The story of the night is not the outcome of the Arkansas Democratic senate primary but the South Carolinian one. A black, unemployed veteran, who raised no money and spent no money, had no website, no signs, no ads, and didn't even file mandatory FEC reports, is destroying Vic Rawl. Vic Rawl has a website. Vic Rawl has a political biography. He would have been an underdog against Jim DeMint, but he would have been a serious challenger. It's unclear how this all happened, but people have been wondering about the mysterious Alvin Greene ever since the Columbia Free Times wrote about him on May 19th.

At the end of a dirt driveway off a dusty highway in rural Clarendon County, just outside the town of Manning, a lawn overgrown with weeds sports no campaign sign for the man living in a house there who has filed to run as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate.

The candidate, a 32-year-old unemployed black Army veteran named Alvin Greene, walked into the state Democratic Party headquarters in March with a personal check for $10,400. He said he wanted to become South Carolina�s U.S. senator.

Needless to say, Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler was a bit surprised.

Fowler had never met Greene before, she says, and the party isn�t in the habit of taking personal checks from candidates filing for office. She told Greene that he�d have to start a campaign account if he wanted to run. She asked him if he thought it was the best way to invest more than $10,000 if he was unemployed.

Several hours later, Greene came back with a campaign check. The party accepted it, and Greene became an official candidate for the U.S. Senate. He was eager to have his picture put on the party�s website to show he had filed, says state Democratic Party executive director Jay Parmley.

But that was the extent of his campaign.

Though he says he is running, and running to win, Greene has not taken the steps one might expect from an active candidate � some of them required by law.

He has not filed with the Secretary of the Senate, according to its Washington, D.C. office. Nor has he filed any disclosure reports with the Federal Election Commission, which the FEC requires by law.

No campaign signs appear around the area where he lives, and Greene admits he hasn�t taken in any donations.

When the South Carolina Democratic Party held its convention in April, Greene did not show up.

Reached by phone May 12, and asked how he thought his campaign was going, Greene said, �So far, so good.�

And the amazing thing? He was right. He won the election.

I don't know which Republican handed this man $10,400 to file as a candidate, or how much extra cash he received to carry out the task. But I don't imagine that they ever imagined he'd actually win. This has all the makings of a movie script. All Alvin Greene has to do now is employ the same brilliant campaign strategy to unseat teabagger extraordinaire Jim DeMint. He can just hole up in his parents' house, leave the lawn unmowed and offer down home political advice to any reporters who call him on the phone.

Asked if he thought it was a good investment to spend so much of his own money in a two-way Democratic primary to run against a popular Republican with millions in campaign cash, Greene replied: �Rather than just save the $10,000 and just go and buy gasoline with it, just take [it] and just be unemployed for [an] even longer period of time, I mean, that wouldn�t make any sense, um, just, um, but, uh, yes, uh � lowering these gas prices � that will create jobs, too. Anything that will lower the gasoline prices. Offshore drilling, the energy package, all that.�

He'll win (again) in a walk, and Mr. Greene can go to Washington. You want the money taken out of politics? This is the man for you.

Are there any good shows on teevee? The few I watch have all ended for the year.

It seems to be the only answer we hear coming from the government elites lately: austerity and cutting deficits. Let's look at that for one moment, shall we? First if we cut the federal deficit we need to make massive cuts to US military spending, Homeland Security, the EPA, SEC, USDA, FDA, the Interior Department, et alia. At the state level it gets worse. Cuts to primary and secondary education, road repair, law enforcement, Medicaid, etc. would be rewuired. What exactly do we gain? The result is that we put less money into the economy. Less money for unemployment benefits. Less money for government contracts to rebuild infrastructure. What happens when less money is circulating in the economy? Does that create jobs? Does it increase tax revenues? The answer to that is "no."

As Bob Herbert says in today's NT Times:

More than 15 million Americans are out of work, and nearly half have been jobless for six months or longer. New college graduates are having a terrible time finding work, and many are taking jobs that require only a high school education. Teachers are facing the worst employment market since the Depression. [...]

