Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
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Hey, Don’t Catch a Cold…
Cocaine Jesus….
….Riding on the Dashboard of my Car!
Meet Cocaine Jesus.
Federal agents last week arrested a Mexican national for allegedly paying a woman to smuggle into the U.S. a statue that was made of a dried cocaine paste. The carefully painted religious icon, pictured here, weighed about six pounds and would have had a street value of about $30,000. The statue was confiscated at a Texas border crossing after a drug-sniffing dog alerted agents to it during an inspection of a vehicle driven by a Mexican woman. The woman later told agents that she was paid $80 by a man who wanted the statue delivered to him at a Laredo bus station.
Source. / The Smoking Gun / May 29, 2008
The Rag Blog
Guess That Makes Us Artifacts….
…Speak for yourself, Dreyer
Back to the Garden: A Woodstock Museum
By Peter Applebome / May 29, 2008
BETHEL, N.Y. — A funny thing happened on the magic bus trip back to the tie-dyed land of peace, love and music.
Yes, there were Jimi and Janis and Joe Cocker twitching around in film clips from the famous concert 39 years ago on the rolling meadow that was Max Yasgur’s alfalfa field. There was a real-life hippie bus in psychedelic colors, and displays of a stars-and-stripes suede jacket and love beads next to a minidress and go-go boots ensemble, the latter getup presumably not worn at Woodstock.
John Sebastian and Richie Havens were there to reminisce. They played Canned Heat’s “Going Up the Country” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” by Bob Dylan.
But somehow “then” kept looping back to “now” at the unveiling Wednesday of the Museum at Bethel Woods, which will open to the public on Monday.
So there was Duke Devlin, famous as the hippie from the Texas Panhandle who came to Woodstock and never left, standing in the bright sun giving his spiel yet again for a German television crew as they waited for two squadrons of reporters in Peter Pan buses to descend on the field where the concert took place.
Stout and tattooed, with long gray hair and beard, Mr. Devlin is the embodiment of the transition of the Woodstock generation into the AARP generation. But he figures that if Woodstock is about nostalgia, it’s about more than nostalgia, too.
“Is it over yet?” he asked. “We’re still here talking. We’ve now got this wonderful museum, but I don’t call it a museum, I call it a time capsule. And without me getting too political, a lot of the same ingredients are still the same — we’ve got a war, we have civil rights, we have women’s issues. Back then, we got sick and tired of being sick and tired. I don’t know if this can be recreated, but something like it can happen again. We’re back in the ’50s, man. The reason we’re all here is because we’re not all there.”
Which is not to say that the museum, housed in a lovely laminated wood structure built by a company that long ago built Mr. Yasgur’s silos, tries to be the personification of the Woodstock ethos, whatever that was. Centered on a 6,728-square-foot permanent gallery, it’s part of Alan Gerry’s re-creation of Woodstock not as a vehicle for peace and love but as a vehicle for Sullivan County’s economic development. The site has become a $100 million arts center with a 15,000-seat outdoor performance space.
And along with voices marveling about how much fun they had in the mud or how Woodstock changed the world, we get to hear old Nixon-era stalwarts lambasting all that Woodstock has come to stand for. “The ’60s were just a terrible time for the country,” says former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, the biggest downer in a chorus of voices, yea and nay, that museumgoers hear after a 21-minute film of music from the concert. “It was the age of selfishness. It was the age of self-indulgence. It was the age of anti-authority, an age in which people did all kind of wrong things. That was the start, really, of the drug problem in the United States.”
But yea or nay, and it’s mostly yea, the most striking thing about the museum is the way that in the end, it’s less about the famous concert and yoga in the mud than about the era that the concert has come to represent.
“When I came to this project, there was this idea to memorialize the concert, which was about as far as it had gone,” said Patrick Gallagher, president of the firm that designed the museum. “And I said, ‘If it’s just a celebration of a celebration, what’s the purpose?’ And the more we peeled back the onion the more it was clear that the idea wanted to be Woodstock as the culminating moment, the capstone of the 1960s. We had to look back to look forward.”
So about 60 percent of the museum is about the politics and culture and music of the ’60s: pillbox hats, Elvis, the Bay of Pigs, the Beatles, civil rights, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. And the rest is a quite vivid re-creation of the chaotic and unlikely process that led to 500,000 people shouting, “No rain, no rain, no rain,” during the summer downpours, Jimi Hendrix’s legendary performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and all the rest.
