apod

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091123.html

Goodbye Earth.

motherjonesfeed

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/11/out-iraq-gulf

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Despite recent large-scale insurgent suicide bombings that have killed scores of civilians and the fact that well over 100,000 US troops are still deployed in that country, coverage of the US war in Iraq has been largely replaced in the mainstream press by the (previously) "forgotten war" in Afghanistan. A major reason for this is the plan, developed at the end of the Bush years and confirmed by President Obama, to draw down US troops in Iraq to 50,000 by August 2010 and withdraw most of the remaining forces by December 2011.

Getting out of Iraq, however, doesn't mean getting out of the Middle East. For one thing, it's likely that a sizeable contingent of US forces will remain garrisoned on several large and remotely situated US bases in Iraq well past December 2011. Still others will be stationed close by—on bases throughout the region where, with little media attention since the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, construction to harden, expand, and upgrade US and allied facilities has gone on to this day.

motherjonesfeed

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2009/11/viggo-mortensen-king-road-aragorn

Anyone not living under a rock has probably seen previews for the big-screen version of Cormac McCarthy's postapocalyptic novel The Road, which hits theaters November 25. The film stars Viggo Mortensen as a nameless father struggling for survival alongside his boy, played by 13-year-old Australian TV actor Kodi Smit-McPhee. (Mortensen's real-life son—Henry, 21—is the product of his now-defunct marriage to Exene Cervenka, front woman of seminal Los Angeles punk band X.)

The word "actor" only begins to describe the many talents of 51-year-old Mortensen, who made his Hollywood debut as an Amish farmer in the 1985 Harrison Ford flick Witness. It would be another 16 years before his portrayal of Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy catapulted him to international stardom (and job security), but Mortensen has never had trouble keeping busy. Born to a Danish father and raised in South America, he's fluent in four languages (not counting the Elvish tongues) and conversational in others. He's a published poet, painter, fine arts photographer, and dabbler in musical projects—including Intelligence Failure, a collaboration with weirdo-guitarist Buckethead. He's also founder and editor of Perceval Press, a boutique publishing house that puts out mostly high-end art books.

To that résumé, you can add another title: political activist. An outspoken foe of the Iraq War, Mortensen actively campaigned for Dennis Kucinich during the 2008 primaries. He's also featured alongside Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, and others in The People Speak, a new documentary based on Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which debuts December 13 on the History Channel. As chance would have it, I caught up with Mortensen the morning that President Obama won his Nobel Peace Prize.

Mother Jones: What do you make of this morning's news about Obama?

Viggo Mortensen: There's a certain irony. He says he's committed to keeping his campaign promise of getting us out of Iraq as soon as it's possible—I don't know exactly what that means anymore. He's gone back on what he said about Guantánamo. He's gone back on what he said about the torture photographs. And he's quite hawkish on Afghanistan. I agree with Obama when he said this morning that he didn't deserve it. But I do like the fact that it seems to be, which he acknowledged, an award that carries with it a certain degree of expectation.

apod

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091122.html

What caused this outburst of V838 Mon?

apod

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091121.html

NGC 253: Dusty Island Universe

spinthemoon

We have a new porch spider. Only, this one doesn't actually build her web across the porch, which is nice. We still have to be careful approaching the front door, but at least there is a way to get in and out of the house after dark.

I don't know what happened to our old porch spider. She disappeared one night, and although I like to assume she simply moved on, I suspect she came to a bad spidery end.

Our old spider was an orb spider. She was very pretty. Our new spider is some kind I've never seen before. She's still pretty, but in a creepier way. Her body is about the size of a dime, and she's hairy.

I'm always impressed by the patience of our porch spider. Every night she spins an enormous web, and every morning she takes it down again. In between the spinning and taking down is a lot of sitting and waiting. There is a lesson there, I think. Of course, there's always the possibility that she's complaining and whining the whole time, and I just don't know it since I don't speak spider.

