Remote control war – a look at the daily grind of Predator pilots

What's it like to kill human beings by dropping bombs with the push of buttons on your computer keyboard 7,000 miles away? Imaging doing this every work day, then driving home to hug your wife and kids every night. This video from FrontLine will give you a good idea of what it's like. Whatever your emotional reaction to this form of "warfare," you will find someone agreeing with you (and disagreeing with you) in the comments following the video. If our enemies were using robotic planes to drop bombs on American soil, I suspect that we'd be outraged, much more than by conventional warfare. This is certainly a sterile way of war, no matter how much the supervisors remind the pilots that they are killing human beings. If I understood why we are at "war" in Afghanistan and Iraq, maybe then I could understand whether these drones are furthering our "war objectives."

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What’s up with economic reform? Not enough.

At Alternet, you can read Art Levine's detailed account of legal corruption of the economic "reform." It's not pretty, and the good guys are losing many of the important battles. Here's a passage, but go read the whole thing--it's well written and critically important:

So, the sleek, blond J.P Morgan lobbyist in a smart gray suit set off by a brightly colored scarf was able to saunter in shortly before the doors opened for the hearing to see just how many more loopholes could be added. (She declined to identify herself.) Like the evicted family in Michael Moore's new film being hired by the bank to clean out their own home, the banking-industry lobbyists in Washington have at long last created the ultimate trickle-down effect from the bailouts: hiring the jobless ( for $11 to $35 an hour) to hold their places in line to make sure there's no effective federal crackdown preventing more job-destroying speculation in credit default swaps and other derivatives.

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Onion pundits hammer Biden for recent gaffes

Pundits from Onion Network News got fed up with a recent string of miscues by Vice-President Joe Biden.
Gaffe-Prone Biden Embarrasses Nation Yet Again By Sneezing During Meeting As you can see, the "pundits" from The Onion were actually hammering real life pundits, and had to work extra hard to parody the absurd.

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