Glenn Greenwald points to a study that further documents the steady collapse of the US from within. One indicator is life expectancy but Greenwald points to many others.

In 1950, the United States was fifth among the leading industrialized nations with respect to female life expectancy at birth, surpassed only by Sweden, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands. The last available measure of female life expectancy had the United States ranked at forty-sixth in the world. As of September 23, 2010, the United States ranked forty-ninth for both male and female life expectancy combined.

The slide is quite rapid. In 1999, the US was 24th.

But not to worry. When it comes to incarcerating prisoners, selling arms, and starting cruel and unnecessary wars, we’re still #1! And we have risen to #5 in executions, just behind China, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Who would not want to be in such distinguished company?

Yes, believe it or not, a judge ordered a constitutional lawyer to jail because he refused to vocalize the Pledge of Allegiance, although he stood while others did so.

Judges do abuse the power they have in their courtrooms on occasion, treating it like their own private fiefdoms, but this is going too far. The Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that children could not be forced to recite the pledge but the judge thinks that adults can?

Glenn Greenwald provides further evidence of the country’s descent into one in which the rule of law and the constitution are treated as inconvenient irritants, to be ignored in the glorious and never-ending ‘war on terror’..

The expert panel appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to look into the deaths resulting from the Israeli attack on the flotilla of vessels bringing relief supplies to Gaza has issued its report on September 27. You can see my series of posts (scroll down) on this tragedy from June 1 through June 10. Scott Horton at Harper’s has read the report and says, “The persons who prepared this report are eminent figures with no obvious prejudices one way or the other on the Gaza controversy. Their report is a model of clarity and masters an impressive body of evidence.”

Horton flags this excerpt:

The circumstances of the killing of at least six of the passengers were in a manner consistent with an extra-legal, arbitrary and summary execution. Furkan Dogan and Ibrahim Bilgen were shot at near range while the victims were lying injured on the top deck. Cevdet Kiliçlar, Cengiz Akyüz, Cengiz Songür and Çetin Topçuoglu were shot on the bridge deck while not participating in activities that represented a threat to any Israeli soldier. In these instances and possibly other killings on the Mavi Marmara, Israeli forces carried out extra- legal, arbitrary and summary executions prohibited by international human rights law, specifically article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
…
two of the passengers killed on the top deck received wounds compatible with being shot at close range while lying on the ground: Furkan Dogan received a bullet in the face and Ibrahim Bilgen received a fatal wound from a soft baton round (beanbag) fired at such close proximity to his head that parts such as wadding penetrated his skull and entered his brain.

Considering that one of the dead (Furkan Dogan) was a US citizen, the lack of outrage from the Obama administration and the Congress and the silence of the media about the report is noteworthy.

Compare this with the fuss raised about the three Americans held by Iran for crossing into that country illegally, even though there is no indication that they were treated particularly badly and one was released on bail and allowed to leave the country for health reasons. Just imagine if Iran had done to them what Israel did to the people on the Mavi Marmara. We would be at war already.

The difference testifies to the fact that Israel can do what it likes to the US and its citizens or even its armed forces (as in the case of the USS Liberty) without fear of repercussions.

… would willfully and knowingly infect people with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge or consent?

The Tuskegee revelations were bad enough. One shrinks with horror at what other abominable past and present secret government programs will be revealed in future.

The denial of equal rights for gays is inexcusable. There is absolutely no justification for it. Homophobia seems to be entirely based on religion or sexual insecurity or both.

The ugly face of homophobia is visible in the vicious and disgusting campaign by the assistant attorney general of the state of Michigan against the president of the University of Michigan student council, as seen in this CNN interview (via Pharyngula.)

One can see within seconds that this guy is a really nasty piece of work. What drives people like this to obsess about other people’s sexuality? This guy is positively creepy.

Certain segments of the population seem to be much more homophobic than others. The Christian Science Monitor has an article that says that the allegations that Eddie Long, the anti-gay head of a megachurch in Atlanta, used his influence to entice four young men to perform sex acts on him, has brought the silent issue of rampant homophobia in the black community to the surface.

The number of prominent, religious, obsessively anti-gay people who turn out to be themselves closeted gays is quite impressive.

From the Rolling Stone of October 15, 2010.

It’s taken three trips to Kentucky, but I’m finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you’d expect: at a Sarah Palin rally.
…
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters.
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A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.
…
This, then, is the future of the Republican Party: Angry white voters hovering over their cash-stuffed mattresses with their kerosene lanterns, peering through the blinds at the oncoming hordes of suburban soccer moms they’ve mistaken for death-panel bureaucrats bent on exterminating anyone who isn’t an illegal alien or a Kenyan anti-colonialist.

You should read the whole thing.

We are often so focused on the big global issues that we can forget that what seems like small steps to us can make huge improvements in the lives of poor people around the world.