As for the music, Mr. Sebastian said that in the end, some was revelatory and a lot was something of a mess. “No matter what we say after the fact, most of us disliked our performances at Woodstock,” he said. “I can find you a quick dozen people who would look back on that performance and say, ‘Oh, man, I bit the big one.’ ” But as for the event, he said, he went home knowing that he had been a part of history.
He wonders why, if people love Woodstock so much, they don’t find ways to act on the things about it that matter. “It evaporated so fast,” he said. “One minute we were there and the next we were in Reagan-land.”
Still, he said, as one of the voices in the exhibit: “I guess it did give you the illusion of infinite possibilities. And maybe that’s the part that we have to say bye-bye to. Because that can’t be for your whole life or for every moment in history that you might happen to live through.”
As for saying bye-bye to Woodstock, not a chance. The museum opens a year before the 40th anniversary, probably the last big milestone at which most of the musicians will be able to perform without walkers. They’re just beginning to draw up plans, but Mr. Meese notwithstanding, don’t expect it to come and go quietly.
Source. / New York Times
Thanks to Tom Welsh / The Rag Blog
Fox News, RNC : Buchenwald Just Labor Camp!
Using the Holocaust to Smear Obama
By Menachem Rosensaft / May 28, 2008
I never thought I’d see the day when the Holocaust would be used as a tool for “gotcha” politics. But over the last two days, we have seen John McCain’s supporters at the Republican National Committee and at Fox News launch tasteless attacks on Barack Obama. In their attempt to score a few political points, they have diminished the experience of those who suffered and died at Buchenwald, and disrespected the service of the heroic American troops who liberated them.
It started yesterday when the RNC put out a statement slamming Obama for referring to Auschwitz as he related a family story on Memorial Day. Instead of merely asking for clarification, the RNC smeared Obama’s “dubious claim,” and suggested — tongue in cheek — that perhaps Obama’s uncle “was serving in the Red Army.” They went on to say that the story raised questions “about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief.”
It turns out that Obama’s great uncle — the brother of the grandmother who largely raised him — served in the 89th Infantry Division of the United States Army, which liberated Ohrdruf, part of Buchenwald. But astonishingly, that only served to fan the flames for those on the right who saw an attempt to use the heroic service of Obama’s uncle against him. In their breathless attempt to damage Obama, Fox News has stooped to a level that is truly depressing.
This morning on the program Fox and Friends, one of the hosts said: “It wasn’t Auschwitz. It was a labor camp called Buchenwald.” Just in case the point was missed, she repeated. “It wasn’t Auschwitz, it was a labor camp. You would think you would want to be as specific as possible if you are telling one of these anecdotes.” Meanwhile, a news “crawl” at the bottom of the screen reinforced, in bold letters, that this was “a work camp, rather than an extermination camp.”
Here are some facts about Buchenwald, which is one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps. At this “work camp,” prisoners were often worked, starved, tortured, or beaten to death. Sometimes they were simply murdered. Roughly 250,000 people were imprisoned there between 1937 and 1945, many of them Jews. Over 50,000 people lost their lives.
At Nuremberg, the world was shocked to learn that some of Buchenwald’s victims were skinned, and the human skin was then used to make lampshades, book covers, and other keepsakes. Buchenwald was also a site for the infamous Nazi “medical experiments” on prisoners, which were often nothing more than crude and horrific forms of torture.
To take just one anecdote about the “work” done at Buchenwald, prisoners had to build the camp road, and camp guards used to shoot those who were not carrying stones that were heavy enough. In the final days before liberation, some 10,000 prisoners from Auschwitz and Gross-Rossen were marched to Buchenwald, adding to the horrific scene that awaited American troops.
On April 4, 1945, Ohrdruf became the first Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by American forces. U.S. troops — including the 89th Infantry Division — found a scene that was vividly described by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission: “The scene was an indescribable horror even to the combat-hardened troops who captured the camp. Bodies were piled throughout the camp. There was evidence everywhere of systematic butchery. Many of the mounds of dead bodies were still smoldering from failed attempts by the departing SS guards to burn them.”
Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley would tour the camp in the days ahead. Eisenhower was so moved by the atrocities at this “work camp,” that he wrote to his wife Mamie that it was “beyond the American mind of comprehend.” He made both his own men and all of the citizens of the German town of Gotha tour the camp. He wanted the Americans to know the evil that they were fighting. He wanted German citizens to see what had been done in their name. After this tour, the Mayor of Gotha and his wife hanged themselves.
