| Obama the Snob? |
[Jul. 23rd, 2008|01:12 pm] |
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July/August 2008
Hanging the ‘elitist’ label on another Democratic candidate
By Peter Hart It’s safe to assume that Barack Obama knew he could expect certain lines of attack when he decided to run for president: whispers about his religious beliefs, for example, or questions regarding his patriotism. And sure enough, those issues came up almost as soon as the campaign started. But it’s difficult to imagine that Obama—whose one grandfather was a high-school dropout and the other a colonial servant—expected to fend off the accusation that he is “elitist.”
Corporate media coverage of political campaigns often rests on certain storylines, though, that don’t necessarily bear any relationship to reality—Al Gore the exaggerator vs. compassionate conservative George W. Bush in the 2000 election, to take one example (Extra!, 1–2/01). Somewhere along the way in 2008, pundits decided to rerun the storyline used for Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004 (Extra!, 7–8/04), asking of Obama: Is he one of us?
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| Michael Savage on autism |
[Jul. 18th, 2008|02:54 pm] |
From Media Matters
From the July 16 edition of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation:
SAVAGE: Now, you want me to tell you my opinion on autism, since I'm not talking about autism? A fraud, a racket. For a long while, we were hearing that every minority child had asthma. Why did they sudden -- why was there an asthma epidemic amongst minority children? Because I'll tell you why: The children got extra welfare if they were disabled, and they got extra help in school. It was a money racket. Everyone went in and was told [fake cough], "When the nurse looks at you, you go [fake cough], 'I don't know, the dust got me.' " See, everyone had asthma from the minority community. That was number one.
Now, the illness du jour is autism. You know what autism is? I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is.
What do you mean they scream and they're silent? They don't have a father around to tell them, "Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't sit there crying and screaming, idiot."
Autism -- everybody has an illness. If I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, "Don't behave like a fool." The worst thing he said -- "Don't behave like a fool. Don't be anybody's dummy. Don't sound like an idiot. Don't act like a girl. Don't cry." That's what I was raised with. That's what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You're turning your son into a girl, and you're turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That's why we have the politicians we have. |
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[Jul. 10th, 2008|07:15 am] |
From ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) electoralvote, which I recommend:
Campaign 2008: The Sounds of Silence
By Robert Samuelson
WASHINGTON -- It is one of our fondest political myths that elections allow us collectively to settle the "big issues." The truth is that there's often a bipartisan consensus to avoid the big issues, because they involve unpopular choices and conflicts. Elections become exercises in mass evasion; that certainly applies so far to the 2008 campaign. A case in point is America's population transformation. Few issues matter more for the country's future -- and yet, it's mostly ignored.
Two changes dominate -- aging and immigration -- and they intersect. In 2005, 12 percent of the population was over 65; by 2050, that will be almost 20 percent. Meanwhile, immigration is driving population growth. By 2050, the population may exceed 430 million, up from about 300 million now. About four-fifths of the increase will reflect immigrants and their children and grandchildren, estimates the Pew Hispanic Center. The potential for conflict is obvious. Older retirees and younger and poorer immigrants -- heavily Hispanic -- will compete for government social services and benefits. Squeezed in between will be middle-class and middle-aged workers, facing higher taxes.
( Read more... ) |
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| Preparing the Battlefield |
[Jul. 1st, 2008|09:01 am] |
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh
July 7, 2008
The New Yorker
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.
Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.
( Read more... ) |
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[Jun. 27th, 2008|12:01 pm] |
GM's Market Value Is Only $7 Billion—Half That of Avon
By Matt Nesto CNBC.com | 26 Jun 2008 | 05:13 PM ET
How the mighty have fallen.
At one time, General Motors was considered the pre-eminent US corporation, a giant among giants.
But now, on news that Goldman Sachs reduced the company's rating to "sell", GM's shares have plummeted to less than $12, the lowest level since 1955.
That means the world's largest auto maker has a stock market value of only about $7 billion. That compares with a market cap of about $56 billion in 2000, when the stock was at its all-time high of $94.62 a share.
