. Read"War On Terror: Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell says closing the terrorist prison camp at Guantanamo would "make Americans less safe." He's right, but Republicans need to sharpen the point to win this key battle.
GOP opposition has put Democrats on the defensive, and the Obama administration so far is not budging from its promise to close Gitmo by the first of next year. The defense secretary says up to 100 detainees may be transferred to U.S. jails. And the attorney general wants to free and resettle at least 17 of them in the Washington suburbs..."
By Investors.com. Read more
"On Tuesday—after Democrats joined with Republicans in the Senate to vote against President Obama's request for $80 million to close the Guantanamo Bay prison—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters that he didn't want terrorist suspects in US prisons. Yet in the midst of scoring—or deflecting—a political point, Reid apparently forgot a basic fact: there are dozens of terrorists in US jails.
Senate Democrats, including Reid, moved to strip the Gitmo shutdown money after the Republicans initiated a scare campaign, warning that the worst will happen if Obama transfers Gitmo detainees to federal prison facilities in the United States. Looking for a winning political issue, Republican House members and senators have been sending letters to Obama and declaring, "Not in my state." Though Reid's home state of Nevada has no federal prisons, he joined this chorus, saying: "Part of what we don't want is [terrorists] be put in prisons in the United States. We don't want them around the United States."
By Mother Jones. Read more
"The Senate showed today that bringing Guantanamo detainees to the US is the ultimate NIMBY (not in my backyard issue).
The White House missed the warning signals on this one. As one Senate Democrat told me, it was a rare case where the Administration "drove in front of the headlights."
Can the White House turn this around? Not right now. But Senate sources from both parties say that there's still a chance the Senate will sign off on transferring some Guantanamo Bay detainees to U.S. prisons by year's end..."
By George Stephanopoulos. Watch more
”Nobody wants to have a detention center for terrorists in their backyard,” said John Yoo, the former Bush administration lawyer and an architect of the detainee policies. And Rush Limbaugh released a new edition of his Guantanamo Bay T-shirts with a new past-tense subtitle: “Club Gitmo - When America was safe.”
ByDavid M. Herszenhorn , DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK. Read more
"(WASHINGTON, D.C.) -- Smart growth, the impact of military base development, flood and natural disaster insurance, and widespread pine beetle infestation were just a few of the breadth of issues that Realtors shared during the national town hall meeting at the Land Use, Property Rights and Environment Forum today. The forum was part of the week-long Realtors Midyear Legislative Meetings & Trade Expo here this week. [...]
Stephanie King-Chahine of the Realtor Association of Greater Miami and the Beaches mentioned the delicate balance and challenges inherent in land use and development issues between Smart Growth initiatives, NIMBY-ism ("not in my backyard"), and outer ring development. "When you have Smart Growth initiatives and infill development, there are people in the community that don't want that development in their backyard," King-Chahine said. "When development then moves to the outer suburbs, people complain about urban sprawl."
By NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS. Read more
"Residents Associations take on a specific role inside the community, unlike Not-in-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) or single-issue campaigns, residents associations aim to represent the interests of a neighbourhood, or group of people in an area, to improve their own conditions. This is positive as it reflects some of the basic principals of libertarian socialism that we wish to promote. However, the quality of residents associations varies greatly. There are many examples of associations going along with council decisions that have subsequently been met with uproar by the community in which they are supposed to be based.
In light of this we argue for our members to be involved with their local residents associations, should they be sufficiently independent, and to take an active part in building them, facilitating their growth. In areas where associations do not exist, or associations are co-opted or dominated by undemocratic factions, new and independent associations should be set up to replace them..."
By Liberty&Solidarity. Read more
"Senate Republicans will send their colleagues off with a recess gift by week's end: A series of politically charged votes on Guantanamo.
The votes should provide an easy win for Republicans who have capitalized on the ultimate not-in-my-back-yard issue of whether to release Guantanamo detainees into U.S. custody. According to GOP aides, Sen. Jim Inhofe will offer at least one amendment that would block funding for closure of Guantanamo and also prohibit transfer of detainees to the United States court system..."
By Martin Kady. Read more
"Watching Nicholas Ray’s 1954 classic Western Johnny Guitar, I kept focusing on the antagonisms between Joan Crawford’s character Vienna and Mercedes McCambridge’s Emma Small as ones between developers and NIMBYs. The story is psychologically complex, conjuring objectively social and personally individual reasons for both the desire to maintain the status quo and the will to change it.
