Author: Madman in the Marketplace

Liberal Street Fighter Oh, what fragile and delicate paper-thin epidermis the Bully Right has: IS THERE NO LEARNING CURVE IN POLITICS? [Kathryn Jean Lopez] I’m catching a little more of the Rosa Parks funeral on CSPAN...

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In music, the Liberal Street Fighters enjoy themselves I had a good day on Saturday. It was a beautiful fall day, and I’d had my fill of “Fitzmas”, of disappointment, of the howling void that is political...

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“Birds do it, bees do it, Liberal Street Fighters do it, let’s do it, lets fall in love!”

Alexander Sanger was in town recently for a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the WI Chapter of Planned Parenthood, and is interviewed by Lisa Kaiser in the latest issue of Milwaukee’s independent paper, the Shepherd Express:

Shepherd: What aspects of your grandmother’s legacy are still alive in Planned Parenthood today?

Sanger: Her legacy is everywhere. She was a fighter who had to face down fundamentalist Protestants and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. She was intrepid and fearless and an advocate for those who were in desperate need of her services, who were disenfranchised, poor, girls who weren’t part of the system, who were immigrants, uninsured. These women’s needs are as great today as they were in my grandmother’s time. The services provided by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin as well as in the rest of the country are vital to the well-being of women.

Shepherd: Have we made progress since her time?

Sanger: No, which is why I wrote the book. I think my grandmother would not be surprised by the state we find ourselves in. She always knew that resistance would be there fighting back, that we would have to fight to stand our ground and fight even harder to get ahead. She fought for the use of birth control. She had nothing to do with abortion.

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he wrote. “I shall be looking over you. And you will hear me from time to time on the gentle breeze that sounds at night, and in the rustle of leaves.”

Bob Herbert highlights this final goodbye from Sgt. Anthony G. Jones, a soldier fallen in Iraq, to his wife, the mother of his newborn child, in his stinging rebuke of the criminals responsible for the senseless slaughter ongoing in Iraq:

Liberal Street Fighter

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Light a candle – Liberal Street Fighter

Bigger, Stronger Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths

By John Ward Anderson, Steve Fainaru and Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 26, 2005; A01

BAGHDAD, Oct. 25 — After 31 months of fighting in Iraq, more than half of all American fatalities are now being caused by powerful roadside bombs that blast fiery, lethal shrapnel into the cabins of armored vehicles, confronting every patrol with an unseen, menacing adversary that is accelerating the U.S. death toll.

U.S. military officials, analysts and militants themselves say insurgents have learned to adapt to U.S. defensive measures by using bigger, more sophisticated and better-concealed bombs known officially as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. They are sometimes made with multiple artillery shells and Iranian TNT, sometimes disguised as bricks, boosted with rocket propellant, and detonated by a cell phone or a garage door opener.

The bombs range from massive explosives capable of destroying five-ton vehicles to precision “shaped charges” that bore softball-size holes through thick armor, the main defense of troops in the field, and they are becoming a key factor in the fast-rising U.S. death toll.

It took about 18 months from the start of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq to reach 1,000 U.S. deaths; it took less than 13 months to reach 1,000 more. A major reason for the surge, statistics show, is the insurgency’s embrace of IEDs, together with the military’s inability to detect them.

While the criminal Bush Administration repeats the blunders of the past, it seems an insurgency in Iraq is proving to be a veritable graduate school in the art of inflicting death by explosive. The death toll from IED’s is rising, both of “coalition” troops and Iraqi civilians and officials.

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