To put that in even more perspective, GM's market value is now roughly equivalent to that of tax-preparation provider H&R Block or toy maker Mattel.
( GM is worth 1/9th of McDonalds ) |
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| Alisa Miller: Why we know less than ever about the world |
[Jun. 3rd, 2008|10:17 pm] |
Alisa Miller: Why we know less than ever about the world
Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why -- though we want to know more about the world than ever -- the US media is actually showing less. Eye-opening stats and graphs.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/248 |
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[May. 27th, 2008|09:47 am] |
A salon.com article about a politico.com confession:
John Harris, former National Political Editor of The Washington Post and current Editor-in-Chief of The Politico, wrote a column yesterday acknowledging the extremely obvious truths about his "profession" -- that because they are obsessed with attracting traffic-generating links, they focus on empty trivialities at the expense of substantive news:
The signature defect of modern political journalism is that it has shredded the ideal of proportionality.
Important stories, sometimes the product of months of serious reporting, that in an earlier era would have captured the attention of the entire political-media community and even redirected the course of a presidential campaign, these days can disappear with barely a whisper.
Trivial stories -- the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top -- can dominate the campaign narrative for days. . . .
As leaders of a new publication, Politico's senior editors and I are relentlessly focused on audience traffic. The way to build traffic on the Web is to get links from other websites. The way to get links is to be first with news -- sometimes big news, sometimes small -- that drives that day's conversation.
The full Salon article, which is pleasantly hyperlinked, can be found here: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/26/harris/index.html
I got the link in the first place from today's http://www.electoral-vote.com, which I highly recommend. |
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[Apr. 4th, 2008|04:48 pm] |
Telling It Like It Wasn't
Friday, April 4, 2008; 12:00 AM
Philip Geyelin was editorial page editor of The Washington Post from 1968 to 1979. This anecdotal account of the riot -- and its coverage -- was first published on April 11, 1968.
In a riot, as in other things, McCluhan may be right: the medium can become the message. And the President's Riot Commission may be right, too. While the message may be pure truth, it can also get badly garbled when the Almighty Eye tries to focus on the phantasmagoria of urban rioting.
( Read more... ) |
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| International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination |
[Mar. 21st, 2008|12:50 pm] |
RACIST PRACTICES PERPETUATE SOCIAL, ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES, UNDERMINE DEVELOPMENT,
SAYS SECRETARY-GENERAL IN MESSAGE ON INTERNATIONAL DAY
UN.ORG
Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, observed 21 March:
On 21 March 1960, police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators protesting racially discriminatory laws in Sharpeville, South Africa. 69 people died and scores more were injured. Every year, the world commemorates that massacre to focus attention on the fight against racism wherever and whenever it occurs.
( Read more... ) |
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| The War That Never Ends |
[Mar. 20th, 2008|11:13 am] |
In These Times
Iraq Veterans Against the War’s ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings revealed the awful truths of the occupation and the ongoing struggle for those who have returned home.
By Jacob Wheeler
Last Memorial Day, Sgt. Kristofer Goldsmith tried to kill himself. He had just been stop-lossed along with 80,000 other soldiers as part of the surge of U.S. forces to be sent to Iraq in the Bush administration’s last-ditch attempt at victory. Goldsmith already suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), though Veterans Affairs (VA) refused to diagnose him. His contract with the army was almost up, and he couldn’t bear the thought of an 18-month deployment.
Like the dozens of disgruntled veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who testified at the Iraq Veterans Against the War’s (IVAW) emotional and groundbreaking “Winter Soldier” hearings, held from March 13-16 at the National Labor College near Washington D.C., Goldsmith had enlisted as a proud American eager to defend his country and trusting of the government that would send him into battle. Goldsmith hails from Long Island, and a day after watching smoke pour out of the collapsed World Trade Center towers, he had told friends that he “wanted to kill everyone in the Middle East.”