It�s impossible to overstate the threat that this crisis of unemployment poses to the well-being of the United States. With so many people out of work and so much of the rest of the population deeply in debt, where is the spending going to come from to power a true economic recovery? The deficit hawks are forecasting Armageddon, but how is anyone going to get a handle on the federal deficits if we don�t get millions of people back to work and paying taxes?

Indeed, reduction of spending only puts more people out on the streets, generates less tax revenues, and hurts small businesses when the unemployed (and people that fear they are next in line for the unemployment lines) and their families drastically reduce all but essential spending. Absent raising taxes on wealthier Americans, at best budget cuts do little to lower deficits and nothing to help the economy.

Who do the help? Investors in stocks and bonds will be reassured we are told and will invest more in the market? But will they? Would you invest in the market where the unemployment rate is so high, and where corporate profits will decline (law of supply and demand anyone?). Oh, investors might be driven to invest in Big Oil (obscene profits despite the BP disaster) and the Big Banks (too big to fail makes them a safe bet in bad economic times) perhaps, but what other industries will benefit?

The reality is that deficit reduction and austerity measures are, as Paul Krugman notes, an incredibly inefficient means of reducing the deficit in a high unemployment economy.

[S]lashing spending while the economy is still deeply depressed is both an extremely costly and quite ineffective way to reduce future debt. Costly, because it depresses the economy further; ineffective, because by depressing the economy, fiscal contraction now reduces tax receipts. A rough estimate right now is that cutting spending by 1 percent of GDP raises the unemployment rate by .75 percent compared with what it would otherwise be, yet reduces future debt by less than 0.5 percent of GDP.

The right thing, overwhelmingly, is to do things that will reduce spending and/or raise revenue after the economy has recovered � specifically, wait until after the economy is strong enough that monetary policy can offset the contractionary effects of fiscal austerity. But no: the deficit hawks want their cuts while unemployment rates are still at near-record highs and monetary policy is still hard up against the zero bound.

Let's look at the alternative. What does stimulus spending get us. Well, we have people who studied the effects of the stimulus bill passed last year (specifically the Congressional Budget Office), the one everyone agrees was too small. Yet the CBO finds that even that meager federal stimulus legislation had a significant impact on the economy.

CBO estimates that in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2009, ARRA added between 1.0 million and 2.1 million to the number of workers employed in the United States, and it increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by between 1.4 million and 3.0 million. Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers. CBO also estimates that real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.5 percent to 3.5 percent higher in the fourth quarter than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA.

Imagine what a real stimulus bill would have done? One that actually invested in significant infrastructure spending and new alternative energy technologies to spur job growth. One that created an analogue to the Civilian Conservation Corps for young Americans? One that increased taxes for outsourcing jobs and decreased them for creating jobs for Americans.

The Deficit Hawks in the Democratic Party obviously never studied what happened to Herbert Hoover. He had the same vision on the unemployment crisis during the Great Depression. His party suffered greatly because he failed to use the government to stimulate the economy sufficiently. Those Blue Dog and Conservative Democrats are going to find that their fiscal conservatism and failure to support measures to increase jobs is going to hurt them this Fall.

It's a failure to learn from history. Then again I suppose they will all become lobbyists after they lose so what do they care?

No matter what happens tonight or on election day in November, the comity of the Senate is going to be decreased next year. Ezra Klein doesn't come right out and say that, but it's implicit in his overall point.

Part of the narrative that's emerged is that these primaries show an anti-incumbent, anti-Washington, year. That's right, but it's mixed, incoherently, with pro-party -- which is to say, pro-Washington establishment -- results. The different bases are eliminating politicians who've been insufficiently dedicated to holding their party's line. The result will be much more significant than merely the election of three new senators. Rather, surviving senators will upgrade the threat an unhappy base poses to their reelection and trim their independence accordingly. The moderates and compromisers who are left will stop acting like moderates and compromisers. This election looks, if nothing else, like it's going to be a big step forward in bringing strong party discipline to the Senate.

Part of that excerpt I disagree with. Bob Bennett, for example, got bounced out of his senate seat primarily because he voted for TARP and he introduced a health care bill a few years ago that had the incredibly unconstitutional Marxist personal mandate that everyone purchase insurance. Those were Washington GOP establishment positions (at one time, anyway) that are very unpopular with rank and file Republicans. Bennett wasn't fired for bucking his party leadership, but for bucking convention-going Utah Republicans' wishes. If Bennett was guilty of 'insufficiently holding his party's line' it was only in the sense that he didn't engage in enough rank hypocrisy and fear-mongering once Obama became president.

