Myanmar poet Saw Wai has been arrested as of Tuesday, for writing what at first glance seemed to be a standard love poem.  After passing the government censors and being approved for publication it found it’s way into newsstands, but it wasn’t long before the military junta was made aware that the poem was not a simple ode to love as it’s title (February the Fourteenth) and subject matter would suggest- but was in fact a statement against junta leader General Than Shwe.

The poem, it was found, can be read as an acrostic, meaning the first letter or word (word in this case) of each line can be taken to make a separate line.  The exact wording of the poem, and the subversive hidden message has been different in every article I’ve read, (and sadly I’ve been unable to find a full translation of the poem) but it is said to be about a man whose heart is broken over his love for a model, and the acrostic line breaks down to a statement of General Than Shwe being crazy with power.

The ruling military government in Myanmar (also known as Burma) has never hidden it’s practices of ruling with an iron fist, often arresting or killing those who stand against it’s authority.  Last year the world (sort of) watched as Buddhist monks marched in protest of the military junta, calling for democracy.  The people of Myanmar joined the monks and flooded the streets, but as the monks were locked in their temples, and the military struck down the demonstrators, the rebellion ended as quickly as it began.  These were not the first protests that had happened in the country, the junta took control in a coup in 1988 and shortly after Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi organized non-violent protests inspired by the likes of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, and in 1990 a democratic election was held in which Aung San Suu Kyi, at the time under house arrest, as she’s been for roughly 12 of the last 18 years, won the office, but the junta declared her ineligible, and remained in power.

I can’t help but be disgusted by most of the world’s apparent blind eye to the attrocities being committed in Myanmar, and especially our own country’s lack of interest- made all the more sad as we (and by “we” I mean the Bush Administration) parade around the Middle East making claims of “spreading democracy” to many countries that don’t even seem to want out idea of “freedom”, while there are citizens dying in the streets, crying out for their freedom from an oppresive rule, and we don’t even blink.

My heart goes out to them, and Saw Wai in particular.  As a poet, I wish I had even a portion of his courage to say something with purpose, no matter the consequence. 

Popularity: 4% [?]

There’s confusion in the south over the competition between Obama and Clinton.

Bill Clinton, that is.

It’s ultimate political tag teaming! As reported by the New York Times, Hillary is focusing on the west coast (California, Airzona, New Mexico, blah blah blah) and she’s sent her husband to South Carolina where he’s been praising the glory of his wife and slandering her main opponent.

Mr. Clinton will be in South Carolina every day until the primary, often joined by his daughter, Chelsea, as he courts fellow Southerners and black voters. He also attended services on Monday at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s old congregation; Mr. Obama spoke there on Sunday.

Mr. Clinton’s campaigning for his wife, which has included some of the most pointed attacks on Mr. Obama and his record on Iraq and other issues, drew criticism at the Ebenezer services on Monday from some Obama supporters, and well as from some black leaders in South Carolina.

Ladies and gentleman! The Clinton Tag team a la Mexican wrestling!

El Hurricano De La Falsificanion!
El Estupendo Hombre Blano!
Politica Sucia De La Furia!

Good luck, Obama. (errr… I mean, Buena suerte Obama!)

Popularity: 11% [?]

The Army aims to have at least 90% of all recruits possessing their High School diplomas.  Unfortunately, with the continuing wars, the prospects of war with Iran, and an amazingly competative business world, the best they were able to come up with this year was roughly 70%.  Of course, when paired with the increases in other allowances the Army has been making for new recruits, such as increases in waivers for criminals, the result- is a fighting force that will struggle to maintain it’s strength and quality.

The National Priorities Project said that Defense Department studies have shown that a high school diploma is an indicator of future success in the military, with about 80 percent of those with high school diplomas finishing the first term of enlistment and about half of the others making it that far. When recruits are unsuccessful in the Army, the service loses on its investment in training and has to recruit again.

Of course, the Army itself is still hopeful.

The Army previously acknowledged that it has not met the 90 percent mark since 2004, and yesterday officials at U.S. Army Recruiting Command disputed the group’s numbers but not the trend. They said that 79.1 percent of its active-duty recruits in 2007 had a high school diploma, down from 87 percent in 2005.

“It’s really an indication of the difficult recruiting environment we’re in, both with the impact of the ongoing wars, an economy competing for high school graduates, and a decline in the percentage of students who graduate from high school,” said Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the recruiting command. “But we’re not putting anyone in the Army that we don’t feel is qualified to serve as a soldier.”

I guess how it bodes for the Army in the long run remains to be seen. 

Popularity: 4% [?]

A film, people. He’s doing a film on Bush.

