Bush’s Failures, All in One Spot

Politics, ,

Brad Reed has a thorough breakdown of the Bush administration’s criminality and ineptitude in a  Alternet story, “The 10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Administration.” It’s depressing to look back at eight years of lows, but copious links and a quick-hit analysis do a good job of summing everything up.

Sometimes I think about the colossal task it”ll be to sum up for my children the immense awfulness of the Presidency. “We get it, we get it,” they’ll say, to which I’ll only be able to point back at resources like this and say, “No, you don’t get it at all.”

Fighting Presidential Lawlessness

Politics, , , , ,

Senator Chris Dodd gave a Congressional speech yesterday denouncing the Democratic capitulation on the recently introduced surveillance “compromise,” highlighting how expanded surveillance opportunities and no-questions-asked amnesty for telecommunications companies that illegally enabled unlawful spying are part and parcel of the Bush administration’s tapestry of misconduct. For those unfamiliar with the issue, the whole speech is worth reading to get a sense of why this latest bill matters.

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Salvation in Soccer

Humor, , , ,

The June 23 issue of Sports Illustrated has an amazing human-interest story by Gary Smith, “Alive and Kicking,” which chronicles  an Atlanta-based youth soccer team composed of children who are refugees from war zones in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The team has been organized and kept afloat by Luma Mufleh, an immigrant born to privilege in Jordan.

Smith does an excellent job of evoking the roughness of the children’s lives in refuge, highlighting traumatic pasts and still-evolving struggles to get by. Rough neighborhoods, racism and single working mothers are the norm for the team’s members. Mufleh begins to anchor the group after a chance encounter with some boys playing makeshift soccer outside a mosque. Adrift herself and estranged from her family, she turns her attachment to the kids into a larger mission to enable them to thrive.

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The Federal Budget in One Poster

Politics, ,

Graphic designer Jess Bachman has created a pretty amazing image that breaks down the discretionary budget for the federal government, from the $515 billion going to the Deparment of Defense to the $13 million going to the Office of Governmental Ethics (unsurprisingly, the latter is the smallest one on the board).

 

The visual design is striking. It’s also impressive how the poster crams a lot of detail into a small space. It’s perfect for starting an argument with your conservative uncle about which areas should be cut!

Comics Depict Desolation of Chinese Earthquakes

Comics, , ,

Chinese artist Coco Wang has written a series of comic strips featuring stories pulled from the rubble of the recent earthquakes in China. Most of the episodes center on people trapped beneath collapsed buildings; excruciating rescues, last-minute losses, and even incidents of parents shielding children with their own bodies are presented in heartbreaking detail.

The tone verges on mythical, and it can even veer into sentiment, but the situations depicted are rending, particularly since  many victims were children trapped in their schools. There’s some light humor to break the tension as well, with rescuers cracking jokes to keep victims awake. Sometimes they suceed; often they don’t.