Goldsmith arrived in the sprawling ghetto of Baghdad’s Sadr City at age 19. He admits to following the command of his superiors and taking photos of unearthed dead bodies, more as war trophies than as evidence. “The images of dead bodies are burned into my memory,” Goldsmith said. His unit harassed the local population, and stopped cars, even as someone’s wife was going into labor in the back seat. And one day he trained his weapon on a six-year-old Iraqi boy pointing a stick at him as if it were an AK-47. “We were so desensitized. … The U.S. government put me in that position,” he said. “It took a lot of thinking not to kill the boy that day.”
( Read more... ) |
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| Can the Dalai Lama resign? |
[Mar. 18th, 2008|10:17 am] |
The Dalai Lama has said he will resign if the violence continues in Tibet. But how can he quit a position he was born into?
BBC
China has blamed the Buddhist spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, for orchestrating violence after days of rioting by Tibetans protesting at Chinese rule.
While denying accusations of inciting violence in Tibet, the Dalai Lama - who endorses non-violent protest - has gone so far as threatening to "completely resign" if the situation veers out of control.
But can the man many Tibetans consider as their leader just throw in the towel?
The crux of the answer is that the Dalai Lama has two roles - religious and political - and he can only resign from one of them.
( Read more... ) |
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| oldie, but a goodie |
[Mar. 12th, 2008|09:53 pm] |
Christopher Lee McCuin, 25, from Tyler, Texas in the United States has been arrested after police found him possibly preparing to eat the body parts of his dead girlfriend, Jana Shearer aged 21. He was also charged with stabbing his ex-wife's boyfriend, William Veasley, 42.
According to reports, Shearer's mother was told by McCuin to "look in the garage" where she discovered the mutilated body of her daughter. She then flagged down a police officer on the road.
McCuin called 911 after the mother left the house. According to reports, he told the dispatcher that he was boiling Shearer's body parts and preparing to eat them. When police got to his home, they discovered one of Shearer's ears boiling in a pot, and an unnamed piece of her flesh on the kitchen table, with silverware placed beside it. The rest of her body had several "chunks" missing from it, according to the Tyler Morning Telegraph quoting Sheriff J.B. Smith of the Smith County Sheriff's Department.
Police later found out that McCuin had stabbed his ex-wife's boyfriend, and also broke into Tyler Custom Openings, a local business, sometime on Friday or Saturday. He started by going to Shearer's home on Friday January 4 to have a discussion with her, but she was never seen alive again. Before stabbing Veasley, he beat Shearer "with a blunt object, multiple times" to death. On Saturday morning, he arrived at his ex-wife's home and fought with Veasley, stabbing him. He is currently in critical condition at a local hospital.
McCuin then broke into the Tyler Custom Openings and then went to his mother's house where he took her to his home to show her what he had done. Although McCuin was inside the house when police arrived, he was able to escape and was chased for a short distance before being caught again.
McCuin is currently being held on a US$2,000,000 bail at Smith County jail.
full story:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/01/06/texas.slaying.ap/index.html#cnnSTCVideo |
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| Security hole at Obama events? |
[Feb. 27th, 2008|11:37 pm] |
Apparently the U.S. Secret Service has established a pattern of screening early comers with metal detectors etc, doing so slowly, and then dropping the whole screening idea later on to get the crowds inside.
The story appears to have been broken by the Dallas-area Star Telegram:
DALLAS -- Security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.
The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.
Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence, head of the Police Department's homeland security and special operations divisions, said the order -- apparently made by the U.S. Secret Service -- was meant to speed up the long lines outside and fill the arena's vacant seats before Obama came on.
full story
Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Making Light has done you and me the favor of reading through some of the 50+ pages of comments on that article, many of which seem to imply that this is not an isolated incident, but rather the M.O. of the Secret Service this past year. Repeated comparisons are drawn to high schools, sporting events, and other places in which screening twenty thousand people in two hours is a normal thing. "Dude, this is the town that shot JFK" is also an unescapable observation.
Her post is very long and very well written and is itself a summary of much, much more, and I shouldn't try to summarize it here.
Go read it yourself.
