07/01/2008
Venom, Ire, ribs, etc.
Well, I'm still quite fond of the surgeon who performed my recent surgery, even though I think he underestimated the recovery time from my collateral damage, a broken rib. I think I'll need every moment of the 2 months he initially predicted for my recovery, which he later revised to 6 weeks due to my wonderful prognosis and youth (!).
Just because I'm sitting around at home feeling sorry for myself because I'm not dipping into the opioid painkillers I've been given - I can't stand them, unfortunately - that doesn't mean I'm not spending an inordinate amount of time browsing amongst the tubes of the internets with my usual jaundiced eye.
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A recent piece in the London Review Of Books discusses a book titled Flat Earth News. It's a dissection of certain problems the author has with the British mainstream media, but with a few minor alterations, the same situation exists in the US; budgets for news cut to the bone and then cut further, "reporters" functioning as nothing more than unquestioning transcribers of press releases, financial pressure turning newspapers and networks into infotainment outlets with no purpose other than returning maximum profits to investors.
The thin gruel passing for news here in the US, and the subsequent vast ignorance of the populace of what's being done in our names abroad, is discussed by Jon Sewart and Lara Logan, chief CBS foreign correspondent, one of a vanishing breed:
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And speaking of the press, one of the few institutions regularly practicing what might be characterized as even a faint memory of investigative journalism is McClatchy.
They've done several leading stories recently: How a senior Pentagon officer went about fine-tuning American torture techniques; a Guantanamo prisoner wants a court to decide if his torture was actually torture according to twisted Bush administration logic; how the Republican-run Department Of Justice derailed an investigation into Republican criminality the might have effected the contested 2004 presidential "election"; how Guantanamo and many American "black site" secret prisons are holding people kidnapped on a whim by our representatives and operatives; the revelation that there are worse American prisons than Guantanamo; and segregation at US military bases in the Middle East, about which, of course, nobody in command knows nothin'.
All that being said - and major props to McClatchy for breaking most of these stories - McClatchy has major problems of its own.
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For those with a taste for political documentaries, I've been enjoying freedocumentaries.org, which streams scads of political films, some downloadable. Coupla Chomsky lectures, several voting fraud films, Moore's Sicko, the truly outstanding The Corporation, a fascinating look at the aging of the anarchist community in NY, etc.
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The Republican smear machine is gearing up against Obama, and doing quite well.
However, for my money, I think Obama is working just as hard to do himself in, casting about for the dregs of the Republican base using Bush tactics. I'm afraid to say that while this guy may come across as young and dynamic, his ethics are about winning; nothing else.
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In a fabulous development, the Bush regime's policy of star chamber evidentiary rules was unanimously overturned by a 3-justice panel including one of their own right-wingers.
With some derision for the Bush administration's arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.
The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem "The Hunting of the Snark": "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
"This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true," said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Of course, someone had to speak for the Administration; it's simply not done to have the truth go unchallenged by neocon spin:
"This case displays the inadequacies of having civilian courts inject themselves into military decision-making," said Glenn M. Sulmasy, a law professor at the Coast Guard Academy and a national security fellow at Harvard.
It's the Harvard part that makes this baboon legit, I assume.
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Frank Rich wrote a good column in the NY Times last week about the Republican reliance on plain old hate-of-the-other to get votes, as well as their kinda sorta hoping for a terrorist attack right near the 2008 election.
This put me in mind of a conversation I had several weeks ago with my friend Jim, who thinks I'm completely off the hook politically, even though we're both quite liberal.
I'd just finished going on for a while about the fact that I think both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections were stolen by the Republicans, and that the neocons seized the government in a bloodless coup.
Hearing this, Jim rolled his eyes, smiled indulgently, and begged to disagree. He then went on to propound his theory that about a week before the election, if Obama is still leading in the polls, the Reppublicans will have him assassinated and Bush will declare himself President for the forseeable future because of national security considerations.
No crazier than stealing 2 elections, I suppose.
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On the other hand, there may not be any problem at all:
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Free Speech Reminder:
Don't lose touch with my boy The Freeway Blogger, he's got a great, direct, cheap, grassroots grasp of politics.
And he's articulate, too:
Interview courtesy of Politics In The Zeros.
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Planning on traveling with your laptop and digital camera? Looking forward to getting home?
Not so fast:
But an April ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Protection, does have full authority to search any electronic devices without suspicion in the same way that it can inspect briefcases.
Additionally, Raw Story has a slightly more detailed take on this.
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Juan Cole, over at Informed Comment made a very apt connection between George Carlin's dislike of euphemisms and the shading of the true brutality of the Iraq War.
Here's the Carlin clip he references. The piece on euphemisms starts about 2:00 in, when he says "You can't be afraid of words that speak the truth." It goes on until 5:00.
And to illustrate Carlin's point about "shell shock", here's Kelly Kennedy, of The Army Times:
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Republicans discover they may be in trouble, even after all that lying, cheating, and stealing.
Duh.
House GOP concludes they failed to sway voters
By DAVID ESPO | AP Special Correspondent
8:24 PM EDT, June 26, 2008
WASHINGTON - House Republicans lost three recent elections when customary campaign themes failed to sway voters and their candidates could not overcome the "negative perception of the national party," according to an internal review that underscores the potential for widespread losses this fall.
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That's all for today. The rib's starting to bang away again, so I'm going out on to the porch to read and make stoic faces.