But Ezra's larger point mostly stands. Whether Blanche Lincoln loses or not, the message has been from voters in Arkansas, Utah, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania that they expect their politicians to support the party line. And, while that is distinct from the watered down version of that line that is practiced by the insiders in Washington DC, the result will be more party discipline. But more party discipline means less interparty cooperation. And with 60 votes as a requirement for getting anything done, we're headed for more gridlock than we've ever seen.

There are only two ways out of this. Either the Dems actually pick up Senate seats so that they can pass any procedural vote they want to, or they revise the filibuster rule in some way to allow the Senate to do its business. We can't have another Congress like the current one, let alone one that is even more deadlocked.

All elections, but especially low-interest midterm elections, turn on certain meta-narratives. While individual races may be decided on local issues or through the talent and resources of the candidates, the overall trend on election night is driven by stories the electorate is telling themselves. In the leadup to the 2006 midterms, Democratic activists pressed the argument that the Republicans and the president had no accountability because they controlled everything. The argument that a divided government will be a better government is dubious at best, but it's the Republicans' main selling point. The way to combat that argument is to convince the public that the Republicans won't provide accountability but obstruction, gridlock, and pointless witchhunts. In this effort, Rand Paul will be a gift that keeps on giving. But probably no one could be a bigger gift than Orly Taitz:

Orly Taitz is an Israeli �migr� who has spent the past two years filing lawsuits challenging President Barack Obama�s right to be president on the grounds that he was born in Kenya. In the process, she has earned herself $20,000 in court fines.

Now she�s running for the GOP nomination for secretary of state, and with her establishment-backed primary opponent mounting a less-than-stellar campaign against her, operatives say there�s a chance she could win.

�It�d be a disaster for the Republican party,� says James Lacy, a conservative GOP operative in the state. �Can you imagine if [gubernatorial candidate] Meg Whitman and [candidate for Lt. Gov.] Abel Maldonado � both of whom might have a chance to win in November � had to run with Orly Taitz as secretary of state, who would make her cockamamie issues about Obama�s birth certificate problems at the forefront of her activities?�

�There is no Republican candidate for statewide office that would be willing to have her campaign with them,� says Adam Probolsky, a spokesman for the Orange County Republican Party.

I hope Taitz wins her election tonight because it will shine a bright light on what the Republican Party is becoming. We can hang Taitz and Paul around the necks of Republicans in every race this fall. And it will be very, very helpful in beating back the idea that we'd benefit from a divided government.

This isn't a story about BP's oil gusher in the Gulf, though God knows when all is said and done if the "moderate impact" of that catastrophe may very well mean the end to much of the edible marine life, including shrimp and fish stocks, in the Gulf of Mexico for decades to come.

No, bad as the BPocalypse may be, that's not the main reason for this story. You see, human activity, from pollution and overfishing, has been rapidly depleting fish stocks around the world and destroying the fragile ecosystems of the world's oceans.

�The oceans cannot save themselves,� says Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute. �Collective commitments to thriving ecosystems are needed to save overfished species from being systematically depleted from compromised habitats.�

Major reasons for the depletion of fish stocks include overfishing, the use of bottom trawling and other destructive fishing techniques, unsustainable aquaculture, and illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing. [...]

Pollution from chemical, radioactive, and nutrient sources; oil spills; and marine debris can contaminate the marine environment, kill organisms, and undermine ecosystem integrity. Of particular concern is the effect on marine wildlife of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), especially those chemicals not yet regulated under the 2001 Stockholm Convention, such as brominated flame retardants. Marine debris, including plastics and derelict fishing gear, is responsible for causing death and injury to many marine species, among them seabirds, turtles, and marine mammals. Large oxygen-depleted �dead zones,� made worse by excessive nitrogen runoff from fertilizers, sewage discharges, and other sources, are further signs that the oceans are under severe stress.