The Secret Service is sticking up for themselves, and Obama isn't calling them out. Then again, if I had bodyguards who I thought were slacking because they didn't like me, but I couldn't afford to replace them, I wouldn't antagonize them myself. "I am easy to shoot, everyone" is also not typically a favored strategy in life. |
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| To Denounce and Reject |
[Feb. 27th, 2008|01:57 pm] |
Why the Farrakhan litmus test must go.
By Marjorie Valbrun
TheRoot.com
Updated: 10:58 AM ET Feb 27, 2008
Feb. 27, 2008 --It was the fall of 1985 when Min. Louis Farrakhan burst onto the New York City political scene. I was a journalism student at Columbia University at the time and, truth be told, I was woefully naive and politically uninformed. I had only a vague idea of who Farrakhan was until he gave a controversial Madison Square Garden speech to 25,000 people.
His arrival would prove to be one of my earliest lessons in the hypocrisy of the media and of the white political establishment. One after another prominent black political leaders were sought out by reporters and asked if they would publicly denounce, condemn, or repudiate Farrakhan. White political leaders called on black leaders who did not respond to promptly do so, and harshly criticized those who refused. It was all very surreal, and even as an inexperienced political watcher and budding student journalist, I knew there was something very wrong with this picture.
Bullying black leaders to represent the entire black race and to speak and think as one, while also treating every loud-mouthed, controversial black leader as if they represent the opinions, political views and personal aspirations of every black American, seemed to me to be a journalistic and political double-standard that was rarely, if ever, applied to white leaders and politicians.
( Read more... ) |
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| Survey: US Religious Landscape in Flux |
[Feb. 25th, 2008|02:59 pm] |
By ERIC GORSKI
The Associated Press
Monday, February 25, 2008; 12:00 PM
-- The U.S. religious marketplace is extremely volatile, with nearly half of American adults leaving the faith tradition of their upbringing to either switch allegiances or abandon religious affiliation altogether, a new survey finds.
The study released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is unusual for it sheer scope, relying on interviews with more than 35,000 adults to document a diverse and dynamic U.S. religious population.
While much of the study confirms earlier findings _ mainline Protestant churches are in decline, non-denominational churches are gaining and the ranks of the unaffiliated are growing _ it also provides a deeper look behind those trends, and of smaller religious groups.
"The American religious economy is like a marketplace _ very dynamic, very competitive," said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum. "Everyone is losing, everyone is gaining. There are net winners and losers, but no one can stand still. Those groups that are losing significant numbers have to recoup them to stay vibrant."
The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey estimates the United States is 78 percent Christian and about to lose its status as a majority Protestant nation, at 51 percent and slipping.
( Read more... ) |
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| Fidel’s Farewell |
[Feb. 25th, 2008|11:44 am] |
The New Yorker
by Alma Guillermoprieto
And that it should end so ingloriously! No fighting to the last man at the battlements, no martyr’s surrender to an assassin’s bullet, only a creaking, shuffling exit through the ward’s doors, hospital gown flapping. We are less than a year away from the half-century marker of a most astonishing marathon, but even this artist of endurance must bow to fate and acknowledge that it’s time to go. Vámonos, Fidel: no one is standing in the way.
So he leaves the field: Fidel Castro Ruz, son of a wealthy Spanish plantation owner and a Cuban washerwoman; rowdy street fighter and student leader; unstoppably audacious politician; revolutionary icon of the lordly profile; self-invented tropical socialist; epic enemy of the United States. In 1953, the extraordinary strength of his conviction persuaded more than a hundred men (and two women) to join him in an attack on one of the dictator Fulgencio Batista’s principal military garrisons. Nearly half his men died in the ill-fated attack and its aftermath; he escaped unharmed and emerged a hero. In December, 1956, following a period of imprisonment and exile, he led another improbable attack—this time by sea—against Batista. Again, he lost nearly all his men but survived, along with his kid brother, Raúl, and a scruffy Argentine named Ernesto Guevara. Washington had tired of the unsavory Batista, and it left the dictator to his enemies. On January 8, 1959, Fidel—in Cuba he would forever be known by his first name—entered Havana in triumph, promising Cubans an alternative to what had seemed their inescapable destiny as a Caribbean island. No more whoredom and ruffled cha-cha singers, no more death or blindness for want of simple prescription medicine, no more surrendering smiles for the tourist and the client, no more begging.
