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Gerbera daisy. May, 2013. Photo by: joanneleon
Gerbera daisy. May, 2013. Photo by: joanneleon
Tunes
Rise Against - Hero Of War
News & Opinion
What do you say on Memorial Day in a country that now lives in the world of Forever War?
US Observes Memorial Day to Honor War Dead
U.S. President Barack Obama will honor the country's war dead with an address Monday, as the United States observes its annual Memorial Day.
The president will take part in a wreath-laying ceremony before his speech at Arlington National Cemetery, just outside Washington, where soldiers have placed American flags on more than 260,000 graves.
On Memorial Day, I say the same thing that I say every day. Bring them home. Give peace a chance. With our dirty wars, we're creating more terrorists than we are killing. We're ruining lives, homes, families. We're creating generational enemies. As Medea Benjamin said, it's not making us safe, it's making us less safe. We're not spreading democracy and freedom, we're spreading evil. We're wasting massive amounts of blood and treasure on massive death and destruction when we could be spending it on making people's lives better and on building things and fixing things and taking care of things and taking care of people.
Imagine all the people, living life in peace.
You may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one.
More than 400 cities. Five continents. It started with a facebook page and a Googledocs document. This is why the govt has to crack down on that darned internet.
Global Protest Against Monsanto
Those ebul Occupy kids are involved in this one too.
Protest in DC Denounces "Monsanto Protection Act"
R & R are at it again, and the NYT gives them a big megaphone... again. 'We used to like you, Paul Krugman, but now you're mean to us and have committed the crime of being... uncivil!' They are not very smart, IMHO, stirring this up again. They don't have many defenders because it's been demonstrated clearly that they were wrong. Apparently working with Wall Street crazed politicians to impoverish 99% of the world is not as bad as being... uncivil!!
Economists Behind Discredited Austerity Study Lash Out at Paul Krugman
Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the Harvard economists whose influential pro-austerity study was recently exposed as being seriously flawed, have penned a scathing open letter to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a major critic of their work and one of the leading voices in the anti-austerity movement. In the long-winded letter posted to Reinhart’s website Saturday, the pair accuse the Nobel Prize-winning economist of “uncivil behavior” and criticize him for being “selective and shallow” in his characterization of their research.
“We admire your past scholarly work, which influences us to this day,” the letter reads. “So it has been with deep disappointment that we have experienced your spectacularly uncivil behavior the past few weeks. You have attacked us in very personal terms, virtually non-stop, in your New York Times column and blog posts. Now you have doubled down in the New York Review of Books, adding the accusation we didn’t share our data. Your characterization of our work and of our policy impact is selective and shallow. It is deeply misleading about where we stand on the issues. And we would respectfully submit, your logic and evidence on the policy substance is not nearly as compelling as you imply.”
There are few people who know the facts and the details of Assange and Manning and Wikileaks better than Alexa O'Brien, nor anyone who has done more work on the subject. She thoroughly destroys Gibney and his propaganda film. I've watched a few interviews with him. He's on the defensive. He may have made some other good documentaries, but his one is apparently really slimy. He's beginning to remind me of Bill Keller with his Assange obsession. What's even more slimy, IMHO, is the way he tries to defend it in many lengthy interviews. Interestingly, the project was offered to him by Universal films. I wonder who was behind the project. Will we find out at some point in the future that this was another project favored by the CIA Hollywood liaison group like Zero Dark Thirty? There's another Assange film out there, to be released in October, with some big name actors and it's being done by Disney and Dreamworks. Yet another one is based on Bill Keller's really weird article in the NYT about the boy who kicked the hornet's nest, and for that one, Mark Boal and Megan Ellison (Annapurna Pictures) were teamed up again, just as they did in Zero Dark Thirty, though Gibney mentioned in a recent interview that the other Assange film projects have been abandoned, except for Dreamworks' "The Fifth Column".
A Review of Alex Gibney's 'We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks'
If "We Steal Secrets" or the subsequent Q & A with director, Alex Gibney, revealed anything, it's that the filmmaker is quite uninformed about the trial of Bradley Manning. He can barely speak on the topic or on that of the largest criminal probe of a publisher and its source in history.
[...]