This doesn't even include the effect that global climate change and the increased acidity of the oceans from increased absorption of CO2 is having on marine life:

With the oceans absorbing more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide an hour, a National Research Council study released Thursday found that the level of acid in the oceans is increasing at an unprecedented rate and threatening to change marine ecosystems. [...]

Unless [CO2] emissions are reined in, ocean acidity could increase by 200 percent by the end of the century and even more in the next century, said James Barry, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California and one of the study's authors.

"Acidification is changing the chemistry of the oceans at a scale and magnitude greater than thought to occur on Earth for many millions of years and is expected to cause changes in the growth and survival of a wide variety of marine organisms, potentially leading to massive shifts in ocean ecosystems," Barry told the Senate Commerce Committee's Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard Subcommittee on Thursday. [...]

"Like climate change, ocean acidification is a growing global problem that will intensify with continued carbon dioxide emissions and has the potential to change marine ecosystems and affect benefits to society," the [National Research Council] report said. The report called for an expanded system to monitor ocean conditions and for increased research into ocean chemistry and the impact that changes would have. Scientists think that increased acidity could affect the entire marine food chain, from microscopic forms of phytoplankton to fish and whales.

Already levels of heavy metals in fish harvested for human consumption, such as mercury, make eating fish a risky business, to the extent that even the Bush administration's EPA advised pregnant women not to consume a wide variety of fish and shellfish contaminated with mercury.

Aquaculture is not necessarily the solution either. For example, salmon raised in fish farms contain high amount of dioxin in them because they are primarily fed "ocean caught fish meal and meat offal from poultry and hog processing." Dioxin is a toxic substance in human beings, and is known to have many adverse consequences for human health.

Dioxins are highly toxic and can cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with hormones and also cause cancer.

Overall 75% of the world's fish stocks are either fully exploited, overexploited or depleted. That's a significant amount. Along with all the other environmental stresses to our oceans I've described previously, we are rapidly approaching a point of no return, where seafood, a major contributor of protein to human diets around the world may be lost to future generations.

The concern is great enough that many of the major fishing nations are meeting in London today for initial talks on how to "prevent the collapse of global fish stocks.". The problem is that the solution, a treaty to create �national parks of the sea� which would be off limits to any fishing, may be impossible to achieve. Not all nations are in agreement as to what such a treaty should or should not include.

Many countries actually provide substantial monetary subsidies which encourage overfishing.

EU fisheries subsidies have encouraged overfishing over the years and helped maintain an over-capacity in the industry, according to a study published Wednesday. [...] "EU fisheries subsidies and the overfishing of valuable fish stocks are clearly connected," said Tim Huntingdon, consultant at British-based Poseidon Aquatic Resource, which carried out the study along with fellow NGO the Pew Environment Group.

To deal with this crisis, we need action on a global scale, action by many different governments, and soon. We need to limit sources of ocean pollution, to address overfishing and exploitation of existing fish stocks, and to address global climate change. In particular, limits on the emissions of CO2 which are rapidly acidifying the oceans and drastically altering marine ecosystems are essential.

Yet does anyone see serious action on these interrelated problems anytime soon. BP's use of toxic chemical dispersants in the Gulf is just a drop in the bucket when compared to all the various ways human activity is destroying one of humanity's greatest food resources: the oceans. Already numerous dead zones exist in which there is no marine life at all. Zero, nada, zip.

The number of oxygen-deprived "dead zones" in the world's oceans has been increasing since the 1970s and is now nearly 150, threatening fisheries as well as humans who depend on fish, the U.N. Environment Program announced [in March 2004] in unveiling its first-ever Global Environment Outlook Year Book.

These "dead zones" are caused by an excess of nitrogen from farm fertilizers, sewage and emissions from vehicles and factories. In what experts call a �nitrogen cascade,� the chemical flows untreated into oceans and triggers the proliferation of plankton, which in turn depletes oxygen in the water.

In short, our over-reliance on nitrogen and phosphorus based fertilizers as well as all the other pollutants, raw sewage and CO2 we are dumping into our oceans as if they were one unlimited waste disposal is literally killing marine life which has been a source of human food for millenia.