He’s tackled the assassination of John F. Kennedy and tumultuous presidency of Richard Nixon. Now Hollywood director Oliver Stone is preparing to take an in depth look at how President Bush came to power.

According to Daily Variety, Stone is in the process of developing a script about the current president that he hopes will hit theatres in time for the general election next fall.

By next fall?? Seriously? I wonder to myself what will be the advantage of releasing this film by next fall. Perhaps it’s to ride along with the cheers the American population will be shouting as Bush leaves the White House. Perhaps Stone just couldn’t hold it in a moment longer? I have a feeling people will be interested in viewing this movie for years to come. Hind site of the Bush years will formidable.  So why rush it?

Of course we must remember that Oliver Stone takes a massive amount of creative liberty with his movies. He almost single handedly brought JFK assassination conspiracies into the national consciousness. (A completely FALSE consciousness, I may add.)

Which angle does Stone say he’ll go with this movie?

“I want a fair, true portrait of the man. How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world? It’s like Frank Capra territory on one hand, but I’ll also cover the demons in his private life, his bouts with his dad and his conversion to Christianity, which explains a lot of where he is coming from. It includes his belief that God personally chose him to be president of the United States, and his coming into his own with the stunning, preemptive attack on Iraq,” he added.

Fiction or not, he’s sold me.

And which actor has Stone tapped to play Bush?

Josh Brolin. Guh??

Popularity: 5% [?]

So, there’s a new paranoia spreading about homosexual sex, and it’s link to disease. But is it justified? Not really.

On Monday, a team of researchers led by doctors from the University of California at San Francisco announced that gay men were “many times more likely than others” to acquire a new strain of drug-resistant staphylococcus, a nasty, fast-spreading and potential lethal bacteria known as MRSA USA300. And sure enough, the study, published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was quickly picked up by reporters round the world and across the Internet, including a London tabloid which dubbed the disease “the new H.I.V”

Well, then the crap kind’ve hit the fan, didn’t it? Because it opened the door for this-

The report also inadvertently offered ammunition for many antigay groups, including the conservative Concerned Women for America, which issued a release on Wednesday citing the “sexual deviancy” of gay men as leading to AIDS, syphilis and gonorrhea.

“The medical community has known for years that homosexual conduct, especially among males, creates a breeding ground for often deadly disease,” the release read.

Another group, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, also cited the report as a way of proving that “homosexual behavior is unhealthy.”

“Why aren’t all schoolchildren being taught that there are special health risks associated with homosexual behavior and that they should ‘just say no’ to homosexuality?” read a released posted on the group’s Web site.

Of course… what they’re not looking at is the fact that it’s not caused by sexual activity, nor is it carried exclusively by homosexuals.

Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which helped finance the study, affirmed on Wednesday that the disease was not sexually transmitted or limited to a certain type of person. It is transmitted through skin-to-skin contact, the agency said in a statement, and is widespread in hospitals and among hospital workers.

“These infections occur in men, women, adults, children and persons of all races and sexual orientations,” the statement read, adding that while the particular strain identified in the report had been found in gay men, it had also been found in people who were not gay.

So, a study in Atlanta finds that all sorts of people, regardless of orientation carry this strain of the disease, while a study of 9 hospitals in SFrancisco finds a higher population of gay men with it. Did anyone think to maybe consider the size of the homosexual population in San Francisco around these hospitals? I mean, maybe I’m just going on media influenced assumptions here… but it might have something to do with it. I dunno.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Lord, help us.

She generally stays well within her 23-year-old-girly box (FYI: McCain is 71 years old) only to occasionally enter that strange gray area of political intrigue, such as:

“I know [Dad] is not as sexy as Obama and interesting and young and fresh,” she told MTV. “I think Obama’s cute . . . but I definitely think [Dad] has an appeal.”

The scary thing is that there’s more than a handful of voters who will align themselves with this sort of prattle.

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you haven’t already heard, our economy sucks. We owe billions to foreign lenders. The dollar is so weak that the Euro, Canadian dollar, and Yen are flexing like Schwarzenegger compared to our Urkel.

Something has to be done. People are losing their homes. Their cars. Their jobs. What’s the solution?

Distribute another $150 billion of our governments (negative) money to the masses, says Bush.

It’ll come in the tune of a $500 tax rebate for individuals.

Bush’s urgent remarks gave fresh impetus to congressional leaders already hard at work on an economic rescue package that would include extra money for food stamps and jobless benefits in addition to tax rebates of hundreds of dollars each for millions of Americans. The hope is that people would immediately spend those rebates and give the economy a badly needed boost.

Forgive me if I’m a bit wary.

Bush has gone down the tax rebate road before. Back in 2001, he added refunds of up to $300 per individual and $600 per household as a recession-fighting element of the tax cut plan that had been the centerpiece of his 2000 campaign.