Losing the Plot
Gibney's dramatic ploy is to pit Manning's plight in obscurity against Assange's fame. "All Julian had left was his celebrity," narrates Gibney. Yet, the feeding frenzy of speculation and gossip about Assange was and is the default setting of the majority of our established press-- too impoverished, cowardly, or lazy to cover the content of the leaks or related legal cases substantially or critically.
[...]
Gibney's exercise discovers nothing, and reveals nothing. His tabloid motion graphic is a regurgitation of stock footage, unsubstantiated innuendo, and unexamined allegation. The ominous and unprecedented prosecution of Manning unfolding in a soundproofed room in the confined wasteland of Fort Meade is a trite remark in the dark space surrounding Gibney's frame.
[...]
The selective criticism of Assange for his alleged bad-faith motive for not appearing in Gibney's film is irrational and intellectually dishonest. During a Q & A, Gibney stated that he was unable to secure interviews with Guardian journalists-- save Nick Davis and James Ball. The Guardian, he opined, did not want to thwart their own Hollywood film about WikiLeaks.
[...]
Adrian Lamo, however, the U.S. Government's confidential informant, who is best described as 'just a liar' is Gibney's voice of empathic consciousness, risk management, and the constitutional test between Executive privilege and the public's right to know.
Even sick human beings, like Adrian Lamo, who can't handle the truth, deserve empathy, but "facts matter". What Gibney has done here is not art; it is a cheap trick.
The Lethal President Sends His Regrets: What Obama's Drone Speech Meant
The lawyer said that the speech was a response to several things, among them the drawing down of the war in Afghanistan and the promotion of John Brennan to the directorship of the CIA. But most of all, the lawyer added, the speech was an opportunity — a chance for the President, finally, to be himself. "From what I know of the president, these are things he really cares about. He's been displeased with the constant war footing and frustrated with the lack of transparency. These are themes he's been pressing from day one. But now he thinks that time is running short and he thinks it's important to the United States and the world for him to be clear about what the administration is doing. It's hard to move the institutions he has to deal with. He's finally said, 'Enough. We have to do this.' I think this was always coming. What you'll hear from the president today is what he's always wanted to say. It's what I've always heard him say."
A few minutes later, I called one of President Obama's former counter-terrorism advisors. I told him what the lawyer had said, about the entrenched institutions of government frustrating the president's inclination to push for transparency, and he said, "I never saw any inclination to push for these things. He's always talked transparency without being transparent. He must have started pushing after I left."
[...]
Yesterday's speech was rhetorically important and rhetorically remarkable — a rhetorical step forward, as many commenters have said — but if the Lethal Presidency reminds us of anything, it's that we should be a long way from judging this president on his rhetoric or his portrayal of himself as a moral actor. Of course, when a man is as successful in fusing morality and rhetoric as Barack Obama, there's always a tendency to think that the real man exists in his words, and all he has to do is find a way to live up to them. The lawyer I spoke to yesterday cast his former boss almost as a Promethean figure, bound to the rock of government, his idealism continually pecked away by politics. The president, in his speeches, usually seems to agree with this characterization, keeping us interested by threatening to break his chains. But yesterday's speech, for all the verbal and moral energy it devoted to the task of moving on, reminds us of what Prometheus was in for:
He gave the world fire.
Immediately after the speech, the following journos were brought to the White House for a meeting with the president, a meeting that was supposed to be an hour long but ran for twice that. Earlier in the week, someone from NPR spotted Josh Marshall, Jonathan Capehart and Ezra Klein heading into the White House with some other unnamed "lefty columnists". It seems that journalists like to report on these meetings but only when they are not one of the ones invited.
Obama met privately with Friedman, Ignatius, etc.
Present at the meeting were Thomas Friedman, The New York Times columnist; Gerald Seib, The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau chief; Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of The Washington Post; David Igantius, The Washington Post columnist; Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic correspondent and Bloomberg View columnist; and Joe Klein, the Time magazine columnist.