On the one hand, Emma Small’s security is threatened by change. She’s a big fish in a small pond, comfortably established as a landowner and cattle baron(ess). She has enough social status and power to boss the community’s menfolk around, too. No wonder she resists the changes that development would bring - and development is literally embodied in Joan Crawford’s Vienna. Vienna runs a saloon where social control lapses and norms break down through risk when patrons enjoy enough alcohol, entertainment, and gambling. Vienna is a risk-taker herself, and she’s not afraid to peddle risk. Like any developer worth his or her salt, she’s taking a huge risk when she stakes everything (including social goodwill) on her main gamble: that the railroad will come to the area. Should she win, she’ll develop the depot and upzone her lowly saloon into a key mercantile hub and infrastructure powerhouse.
Intertwined in that objective description, however, are forces fueled by desire. For example, Vienna has also successfully sold herself as a purveyor of glamour. In one scene, Emma verbally pistol-whips the all-male posse to stop playing with themselves and to hunt Vienna instead. She taunts them for believing that Vienna is somehow better quality, or that they, by associating with her, are improved. In not so many words, Emma reminds the men that Vienna is cheap and that they’re still just cowpokes - in other words, that change (for the men) is an illusion. They’re essentially still swine (reversing Circe’s trick) and should remember their place. Change is for tricksters; real people should be content with their lot, especially if it’s a relatively cozy and secure one. Real people don’t take risks, it seems. If you can avoid risk, you can avoid change.
And here’s where additional psychological complexity comes into play: the change that’s very close to home for Emma Small is a sexual one. Emma has convinced herself that an outlaw named The Dancin’ Kid is behind a stage coach robbery that killed her brother. A not-so-minor detail is that The Dancin’ Kid frequents Vienna’s saloon and occasionally shares Vienna’s bed. It’s through the body of The Dancin’ Kid that Emma’s fear of change multiplies in her own mind, eventually encompassing all change, whether social or personal. As Vienna puts it in answering Johnny Guitar’s question why Emma has it in for The Dancin’ Kid, “he makes her feel like a woman, and that scares her.” In fact, toward the end of the film, Emma puts a bullet through The Dancin’ Kid’s head, literally stopping change in its tracks …temporarily, at any rate..."
By Yule Heibel. Read more
"This is your new blog post. Click here and staYou may have read yesterday that Obama is going to continue using the military tribunals for a small number of prisoners, but he'll be giving them more legal rights than they had before. Did he just cave?rt typing, or drag in elements from the top bar. [...]
It appears we're having a case of "terrorist NIMBY." Let's prosecute them all, even if they're just innocent farmers, and lock 'em up forever, damn it! But not in my backyard, thank you very much. It seems Republicans and Democrats in Congress are afraid of having any of these terrah-ists shipped to prisons in their own states. Which means, of course, they'll all be shipped to DC, since we don't have any real representation in Congress. Of course, the joke then would be that every single member of Congress who didn't want these guys in their own backyard would in fact have them in their own backyard, in DC..."
By John Aravosis. Read more
Obama prometió cerrar Guantánamo en un año, prohibió la tortura, clausuró las cárceles secretas y anuló los dictámenes jurídicos que interpretaban torcidamente las convenciones de Ginebra. Pero cuando ha querido concretar su política antiterrorista ha sufrido un muy serio revés en el Congreso, donde ninguna de las dos cámaras ha querido aprobar los fondos para desmantelar Guantánamo y trasladar los presos peligrosos a instalaciones en territorio norteamericano. Los congresistas, en una actitud de populismo nimby (not in my backyard, es decir, no en mi patio trasero), rechazan el traslado de presos peligrosos a sus respectivos estados por los prejuicios electorales que pudiera causarles, ante el regocijo de los neocons. Unos y otros, en cambio, no tienen empacho en pedir a los europeos que aceptemos a más presos del limbo jurídico antillano.
By LLUÍS BASSETS. Read more
La campaña que desde hace unos años impulsa la industria de la energía atómica con objeto de vender el supuesto carácter “limpio” de su actividad ha reactivado al otrora poderoso movimiento antinuclear.
By ÓSCAR CHAVES. READ MORE
“Desde la Universidad de Turón, Luigi Bobbio añade que el fenómeno nimby es aún "muy difuso y heterogéneo en países como Italia y España". "Las plataformas son a la vez una señal del renacimiento de la democracia de base y una amenazadora manifestación de la antipolítica. Y no hay que olvidar que surgen por la incertidumbre creciente de una sociedad que se siente agredida por riesgos que cada vez controla menos", explica...”
By Claudi Pérez. Read more
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