And apparently it’s part of his exit campaign too.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Returning to a topic that’s near and dear to our hearts, but hasn’t been anything near a focus for the news media for months now- Iraq’s Defense Minister has made a recent statement that Iraq’s military might be able to take over internal security (meaning worrying about the shit that’s happening in their own country and taking care of it themselves) by 2009, and handling the rest of the burden (all the cats who keep coming into Iraq to mess things up) by 2012.

In the second of two hearings this week focusing on the military situation in Iraq and the mission of American forces, Chairman Ike Skelton, a Democrat summed up a question many are asking about progress in Iraq’s security forces. “The question now is how do you sustain it? And part of that solution will depend on political progress in Iraq but part will depend on developing an effective non-sectarian Iraqi security force,” he said.

A tall order as all can surely recognize, and I for one am not holding my breath, but at the same time, I do have hope that maybe the people, and more specifically the gov’t and military of Iraq are ready and willing to accept the responcibility of taking care of their country.

But while Iraq may actually be tempering down, at least for us, the Middle East is still far from a mellow place. For example-

Israeli air strikes killed at least seven Palestinians, including a mother and child, in the Gaza Strip on Thursday as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed to wage a “war” to stop rocket attacks on the Jewish state.

The escalation in violence prompted Palestinian leaders to warn that renewed peace talks — spurred by last week’s visit by U.S. President George W. Bush — were at stake.

The latest in a series of air strikes killed two Hamas militants and wounded three others, Hamas said.

A prior Israeli air strike on a car in the Gaza Strip killed at least one Islamic Jihad militant, as well as a mother and child riding in a donkey cart, Palestinian hospital officials said. A third air strike killed a militant leader and his wife.

Well alright, great to hear those peace talks are working out, and everyone involved seems to be acting rationally here. Just awesome.

Oh hey, before I forget (like so many others seemed to have done for a while til it came to bite us all in the ass), Al-Qaeda is back to their old tricks of killing folks and blowing things up. You know, fun terrorist type stuff. Only this time, it’s not just another faceless nameless statistic that suffered their wrath… it’s… wait for it…

The CIA has concluded that members of al-Qaeda and allies of Pakistani tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud were responsible for last month’s assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and that they also stand behind a new wave of violence threatening that country’s stability, the agency’s director, Michael V. Hayden, said in an interview.

Offering the most definitive public assessment by a U.S. intelligence official, Hayden said Bhutto was killed by fighters allied with Mehsud, a tribal leader in northwestern Pakistan, with support from al-Qaeda’s terrorist network. That view mirrors the Pakistani government’s assertions.

The same alliance between local and international terrorists poses a grave risk to the government of President Pervez Musharraf, a close U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism, Hayden said in 45-minute interview with The Washington Post. “What you see is, I think, a change in the character of what’s going on there,” he said. “You’ve got this nexus now that probably was always there in latency but is now active: a nexus between al-Qaeda and various extremist and separatist groups.”

Hayden added, “It is clear that their intention is to continue to try to do harm to the Pakistani state as it currently exists.”

Kinda makes you wish we’d just stuck to going after them after 9-11 and kept that our main focus… doesn’t it?

But hey… the news isn’t all bad, after all- what kind’ve world would we be living in if the news was always bad?

One battle that might be drawing to a close is the Writer’s Guild against the Studios. As the Director’s Guild works out a deal with the big machine, many of the issues resolved pertain to the Writers as well… so maybe this could be winding down?

And a cease fire that seems to be a little more finalized came from the Democrats the other day.

A Democratic presidential debate unfolded with an exchange of pleasantries and acts of contrition among rivals on Tuesday as Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama promised to dispel a rancorous feud over race and gender that had threatened to divide the party and alienate voters.

It was a night of “John” and “Barack” and “Hillary,” soft voices, easy jokes and belly laughs. Even the normally pugnacious Tim Russert, one of the moderators, seemed subdued.

“We’re all family in the Democratic party,” Mrs. Clinton said, glancing toward her competitors who were seated closely around a table. “We are so different from the Republicans on all of these issues.”

Well, at least we’ll still get the Red vs Blue fight, cuz otherwise… how boring would the Presidential Race be? Right people?

Popularity: 8% [?]

….and wins?

I’m not sure anyone won this argument but at least the reporter made his point.Pay special attention to the brow beating Romney’s campaign spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom gave AP reported Glen Johnson after Romney walks off. The way I see it, Johnson was pointing out an obviously flawed statement from Romney. Apparently, Romney’s campaign spokesperson found it to be “unprofessional” of the reporter to call him out on a (dare I say) lie.

