Hammer Mill Days

Ahem . Still bobbing out here in deep space. Nothing to keep us company but the echoes of our increasingly impatient throat clearings. Ahem! Well, while we have so much time on our hands, time to crack open that big Christmas present we left all of you who subscribe to our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN - namely, our annual Christmas Spectacular. What's inside the box this year? Two solid hours of Big Green madness, including: Ned Trek XV: Santorum’s Christmas Planet - This special, expanded holiday edition of our (un)popular Star Trek parody features six - yes, six - new Big Green songs, sung in character: Christmas Shine - Captain Mitt Romney's joyful rumination on getting full value out of his human resources throughout the holiday season. And he's not going to say it again. Horrible People - Mr. Ned contemplates the fate of all animals during the dangerous Yultide ritual celebrations. (Backing vocals by those '40s guys.) Dick'smas Xmas - Even the robot

Just a few things I want to comment on this week, not at any great length. Bear with me, please. Human Rights. In what appeared to be an effort to elicit Vietnam's cooperation in the looming Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) "free trade agreement" - really an investors' rights agreement - Secretary of State John Kerry recently paid a visit to Hanoi to discuss new maritime security cooperation measures, against the backdrop of China's recent declaration of a kind of demilitarized zone in the South China Sea. None of this is surprising, but what kind of made my jaw hang open was the reporting around the visit. The main hook was that Kerry had been part of America's expeditionary force in South Vietnam during the war, and he toured some of his old haunts in the south. NPR (not to single them out - everyone else did this, too), practically in a single breath, made reference to this trip down memory lane, then referred to problems with Vietnam's human rights r