Gitmo: Parsing what the president actually said
President Obama’s statements were contradictory. He blamed Congress for halting transfers, but announced he would be lifting the ban on transfers to Yemen, which is a self-imposed policy. “The idea that he has lifted the ban on returning Yemenis to Yemen is something you can’t give him too much credit for because he’s the one who put that in place,” said attorney David Remes, who represents 17 of the current prisoners at Gitmo, 14 of whom are Yemeni. “It’s a meaningless statement. At the same time he’s saying Congress has tied his hands,” added Remes. In an earlier conversation with MSNBC, Remes spoke of the needed action regarding the 56 cleared Yemeni detainees; “[Obama] cannot make meaningful progress without sending the Yemenis home…they all want to reunite with their families and rebuild their lives.”
‘This is a massive effort to attract cheap labor.’ Why Sen. Bernie Sanders is skeptical of guest workers.
The bottom line is that I feel, very much, that a lot of the initiative behind these guest workers programs, a very large expansion of guest worker programs — H2B visas would go up to as many as 195,000, H1B to as many as 205,000 a year — is coming from large corporations who want cheap labor from abroad. Absolutely, there is a need for foreign labor. I recognize that in agriculture and certain areas in the high tech industry, you need foreign labor. But this is a massive effort to attract cheap labor, a great disservice to American workers.
Young and Unemployed in America
"The youth unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year old workers 16.2%... For teenagers the overall unemployment rate is 25.1%. For African American teens, the number is 43.1%. Believe it or not, Madame President, the United States has now surpassed much of Europe in the percentage of young adults without jobs, according to a recent article in the New York Times.
Indian Guest Workers Sue Company in Miss., Texas
Dozens of Indian guest workers are suing an Alabama-based marine and fabrication company, claiming it financially exploited them and forced them to live in squalid conditions after bringing them to work at Gulf Coast shipyards after Hurricane Katrina.
Three federal lawsuits backed by the Southern Poverty Law Center were filed Tuesday in Mississippi and Texas on behalf of 83 people who worked for Signal International LLC after the 2005 storm slammed into the coast.
Get Apocalyptic: Why Radical is the New Normal
Feeling anxious about life in a broken economy on a strained planet? Turn despair into action.
Feeling anxious about life in a broken-down society on a stressed-out planet? That’s hardly surprising: Life as we know it is almost over. While the dominant culture encourages dysfunctional denial—pop a pill, go shopping, find your bliss—there’s a more sensible approach: Accept the anxiety, embrace the deeper anguish—and then get apocalyptic.
We are staring down multiple cascading ecological crises, struggling with political and economic institutions that are unable even to acknowledge, let alone cope with, the threats to the human family and the larger living world. We are intensifying an assault on the ecosystems in which we live, undermining the ability of that living world to sustain a large-scale human presence into the future. When all the world darkens, looking on the bright side is not a virtue but a sign of irrationality.
In these circumstances, anxiety is rational and anguish is healthy, signs not of weakness but of courage. A deep grief over what we are losing—and have already lost, perhaps never to be recovered—is appropriate. Instead of repressing these emotions we can confront them, not as isolated individuals but collectively, not only for our own mental health but to increase the effectiveness of our organizing for the social justice and ecological sustainability still within our grasp. Once we’ve sorted through those reactions, we can get apocalyptic and get down to our real work.
35 pictures from the shore (southern part of the Jersey shore) as things open up again, post-Sandy, for the summer season. It's been a cold weekend with some rain, but that's not unusual for Memorial Day weekend at the Jersey shore.
Memorial Day at the Shore
C'mon down! Open for business. New and improved. Sandy who? Jump in, the water's fine! Communities on the Jersey Shore are ready to welcome vacationers during the Summer of 2013.
After a long winter of hard work, summer begins at the Shore
And now comes summer and the ceremonial end to the endless winter.
Ceremonial, because with all the ribbon cuttings and grand reopenings and bare toes in freshly screened sand, the work goes on. Ceremonial, because most beachfronts north of LBI still look like construction sites.
But that’s okay, because what will be unveiled at the Jersey Shore this weekend is pretty amazing. But it is not miraculous. It is simply the product of 197 days of hard work. Seven months of seven-day weeks, 28 weeks of 12-hour days. Of work, and more work.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Evening Blues
More Tunes
Bob Marley & the Wailers - War/No More Trouble (live)
FREDA PAYNE: "BRING THE BOYS HOME"