I appreciate that talks among political figures from various nations are ongoing, such as the talks in London this week. However we need immediate action if we are to save our oceans. So far, I see precious little action or even an awareness of the problem among the world's governments.

And the media has done little to emphasize the seriousness of this crisis. How many TV News shows have you seen dedicated to reporting about and explaining this looming disaster? I cannot remember one. Perhaps this story is covered better in other countries, but I doubt it.

So what can you do? Start by informing your representatives in Congress that this is an issue that you care about and on which you want them to take action. The BP spill gives us an opportunity to push this issue to the fore. Because it isn't just Gulf seafood that may be lost to us, it's all seafood unless we start promoting and implementing more sustainable policies.

It's sad when someone you respect does something stupid to tarnish their entire life's work. I felt that way when Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld) made racially insensitive remarks during a stand-up routine, and I feel that way about Helen Thomas's comments about Israelis 'getting the hell out of Palestine" and going back to Poland, Germany, and America. I don't know what's in her heart, although I could forgive an outburst of frustration with the Middle East impasse in the context of the flotilla massacre. But I can't and won't defend her remarks. Telling Jews to go back to Germany is about as insensitive as you can get. She deserves sharp criticism. But I don't like to see people piling on like this:

"She asked questions no hard-news reporter would ask, that carried an agenda and reflected her point of view, and there were some reporters who felt that was inappropriate," said CBS correspondent Mark Knoller. "As a columnist she felt totally unbound from any of the normal policies of objectivity that every other reporter in the room felt compelled to abide by, and sometimes her questions were embarrassing to other reporters."

Is Mark Knoller on the record complaining about James Guckert/Jeff Gannon's point of view or WorldNetDaily's Les Kinsolving's agenda? I have never heard Kinsolving ask a pertinent question, ever. Helen Thomas was a tough questioner. She had a point of view, but she didn't suck up to anyone. She was Bush's toughest questioner and she was Obama's toughest questioner. She embarrassed people who ought to have been embarrassed. The consensus until about two minutes ago was that she was a national treasure. And why? Because she asked tough questions even when she knew the answer would be contemptuous:

In 2002, Thomas asked [Ari] Fleischer: "Does the president think that the Palestinians have a right to resist 35 years of brutal military occupation and suppression?"

Four years later, Thomas told Fleischer's successor, Tony Snow, that the United States "could have stopped the bombardment of Lebanon" by Israel, but instead had "gone for collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine." Snow tartly thanked her for "the Hezbollah view."

God forbid a child of Lebanese immigrants should question the reaction of Israel over a few rocket attacks and kidnappings from the Hezbollah-controlled border region.

During the campaign Israel's Air Force flew more than 12,000 combat missions, its Navy fired 2,500 shells, and its Army fired over 100,000 shells. Large parts of the Lebanese civilian infrastructure were destroyed, including 400 miles (640 km) of roads, 73 bridges, and 31 other targets such as Beirut's Rafic Hariri International Airport, ports, water and sewage treatment plants, electrical facilities, 25 fuel stations, 900 commercial structures, up to 350 schools and two hospitals, and 15,000 homes. Some 130,000 more homes were damaged.

There was nothing disproportionate or excessive about that response at all. The mere act of asking about our government's complicity in that response was 'giving the Hezbollah view.'

No knowledgeable person thought the tensions at the border were organized or approved by the leadership in Beirut, but bombing the airport was an unassailable act.

Look. Whether you agreed with Israel's decision to decimate all of Lebanon or not, what is the problem with asking why we are going along with it?

And Helen Thomas wasn't just a hard-ass on issues related to Israel. She was a pain in the ass of every administration. Isn't that what we want from a White House press correspondent? When people start complaining about the point of view and agenda of right-wing correspondents then I might be willing to listen. But Thomas had a sterling career until she said something truly stupid. We can condemn her remark without impugning her entire body of work.