Anyway, here she is:

apod

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091120.html

This bright meteor streaked through dark

motherjonesfeed

http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2009/11/mojo-interview-malalai-joya

Malalai Joya has often been called the bravest woman in Afghanistan. Just 27 when she was elected in 2005, Joya has quickly become one of her country's fiercest critics. In print and in public, she decries widespread government corruption, brutal violence, and appalling conditions for women that persist eight years after the NATO invasion. Since she was thrown out of office in 2007 for a speech comparing parliament to a zoo, Joya has been in hiding, traveling disguised in a burka with the protection of several body guards. Now she's in the US, promoting her new book, Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out. Joya stopped by MoJo headquarters to discuss rumors of more troops, Hamid Karzai’s reelection, and the ongoing struggle for women's rights in Afghanistan.

Mother Jones: What do you think about the possibility of Obama's sending more troops to Afghanistan?

Malalai Joya: Unfortunately, Mr. Obama's policy is quite similar to the Bush administration's. They spend $165 million a day for war in Afghanistan, while for all of Afghanistan in a day, aid is $7 million. If Obama is really honest with the Afghani people, he must apologize and end this tragic drama of the so-called war on terror, end this occupation. Democracy never comes by the barrel of a gun, or by cluster bombs. Mr. Obama must stop arming the warlords. He must put pressure on neighboring countries, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan, not to support the Taliban and these warlords.

MoJo: Do you feel that things have changed under Obama?

MJ: Mr. Obama, no question he's different from Bush. But his foreign policy—what he is doing, tomorrow people will say he is worse than Bush. He started a war in Pakistan! And for this he gets the Nobel Peace Prize.

motherjonesfeed

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/11/sarah-palin-tito-builder-and-me

Well, I guess I've made it. Sort of. In Sarah Palin's book, Going Rogue, I have a cameo appearance on page 305. I learned of this not by reading the book—just haven't gotten around to it yet—but because Slate produced a tongue-in-cheek (but real) index for the index-free book. I'm listed under "haters, unnamed"—along with Andrew Sullivan and Ashley Judd. ("Haters, named" includes two Alaska-based critics of Palin—blogger Andrew Halcro and self-styled reform watchdog Andree Mcleod—and the Huffington Post.)

What drew me into Palin World was an encounter I had with a McCain-Palin supporter after a campaign rally in Virginia for John McCain two weeks before the 2008 presidential election. This fellow named Tito Munoz, who came to be known as Tito the Builder, was angry about press coverage of Joe Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber. A week earlier, Wurzelbacher had become a player in the campaign after questioning Barack Obama about his tax plan and suggesting Obama's policies could prevent him from buying the plumbing company he worked for.

In the intervening days, news reports had noted that Wurzelbacher had not registered to operate as a plumber, that he did not make enough money to acquire the plumbing business where he was employed, that he had not paid $1,182 in Ohio state income taxes, and that he would actually pay less in taxes under Obama's proposed tax plan than under McCain's. In her book, Palin says that she liked Wurzelbacher and that "our campaign quickly realized" that he "typified the everyday American laborer who...ought not to be punished by oppressive tax policies."

Palin accurately reports that Munoz, wearing a yellow hard hat and orange reflective vest, had come to that Virginia rally "mad as hell" at the media for having raised questions about Wurzelbacher. And she accurately notes—here's where I come in—that a "left-wing reporter from the magazine Mother Jones told Tito he didn't see anything wrong with the press coverage." That exchange was part of a feisty conversation between me, Munoz, and several other McCain-Palin supporters.  (You can watch it here or below.)

Palin and her cowriter, though, provide a skewed account. They note that a woman in the crowd, treating me as a representative of the entire news media, yelled, "Why is it that you can go and find out about Joe the Plumber's tax lien and when he divorced his wife and you can't tell me when Barack Obama met with William Ayers [the 1960s Weather Underground radical]? Why? Why could you not tell us that? Joe the Plumber is me!" And in Palin's account, Munoz piped up: "I am Joe the Plumber. You're attacking me."

What Palin leaves out is that as Munoz continued to complain that the media was not reporting on Obama's past, I pointed out to him that the most comprehensive article to date on Obama's relationship with Ayers was a long piece that had recently appeared in The New York Times, the ground zero of the liberal media conspiracy. Palin also neglected to note that when I told Munoz and his fellow McCainiacs that nonpartisan tax policy experts had concluded that Obama's tax plan would impose lower taxes on Americans making below $200,000 a year than McCain's proposal, Munoz and the others jeered, with one shouting, "Do you believe everything you read?" This was an indication that Munoz and his comrades were not in the mood for facts. And moments later—during another part of the conversation Palin does not chronicle—Munoz, referring to Obama, shouted, "Socialist, socialist!" (By the way, Munoz owns a construction company that has received a loan from the Small Business Administration and that has been registered as minority-owned in order to receive what some conservatives might call "affirmative-action" federal contracts.)

