April 30, 2008 archive

:: It’s Time for US to Clamp Down On The Media Part 2

I wrote this diary over one month ago. Nothing has changed except the problems we are facing as citizens of the world are getting worse. We have NO chance of breaking through to new solutions as long as our status quo media are allowed to continue their endless drivel. For me this has gone well past the scope of this first diary on the subject, included below.

Over the past month, as we have read here and elsewhere, climate damage is more severe than even Al Gore predicted it would me. Soldiers and Iraqi civilians keep dying for a war we now conclusively know is about oil and worse, American imperialism. The dollar is still in the tank and the next shoe to drop will be in January and it is breathtaking in its scale.

In the spirit I say NO MORE. IF WE DO NOT GET OUR VOICES HEARD TO THE MEDIA AND I MEAN NOW WE ARE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION.

Following this first list is a much more comprehensive list of to dos

Two Years at DailyKos (warning – heavy graphics)

What follows is a bit of a recap of my two years here…er, there.  I’m going to drop in some of my favorite illustrations and collages from the past 2 years and they won’t necessarily relate to the text.  I beg your indulgence.

On April 30, 2006 I posted my first diary at DailyKos, The Curse of Big Money and The Pledge.  (Wasn’t a big hit.)

Art-in-the-age-of-acid

The New Revolution

The New Revolution

I trust that it’s become clear by now that some US citizens are under siege.  I use that word guardedly.  If under siege, we are in self-defense mode.  That means we can take whatever measures necessary to defend ourselves.  We have that right.  It can’t be taken away under threat, because the threat itself gives us the right to defend ourselves.  

If we are at risk of our lives if we don’t respond, that is a threat.  If the threat is just to a few of us, the case for siege is hard to make.  It’s a matter of where to draw the line between ‘falling through the cracks’ and stopping those cracks from opening to swallow more of us.  Where to draw the line between things like misfeasance or malfeasance, and outright siege that will destroy more and more us?  Readers will decide where to draw that line, where the tipping point is between neglect and abuse for a few who don’t matter enough (your choice), and neglect and abuse for so many people that it has to be called a siege.  Here are some pointers.

Strike on 5/1/08: Fifth Anniversary of “Mission Accomplished”

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Photobucket

On May 1, 2003, exactly 5 years ago, President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to mark the end of major combat operations in Iraq:

Thank you all very much. Admiral Kelly, Captain Card (ph), officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

More than 4,000 US troops have now died in Iraq, more than 97% after the President’s speech.  The number of injured US troops and injured and killed Iraqi men, women, and children follows the same relationship: the vast majority of the casualties occurred after the “major combat operations in Iraq [   ] ended.”

Think Progress reports:

Today (4/30/08), reporter Helen Thomas asked White House Press Secretary Dana Perino how the president would “commemorate” the date tomorrow. Perino said the White House had “certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner”:

 

PERINO: President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific, and said, Mission Accomplished For These Sailors Who Are On This Ship On Their Mission. And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.

Does the White House seriously think we’re so stupid as to believe that Bush wasn’t really talking about the end of hostilities in Iraq?  that he was talking about something else?  Think Progress points out:

Just a month after his speech on the U.S.S. Lincoln, he also spoke to troops in Qatar: “America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished.”

Chalk that up as just one more reason why on May 1, 2008, I’m not working and why I’m participating in a one-day General Strike.

Need other reasons? How about torture, Gitmo, illegal extraditions, secret renditions, $3.67/gallon gasoline, sub prime mortgages, lack of universal health care, the recession, and on and on and on.  You could make your own list.  You could write an essay that was just a list.  It would go on and on and on.  It’s not necessary to do that.

I’m striking.  Please join me.

Pangea Day

What is Pangea Day? From the web site:

In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize, an annual award granted at the TED Conference. She was granted $100,000, and more important, a wish to change the world. Her wish was to create a day in which the world came together through film. Pangea Day grew out of that wish.

Pangea Day is a global event bringing the world together through film.

Why? In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that – to help people see themselves in others – through the power of film.

Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

The 24 short films to be featured have been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow us see the world through another person’s eyes.

Hunting Down the War Criminals

WANTED

SS Doctor Aribert Heim, war criminal

Associated Press has a story up on the ongoing hunt for Nazi war criminals. The Simon Wiesenthal Center releases periodic lists of top war criminals from the Nazi era still at large. Despite the Wiesenthal Center’s one-sided apologetics for Israeli crimes against the Palestinians (all sides have engaged in atrocities), we should pay attention to their efforts to bring Nazi war criminals and their collaborators to justice, even decades after their hideous crimes took place. Such efforts should also make Bush and his cronies start sweating, for reasons I will make clear.

Hunting Down the War Criminals

WANTED

SS Doctor Aribert Heim, war criminal

Associated Press has a story up on the ongoing hunt for Nazi war criminals. The Simon Wiesenthal Center releases periodic lists of top war criminals from the Nazi era still at large. Despite the Wiesenthal Center’s one-sided apologetics for Israeli crimes against the Palestinians (all sides have engaged in atrocities), we should pay attention to their efforts to bring Nazi war criminals and their collaborators to justice, even decades after their hideous crimes took place. Such efforts should also make Bush and his cronies start sweating, for reasons I will make clear.