I wish these folks well, but I wonder if maybe God's radio just isn't tuned to the Gulf states' channel right now:

�Pastor Allen Jenkins of the First Missionary Baptist Church in Bay St. Louis led over 20 members of the congregation in prayer at 3pm Sunday afternoon, in hopes of divine intervention with the oil spill. According to Jenkins, other local churches in the area held prayer groups at the same time in a �show of unity and strength.� � ��We were praying that the oil slick would dissipate,� said Pastor Jenkins �And that it wouldn�t create any ecological or economic problems for our coast. We know the Lord can work miracles and has our best interests at heart.� �For the past five years, people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast � with the help of volunteers throughout the country � have worked to rebuild our cities after the devastation of Katrina. Now, in the face of this man-made disaster, we�re utilizing things we learned from Katrina recovery � like directing energy toward volunteer training for eventual clean-up. In ways as diverse as our culture itself, we�re finding comfort and strength in the kinship of community.� Bay St. Louis, Miss.

If you like what we do here at the Frog Pond, please consider making a donation. It's hard to keep the lights on at this place and it's getting harder. I really appreciate the generosity of our readers, but I also depend on it. Thank you.

Let me try a new trick here and give you some rockin' tunes to incentivize you.

As for topics of conversation, have you seen what is going on in South Carolina? It's just weird.

How can the public be dissatisfied with the federal response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster? I mean, what about the brilliant use of gamma rays?

The administration should let more people know about their Energy Secretary's superpowers. On a more serious note, I think most Republicans would come out in favor of the clap if Rush Limbaugh said it was a fun experience.

A lot of political blogs are doing rundowns on the interesting primary races that will be decided tomorrow. I don't feel like doing a comprehensive piece. What I am mainly interested in seeing is whether the Republicans nominate candidates that make it easier for Democrats to win. For example, Harry Reid has been on life support for the last year, but he can probably beat teabagger extraordinaire Sharron Angle. Down in South Carolina, the Democrats have no business thinking they can take over the governor's mansion but the GOP seems poised to nominate a woman who has been accused of having more than one extramarital affair. If that proves to be true, or the public becomes convinced that it's true, the Dems just might be facing a crippled candidate.

Obviously, the biggest race tomorrow is the runoff election between Arkansas Senator Blance Lincoln and Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. Will another incumbent get bounced out of office before the general election? In some ways it doesn't much matter. This was always more about sending a message than actually winning. And the message has been sent. Whoever wins tomorrow will be a long-shot to win in November. Still, I'll be pulling for Halter because he has a better chance of holding the seat and because he's running without the support of the Arkansas Democratic Establishment. I think he'd probably be a better senator than Lincoln. And smarter.

There are a number of interesting House races to watch for tomorrow. Can Richard Pombo make a comeback? Will any teabaggers break through in Virginia? Will Bob Inglis get outwingnutted in South Carolina? Lots of fun and lots to look at. I actually enjoy election day because it's the one time when talking doesn't matter and we get to see what people really think. The electorate appears to be quite ornery and I suspect we'll see that reflected in tomorrow's results.

What are going to look for?

Oh, now I get it.

It's well known that Democrats have taken large contributions from labor unions and trial lawyers, while Republicans have significant financial backing from the tobacco industry. However, the single largest career backer of House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is the same: telecom giant AT&T.;

Spy away!!

You gotta love Fred Barnes:

In Washington these days, President Obama is rumored to be hoping Republicans capture the House of Representatives in the midterm election in November. There's no evidence for this speculation, so far as I know, but it's hardly far-fetched. If Mr. Obama wants to avert a fiscal crisis and win re-election in 2012, he needs House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be removed from her powerful post. A GOP takeover may be the only way.

To say there is no evidence for this speculation is an understatement. The president has had no success in working with House Republicans on any measure over the last year and a half and his agenda would be completely blocked if he had to deal with a Speaker Boehner and a bunch of Republican committee chairs.

As it is, he is finding Congress unwilling to add sufficient stimulus or even pass a budget. What the president needs above all is for the voters to defy expectations and return huge Democratic majorities to Congress. That is the only way he can break the logjam in Washington and take on big issues.

If true, this is pretty damning stuff and would constitute a war crime.

A US cruise missile carrying cluster bombs was behind a December attack in Yemen that killed 55 people, most of them civilians, Amnesty International (AI) said on Monday. The London-based rights group released photographs that it said showed the remains of a US-made Tomahawk missile and unexploded cluster bombs that were apparently used in the December 17, 2009 attack on the rural community of Al-Maajala in Yemen's southern Abyan province.

