Without a Free Press, democracy cannot exist.

America's media is now owned by conglomerates -- which used to number 8, may be lower now. Conglomerates = corporations=business=Republicans. You expect Conglomerates to give you the `news'? They're happy taking your dollars and shaping the news, thank you very much.

Did you watch the Sunday talking heads yesterday? Why? Anything changed since the last time you watched? Republicans still outnumber Democrats (I'm talking REAL Democrats here, not Republican Lite)... there's one opinion, then the opposite -- separated by a `moderator'... no journalism there. How `bout the newspaper? Did you read the economy sucks, the Treasury is empty, more troops died last week? No?

What are you going to do about it? Talk about it... some more? Haven't we been doing that long enough? Did you hear plans have been completed, signed off, for US to attack Iran in June?

The objective of this diary is NOT to discuss the circumstances surrounding Nick Berg's death, but to examine the diverse commentary surrounding this event, which I believe to be a phenomena in and of itself.

Scottish poet Robert Burns observed:
"O would some power the giftie give us/ to see ourselves as others see us."

The view of those in the Middle East might be:

European settlers with a biblical ideology invaded the Americas and destroyed the indigenous civilizations that had prospered there for centuries or millennia. New Americans paid no attention to the rights of local people, who were wantonly slaughtered and driven from their lands, or who died en masse of the diseases brought from Europe to the Northern American continent by the Europeans. Besides being built on the graves of millions of Native peoples in the eastern and central part of the continent, America was built on the backs of millions of Africans, kidnapped and worked to death in the new world to build and benefit the white man's paradise. This dual crime of genocide and enslavement was soon supplemented by a third, the systematic depopulation of what was once greater Mexico, the area now known as the southwestern United States, of its original inhabitants. The American colonial machine soon occupied all of what is now called the United States, and legalized and normalized the fruits of its crimes.