( Read more... ) |
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[Feb. 24th, 2008|12:13 pm] |
Al Jazeera is doing a poll to gauge world opinion of the U.S. presidential race. The current results are here.
1) Go vote!
2) Bearing in mind that this is an unscientific poll of 9,000 Al Jazeera readers... the results are pretty interesting.
Barack Obama is a clear worldwide favorite, followed by Romney*, Paul, Huckabee, Clinton, Gravel, and McCain, in that order. He sweeps every region except the Middle East, where he scores a whopping 4.5%. The only other place where he gets less than half the vote is the United States.
Although the number one candidate (by a margin of 8%) is a Democrat, the next three favored candidates are all Republicans.
Collectively, the world would rather see Mike Gravel in office than John McCain, who comes in dead last. The only region where McCain garners more than 7% of the vote is South America, where he gets 15%. Not surprisingly, the man who wants to stay in Iraq for 10,000 years polls at 1.8% in the Middle East.
Although, who is the prevailing candidate in the Middle East? It's Romney - who garners three quarters of the vote there, and has 1-3% support everywhere else. This is the man who supports Israel and the "surge" in Iraq, and refuses to set a timetable for withdrawal. So if people in the Middle East aren't voting based on Israel policy and the War on Terror... what are they voting on?
* not in the race anymore, but was in it when the poll began, and has not been removed from the poll. |
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| Raelians Rocket From Clones to Clitorises |
[Feb. 19th, 2008|09:07 am] |
By Eliza Strickland Wired
The Raelians have championed some strange causes in the movement's 25-year history, including aliens and human clones, but now they are going to bat for a body part -- the clitoris.
The cult's leader, Rael, whose real name is Claude Vorilhon, has become outraged by the custom of female genital cutting, the primarily African practice in which part of a girl's genitalia is sliced away.
Now the Raelian Movement has resolved to build a hospital in the West African country of Burkina Faso, where women could come to have their clitorises "reconstructed."
"Rael thought this is a crime against humanity," says Lara Terstenjak, a spokeswoman for Clitoraid, a nonprofit set up by the Raelians to sponsor genital surgeries.
( Read more... ) |
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| Annals of American History |
[Feb. 18th, 2008|09:45 am] |
The Water Cure
Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago.
by Paul Kramer
The New Yorker
February 25, 2008
Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars. The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba.
The Americans were not done liberating. Rising trade in East Asia suggested to imperialists that the Philippines, Spain’s largest colony, might serve as an effective “stepping stone” to China’s markets. U.S. naval plans included provisions for an attack on the Spanish Navy in the event of war, and led to a decisive victory against the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in May, 1898. Shortly afterward, Commodore George Dewey returned the exiled Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo to the islands. Aguinaldo defeated Spanish forces on land, declared the Philippines independent in June, and organized a government led by the Philippine élite.
During the next half year, it became clear that American and Filipino visions for the islands’ future were at odds. U.S. forces seized Manila from Spain—keeping the army of their ostensible ally Aguinaldo from entering the city—and President William McKinley refused to recognize Filipino claims to independence, pushing his negotiators to demand that Spain cede sovereignty over the islands to the United States, while talking about Filipinos’ need for “benevolent assimilation.” Aguinaldo and some of his advisers, who had been inspired by the United States as a model republic and had greeted its soldiers as liberators, became increasingly suspicious of American motivations. When, after a period of mounting tensions, a U.S. sentry fired on Filipino soldiers outside Manila in February, 1899, the second war erupted, just days before the Senate ratified a treaty with Spain securing American sovereignty over the islands in exchange for twenty million dollars. In the next three years, U.S. troops waged a war to “free” the islands’ population from the regime that Aguinaldo had established. The conflict cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and about four thousand U.S. soldiers.
( Read more... ) |
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