Honestly, I thought it was the job of a professional journalist to point out such blatantly obvious falsehoods. Then again, we are talking about the American media here. They’re just as guilty of “business as usual”. Kudos to Johnson for speaking up.

A partial transcript follows:

An Associated Press reporter following Romney’s campaign challenged his claim.

“That’s not true governor,” said Glen Johnson, a reporter with the AP. “That is not true. Ron Kaufman’s a lobbyist. How can you say that you don’t have lobbyists?”

Johnson was referring to Kaufman, a senior advisor to Romney, who has traveled extensively on the campaign.

Then, a heated exchange ensued between Romney and the reporter:

Romney: “Did you hear what I said? Did you hear what I said Glen?”

Johnson: “That you don’t have lobbyists running your campaign.”

Romney: “I said I don’t have lobbyists running my campaign and he’s not running my campaign.”

Johnson: “He’s one of your senior advisors.”

Romney began to argue that his campaign manager is Beth Myers, not Ron Kaufman.

Romney: “Beth Myers has been on the plane with me and Beth Myers is running my campaign.”

Johnson: “So Ron is just window dressing? He’s just a potted plant on your plane?”

Romney: “Ron is a wonderful friend. An advisor, he’s not paid as an advisor like many others. But I do not have lobbyists running my campaign. I appreciate that you think that’s funny but Ron Kaufman has not been any in on any of the senior strategy meetings of our campaign.”

Johnson pressed Romney about whether Kaufman had ever been in a debate strategy session.

Romney: “At any time, has he ever been in a debate session? Sure. Is that a senior strategy meeting?”

Romney suggested the reporter was out of line and the reporter suggested Romney wasn’t being truthful.

“Don’t be argumentative with the candidate,” Romney campaign spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom told the reporter.

Underlying the exchange is tension between Romney and some of the reporters covering his campaign, who have accused him of a “candor gap.”

Popularity: 3% [?]

There’s two stories about drugs that I picked up this early morning while writing under the mild influence of alcohol which, while acceptable in broad society and legallity, is still a drug, and I thought I might share them with you.

First off, Obama’s past drug use… still an issues, as noted by a question raised by a man at a Town Hall meeting in Nevada.

At a town hall meeting on a day that took Obama from Nevada to Los Angeles, a man who said he did not use illegal drugs wanted to know if Obama would end the “drug wars.”

“You’ve had experience yourself, where if you were arrested when you were a teenager, you would never be elected to the presidency,” the man said.

Obama did not acknowledge the personal reference. “I am not interested in legalizing drugs,” he said.

“What I am interested in is putting more of an emphasis on the public health approach to drugs and less on … incarceration.” He said too many “first-time nonviolent drug offenders” were locked up “instead of diverting them into programs where they can get treatment, and all we do is give them a master’s degree in criminality.”

Sounds like a good policy to me, and many would agree.  And, of course, Obama’s past admitted use of pot and coke as a teen, had he been busted, would have kept him from getting as far in the world as he has, so with that in mind- rehabbing and treatment does seem like a considerably better option than jail.  Of course, we’re still talking non-violent 1st time offenders, after that, then we’ll talk about jail. 

One type of drugs that won’t get you put into lock-up, and is easy to come by if you know the right dealer (or as some call them- therapists) are anti-depresants.  Which are now coming under fire due to the fact that many trial findings from their development were not being submitted when trying to get FDA approval.

The makers of antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs’ true effectiveness, a new analysis has found.

In published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but by a modest margin, concludes the new report, which appears Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Wow, so you’re telling me that not only are the drugs not always as effective on patients as they’re advertised to be… but also, much of the time just taking a sugar pill make people feel better when they really think they’re taking something that will make them feel better?  Like a lot of this depression might just be something in their mind that they’re dealing with, and not a chemical irregularity?  Well holy shit.

Oh, and while winter is still upon us, a note from the FDA to all you parents out there.  Don’t give your kids cold medicine when they’re all sniffly and such.  It might kill them.  No, seriously, that’s what they’re saying.

Parents should not give sniffling babies and toddlers over-the-counter cough and cold medicines — they’re too risky for children so young, the government will declare Thursday.

The Food and Drug Administration still hasn’t decided whether the remedies are appropriate for older children, officials said. Expect a decision on that by spring, the deadline necessary to notify manufacturers before they begin production for autumn’s cold season.

For now, the FDA is issuing a public health advisory to warn parents to avoid these drugs for children under age 2 “because serious and potentially life-threatening side effects can occur.”

See, told you.

So there you have it kids.  Remember, just say no to drugs.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to finish my rum and go to bed. 

Popularity: 4% [?]