest commentaries on the relative merits of VHS and Betamax would have been just as timely an exchange as the blogging pieces in the Post-Dispatch.

Some might argue that a newspaper with its own in-house blogging effort, such as the P-D, actually does “get” the significance of blogging. Those folks are invited to compare the Post-Dispatch with some other papers engaged with blogging.

To paraphrase a now-departed secretary of defense, you apprehend the world with the newspaper you have. For the readers of the P-D, that world is a sleepy, slow-moving place indeed.

(Thanks to correspondent - and blogger - Camera Obscura to tipping me to the Durbin piece.)

Crocodile hunter

In which the wearing of crocodile skin is taken to a disturbing new level:

A woman was caught with three crocodiles strapped to her waist at the Gaza-Egypt border crossing after guards noticed that she looked “strangely fat,” officials said.

The woman’s odd shape raised suspicions at the Rafah terminal in southern Gaza, and a body search by a female border guard turned up the animals, each about 50 centimeters (20 inches) long, concealed underneath her loose robe, according to Maria Telleria, spokeswoman for the European observers who run the crossing. [...]

“The policewoman screamed and ran out of the room, and then women began screaming and panicking when they heard,” Telleria said. But when the hysteria died down, she said, “everybody was admiring a woman who is able to tie crocodiles to her body.”

Haute couture indeed!

Look for this trend to hit the runways of Paris shortly. Nothing says “body confidence” like wearing live reptiles.

The word continues to spread

I tried last week to tally up all of the blogs, sites, and forums that have made a point of discussing the LaVena Johnson story or have linked to the petition website, but I soon realized that I’d never have time to count them all. The response to the story has been greatly encouraging, and the best I can manage for most of these kind souls is a blanket-yet-heartfelt thank you.

I would like to express particular thanks, however, to those people that have written about LaVena in direct response to a request. Oliver Willis was not only good enough to write about LaVena last week, but made that topic the first featured after his blog’s redesign. Steve Benes of Salon’s The Blog Report literally put the LaVena Johnson story on the radar today by linking to this weekend’s AlterNet piece. Many thanks to them both.

Technorati Tags: LaVena Johnson, Iraq

Busy enough, thanks

Waveflux might look sleepily inactive on this pleasant Sunday, but don’t believe your lying eyes. Your humble correspodent is engaged in weblog maintenance, LaVena Johnson petition outreach, and other chores that wouldn’t need doing had Tim Berners-Lee not invented the Web.

Hope you’re enjoying your weekend. Regular blogging on all fronts resumes tomorrow.

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