Many of the terrible photographs and videos that we have seen of the Holocaust come from these days. Eisenhower said that he wanted, “to give first-hand evidence if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.'” The carefully documents attrocities at Buchenwald are thus part of the record that we use to confront anyone who would deny the horror of the Holocaust.
The men who liberated Buchenwald were heroes, plain and simple. That includes Barack Obama’s great uncle. In their march across Europe, the 89th Infantry Division suffered over 1,000 casualties, with over 300 men killed. In their liberation of Buchenwald, they put an end to one of the most horrible concentration camps of the 20th century. We must honor them, just as we must remember each and every victim of the criminal Nazi regime.
To those who continue to use this story to damage Barack Obama, I have a simple question: have you no shame? You attempts to diminish his uncle’s service for your own political gain says a lot more about you than it does about Barack Obama.
Source. / The Huffington Post
Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog
Rachel Ray in Keffiyeh : Donut Terrorist?
Drivel Dragon Disses Doughnut Diva
By Dark Wraith / May 28, 2008
Global doughnut franchiser Dunkin’ Donuts has removed from broadcast an ad featuring television chef Rachel Ray because Right-wing extremist Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin claimed that, in the ad, Ray was wearing a scarf called a keffiyeh, which is traditionally worn by Arab men. Malkin described this head wrapping as having been “…popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos.”
Of Ray’s offending accessory, Dunkin’ Donuts said, “…the scarf had a paisley design… selected by a stylist for the advertising shoot,” and went on to blubber, “Absolutely no symbolism was intended.”
Gleeful that her latest exercise in bullying had caused a corporation to capitulate, Malkin followed up her original commentary of last week on the matter with praise for the company: “It’s refreshing to see an American company show sensitivity to the concerns of Americans opposed to Islamic jihad and its apologists.”
Ms. Malkin and her fellow apologists made no mention of the fact that none other than Meghan McCain, daughter of putative GOP presidential nominee John McCain, has been photographed publicly wearing a nearly identical scarf. So, too, have American and British soldiers stationed in the Middle East; in fact under the name “shemagh,” the traditional headdress is so common as an Anglo-American armed forces apparel option that it is sold online as military gear and described as being “…worn by U.S. and British Special Ops. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Now, many readers righteously indignant over this whole incident are wondering what can be done. As far as Malkin is concerned, the answer is simple: “absolutely nothing.” As frustrating as that is, long ago the choices were made to let a much wider range of personalities be considered within the scope of “normalcy.” The extremists of the 21st Century are nothing other than the blowback from a previous era of liberalism and its obsession with intellectual tolerance that extended all the way to anti-intellectualism. In gratitude, the practitioners of orgiastic ignorance have issued forth a tsunami of intimidation to wash away that same liberal society which allowed them the freedom to coälesce with their own kind in the open and become a rolling mob running amok to shatter the glass windows of the market of clear, thoughtful, and reasoned ideas.
On the level of the commentators, themselves, let it go: that war is over and lost.
More broadly, never try to change the whole world when more can be accomplished by making the willfully miserable within it even more so.
As far as the craven media outlets, schools, public figures, and corporations that allow themselves to be bullied into submission by the madness of our age, it is their fate that they find no harbor of quiet by doing what the Right demands of them.
Change something deserving of aggravation; and to do that, first, politely ask for its attention.
If that doesn’t work, scream in its bloody ear.
If it is deaf, moon it.
If it is blind, fart at it.
If its own smell has made it insensible, find its testicles. With corporations, they are called “sales revenue.”
If you are dealing with a corporation that has $5.3 billion in global sales revenue, as Dunkin’ Donuts does, your personal boycott is going to fail, but your personal quest might not.
In the case of the latest sniveling company that has caved to bizarre allegations, the good news about certain failure in effectively punishing the craven is two-fold: first, you will have the pleasure of annoying the rich, cowardly, well-dressed executives who run the firm; and, second, by not purchasing Dunkin’ Donuts products, you might find out about small bakeries right in your area that not only sell much better doughnuts, but also know how to spell the word for their product.