In writing about Munoz, Palin hails him as something of an American hero. She recalls that her campaign jumped at the chance to have him introduce her at a subsequent rally. But in her book, she really uses him—and my encounter with him—to demonstrate that she had the guts to go after Obama in a way McCain did not:

Tito the Builder sounded like the kind of guy who wasn't going to be told to sit down and shut up, something I'd basically been told to do when I spoke on the trail about Obama's associations with questionable characters, including Obama's long association with Bill Ayers.

</p>

Palin recalls that McCain campaign headquarters approved an Ayers-related soundbite for her to use: Obama's "palling around with terrorists." But after media commentators accused her of playing down-and-dirty politics, she grouses, "the folks there [at the McCain campaign] did little more than duck." Yet Palin notes that not only was she willing to continue this line of attack, she was eager to slam Obama for his relationship with "Jeremiah 'God Damn America' Wright." She writes, "I will forever question the campaign for prohibiting discussions of such associations."

Palin, no surprise, is unrepentant about her attempt to brand Obama as a pal-to-terrorists. And she's using Munoz to back her up, implying that he knew better than those wimpy McCain campaign strategists. If Palin does decide to run for president in 2012, perhaps she can bring Munoz aboard as Tito the Adviser.

You can follow David Corn's postings and media appearances via Twitter.

apod

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091119.html

Eerie spires of rock rise from shore of Mono Lake in the

motherjonesfeed

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/11/stimulus-site-criticism-legit

This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

Stimulus critics were abuzz this week flogging the federal Web site Recovery.gov for flaws in its first big data release. Problems ranged from confusing variation and gaps in job numbers to mistakes that put projects in nonexistent congressional districts to spending that never made it into the data.

Even stimulus backers demanded fixes. Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations and one of the chief architects of the nearly $800 billion stimulus package, demanded that the Obama administration “correct the ludicrous mistakes.”

Earl Devaney, the top stimulus watchdog charged with running Recovery.gov, downplayed the problems, saying he’s less interested in data glitches than in what’s happening with taxpayer money.

motherjonesfeed

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/11/afghan-speech-obama-should-give

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Sure, the quote in the over-title is only my fantasy. No one in Washington—no less President Obama—ever said, "This administration ended, rather than extended, two wars," and right now, it looks as if no one in an official capacity is likely to do so any time soon. It's common knowledge that a president—but above all a Democratic president—who tried to de-escalate a war like the one now expanding in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, and withdraw American troops, would be so much domestic political dead meat.

This everyday bit of engrained Washington wisdom is, in fact, based on not a shred of evidence in the historical record. We do, however, know something about what could happen to a president who escalated a counterinsurgency war: Lyndon Johnson comes to mind for expanding his inherited war in Vietnam out of fear that he would be labeled the president who "lost" that country to the communists (as Harry Truman had supposedly "lost" China). And then there was Vice President Hubert Humphrey who—incapable of rejecting Johnson's war policy—lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, a candidate pushing a fraudulent "peace with honor" formula for downsizing the war.

Still, we have no evidence about how American voters would deal with a president who didn't take the Johnson approach to a losing war. The only example might be John F. Kennedy, who reputedly pushed back against escalatory advice over Vietnam, and certainly did so against his military high command during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In both cases, however, he acted in private, offering quite a different face to the world.

motherjonesfeed

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/11/brodners-cartoon-du-jour-karzai-inauguration

...the oath was reportedly administered by good friend Rod Blagojevich. In a lighthearted moment the two exchanged the hair for the hat. Also in attendance (and up for high-level Cabinet posts): Alberto Fujimori, Robert Mugabe, and 17 Madoffs.

motherjonesfeed

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2009/11/trying-terrorists

This cartoon requires Macromedia's Flash Player. If you don't see the cartoon above, download the player here.

Mark Fiore is an editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a web site featuring his work.

apod

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091118.html

Why is there water on the Moon?