Here's more from Amnesty International's own website about the attack:

Amnesty International has released images of a US-manufactured cruise missile that carried cluster munitions, apparently taken following an attack on an alleged al-Qa'ida training camp in Yemen that killed 41 local residents, including 14 women and 21 children. [...]

Shortly after the attack some US media reported alleged statements by unnamed US government sources who said that US cruise missiles launched on presidential orders had been fired at two alleged al-Qa'ida sites in Yemen. [...]

The photographs enable the positive identification of damaged missile parts, which appear to be from the payload, mid-body, aft-body and propulsion sections of a BGM-109D Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile.

This type of missile, launched from a warship or submarine, is designed to carry a payload of 166 cluster submunitions (bomblets) which each explode into over 200 sharp steel fragments that can cause injuries up to 150m away. An incendiary material inside the bomblet also spreads fragments of burning zirconium designed to set fire to nearby flammable objects.

A further photograph, apparently taken within half an hour of the others, shows an unexploded BLU 97 A/B submunition itself, the type carried by BGM-109D missiles. These missiles are known to be held only by US forces and Yemeni armed forces are unlikely to be capable of using such a missile. [...]

A Yemeni parliamentary committee that investigated the 17 December 2009 attack reported in February that 41 people it described as civilians had been killed. In its report the committee said that on arrival at the scene of the attack in al-Ma'jalah it found that all the homes and their contents were burnt and all that was left were traces of furniture.

It said the committee found traces of blood of the victims and a number of holes in the ground left by the bombings as well as a number of unexploded bombs, and that one survivor told the committee that his family, who were killed although they had committed no crime, were sleeping when the missiles struck on the morning of 17 December 2009.

The images released by Amnesty International of alleged US cruise missiles and cluster munitions used in Yemen can be found here.

Are we reaching to the point where our government considers anyone, including women and children, potential terrorists because of where they reside, as the Israelis do in Gaza? President Obama, as Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, would have had to give the okay for such an attack with a weapon that is not precise, is not exact, that is intended to kill large numbers of individuals.

I call on the President to immediately answer the question whether he authorized such an attack in violation of international law and simple moral values. You do not murder innocent civilians in a town because your enemy may live there. [deleted -- see same diary at Dkos for reason]

Perhaps using cluster bombs against suspected terrorist sites in civilian areas would have been an acceptable policy under former President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who continue to defend torture and an illegal war of aggression against Iraq to this day without any hint of regret or remorse. However,it should never be the policy that a Democratic President adopts. This was certainly not an action I expected a Democratic President to endorse: the use of cluster bombs which he must have known would kill and maim civilians.

And people wonder why US residents irate at the slaughter of innocent Muslims are attempting to join Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations on Americans after attacks like this. The question must be asked of this administration: what benefit is there to unilaterally killing people in countries where no state of war exists, and with weapons designed to kill as many people as possible, regardless of their connection to alleged terrorists.

In the short term we may have eradicated an Al Qaeda training site. Good for us.

However, it is the long term, that I am concerned about. One of these days we won't be so lucky when a homegrown terrorist tries to explode a car bomb in Times Square, or attacks some other target of "opportunity." I wonder if the people murdered at Ft Hood would have been gunned down by Major Hasan if the Bush administration had not adopted torture and promoted a war in Iraq that killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of civilians, including many children.

When we use weapons that are bound to kill people who have nothing to do with those who oppose us, we are no better than base murderers. War does not excuse such actions authorized by our government and carried out by our military. In the end, it will be innocent Americans who will pay the price for these senseless killings. Perhaps your child or mine.

So, President Obama, answer the question: were our armed forces behind the attack on al-Ma'jalah? Did we employ cluster munitions? Is it our policy to continue to employ such weapons regardless of the risk to innocent civilians who are likely to be killed or maimed for life along with any potential militants that may attack America?

If so, I'd like to know your reasons for authorizing such a vicious assault and whether you believe such weapons of mass murder are an appropriate means to assault civilian areas as opposed to military installations.

This is most certainly not the change I voted for. If your administration is responsible, stand up and be accountable for this heinous crime. No more lies or evasions. We had enough of those under the former President.