Four at Four

  1. Lurita Doan, the horribly incompetent GSA head and certified Bush political hack, has resigned. It only took her a year to do so. The Washington post reports “At the request of the White House, General Services Administration chief Lurita Alexis Doan resigned last night as head of the government’s premier contracting agency… Doan’s resignation came almost a year after Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he believed Doan could no longer be effective because of the allegations about her leadership.”

    Doan “violated the Hatch Act in January 2007 by asking political appointees how they could “help our candidates” at an agency briefing conducted by a White House official, according to several of the appointees present for the briefing”. She still needs to be prosecuted for sponsoring illegal political meetings.

    Video from June 2007.

  2. The Washington Post reports U.S. Role Deepens in Sadr City. Since Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ‘stir the hornet’s nest’ campaign last month in Basra, the U.S. has been drawn deeply into the fighting between rival Shi’ite factions. Yesterday, U.S. troops fight a four-hour battle against Shi’ite militia fighters that killed at least 28 Iraqis dead.

    “Until Maliki’s push into the southern city of Basra, U.S. troops were not intensely engaged in Sadr City, a Baghdad neighborhood of roughly 3 million people that was among the most treacherous areas for U.S. forces early in the war.” Since Maliki’smove against Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army in Basra, “more than 500 people have been killed and 2,100 injured in Sadr City“.

    The Iraqis are deliberately escalating the fighting in Iraq to prove the “surge” has not worked, which of course, McCain will explain that this means the “surge” has worked and the Iraqis are just trying to influence the U.S. election. The “surge” cannot possibly fail.

    To prove how right McCain is, al-Sadr “has threatened to call off the eight-month cease-fire, which has been widely credited with lowering the level of violence in Iraq, if the government does not end its offensive against his followers.” And according to a random Mahdi Army member quoted by WaPo, they are “very close to the Zero Hour” meaning time is nearly up.

    McClatchy Newspapers reports Defense War Secretary Robert Gates as saying Lull in Iraq has ended, but withdrawal will go on. He’s sending a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf, but denied it has anything to do with the Bush administration’s plans to attack Iran. The “surge” is working though, because:

    April has been the bloodiest month for Americans in Iraq since September, with 44 troops killed, compared to 39 in March and 29 in February.

    April also was the first month since November that saw U.S. Marines killed in once restive Anbar province. Two Marines were killed in April in Anbar, which had been the deadliest part of Iraq for U.S. troops before a widely heralded tribal rebellion drove Sunni militants from the province.

    Meanwhile, to distract Americans from the obvious success of the “surge”, a trial for Tariq Aziz has begun. BBC News reports, “The trial of Iraq’s former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz over the deaths of a group of merchants in 1992 has opened in Baghdad,” but “after a brief session the judge adjourned the trial until 20 May”.

Four at Four continues below the fold with stories about the show trials in Guantánamo Bay and the Bush administration’s meddling with science.

The Long War and Mental Health

Yesterday NLinStPaul asked (rhetorically)

You mean we can do this and have some fun?

Goddess above, I hope that’s true!!

In my opinion, fun is vital!

Photobucket

The guy who is fond of the phrase The Long War, THIS guy …. Photobucket is anti-fun….

and we are anti-That guy. Logically then, we are PRO-FUN!

Talk LIVE with Cliff Schecter at 4PM Eastern about “The Real McCain”

This will be a short but important post.  Some of you may know the excellent work that Cliff Schecter has done around the blogosphere, both at The Agonist, at Huffington Post, and other places.  Some of you may have seen him take down and destroy right wing talking heads over the past few years on cable “news” channels.

And some of you know the fantastic work he has done researching and bringing to light the Real McCain.

So, for those who didn’t already know that Cliff’s book The Real McCain, Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him–and Why Independents Shouldn’t (buy it by clicking this link) is chock full of everything that everyone should know about John W. McSame, you can hear Cliff talk to me and thereisnospoon today at 4PM Eastern on our BlogTalkRadio show.

The link to the show itself is here, and we will be taking calls as well later in the show.  The call in number is 718-508-9410, and we will try to keep the chat room open as well.

This is a great opportunity to hear Cliff talk about the things that everyone should know about John McCain – his voting record, his associates, his temper, his actions throughout the years and who he “really is” – as opposed to the carefully crafted persona that the corporate media keeps trying to ram down this country’s throat.

The book is a must read as well – I plowed through it and highly recommend it to anyone that knows someone that is even remotely considering voting for John McCain – and despite what we all wish, there is probably someone that each of us knows who is planning on possibly voting for this odious and phony candidate.

If you can’t make the live show, it will be available at Heading Left as well as our BlogTalkRadio page, in addition to the new 24/7 BlogTalkRadio “Heading Left” radio channel.

Hope you can make it!!  I assure you that Cliff will not disappoint (can’t vouch for me though….)

Scalia dodges the constitutionality of torture

Do you recognize this man?

Photobucket

His name is Rod Serling and he once hosted an amazing little television show called the Twilight Zone.  Each week, he would appear to announce the story of someone trapped in a bizarre set of circumstances, typically surreal and frightening.  It was fiction, but great fun.

I suddenly find myself looking for Rod Serling to appear again because I am suffering from the same uncomfortable sensation of surreality, except this time it is neither fiction nor fun.

Father of LSD is Dead



Albert Hofmann died yesterday at the age of 102.  

Blessings on your Journey Al!

Obit on WaPo.  

Load more