Dunkin’ Donuts
Consumer Care
130 Royall Street
Canton MA 02021
(800) 859-5339Dunkin’ Donuts Public Relations Department
130 Royall Street
Canton, MA 02021
(781) 737-5200Executive Management
Will Kussell,
President & Chief Brand Officer
Frances Allen,
Brand Marketing Officer
(781) 737-3000
Bon appétit, crusaders of the crusty cruller.
The Dark Wraith reaches for the éclairs.
Source. / The UnCapitalist Journal
The Rag Blog
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged American Society, Capitalism, Dining, Madison Avenue, Media, Terrorism
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Austin Civil Rights Pioneer Dies at 89
Ernest Goldstein Pushed for Integration At University of Texas in ’50s
By Joe Holley / May 29, 2008
E. Ernest Goldstein, 89, a Capitol Hill lawyer who moved to Texas in the mid-1950s and played a leading role in the full integration of the University of Texas at Austin and who later served in the Johnson administration, died May 25 of Alzheimer’s disease at his home in Austin.
Mr. Goldstein was teaching law at the University of Texas when students and faculty members began protesting race-based regulations on the South’s largest campus, which had about 200 African American students among a student body of more than 20,000.
In 1961, the university’s student assembly voted 22 to 2 to integrate Texas athletic teams and 23 to 1 to integrate a men’s dormitory. The nine regents, all appointees of two segregationist governors, voted to ignore the students’ voices.
When black students held sit-ins at segregated dorms and were put on disciplinary probation, Mr. Goldstein circulated a resolution denouncing dorm regulations that “degrade the dignity of the individual, subvert the academic community and interfere with the educational process.”
He ridiculed the university’s position. “What happened,” he told Time magazine, “was they collected all the known Negroes and then they asked them, ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Negro race?’ “
Ronnie Dugger of the Texas Observer reported that a mathematics professor challenged Mr. Goldstein during a faculty meeting: “Why did you accept the tradition here? Why did you come?”
“Because I knew what the law of the land was, and I assumed the university would progress with the rest of the world,” Mr. Goldstein responded.
The faculty assembly adopted his resolution by a vote of 308 to 34, but the regents continued to insist that the integrationists were a “vocal minority.”
“When students gathered outside the faculty assembly to applaud their teachers, Goldstein (by this time the clear leader of a popular revolt) appeared in an open window, coattails flapping, to encourage the legal fight,” Time reported.
“He didn’t go looking for a fight; he just had a fierce sense of fairness,” said his son, Daniel Goldstein of Baltimore.
Mr. Goldstein was born in Pittsburgh and graduated cum laude from Amherst College in 1939. He studied at the University of Chicago Law School from 1940 to 1942 and received a law degree from Georgetown University in 1947. He received a doctorate of law from the University of Wisconsin in 1956.
During World War II, he served as an Army Security Agency cryptanalyst at Arlington Hall, where he helped to break coded German naval communications. He received the Legion of Merit.
He practiced law with the Washington firm of Pike and Fisher before joining the Justice Department. He served as counsel to the House antitrust subcommittee chaired by Rep. Emmanuel Celler (D-N.Y.) during its investigation of baseball’s reserve clause and as counsel to the Senate committee chaired by Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) that investigated organized crime.
In 1952-53, he was a restrictive-trade practices specialist to the U.S. mission in Paris and the U.S. representative to the Productivity and Applied Research Committee of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. A run-in with Harold Stassen, director of the Foreign Operations Administration during the Eisenhower administration, left him out of work for nine months. Stassen, according to Mr. Goldstein’s son, questioned the loyalties of some of Mr. Goldstein’s associates.
He became a professor of law at Texas in 1955 and taught international law, trademark and copyright law and government regulation of competition.
In 1966-67, he served as counsel to Coudert Frères in Paris, then joined the Johnson administration as special assistant to the president. In 1968, he rejoined Coudert Frères as a partner, living in Paris and Switzerland before returning to Austin in 1992.
For years, Mr. Goldstein was an inveterate writer of letters to the editor. In a 1948 letter to The Washington Post, he decried the segregation policies of the National Theatre and Lisner Auditorium and proposed a committee of District residents who would “underwrite four or eight weeks of full, nonsegregated houses at the National. . . . Should we not demonstrate the willingness of the majority to attend a nonsegregated theater?”
In another letter to The Post years later, he chided Jack Valenti, who also worked in the Johnson White House, for claiming that presidential assistants missed the joy of power. Mr. Goldstein wrote that he and others “neither sought nor obtained an extra client or dollar because of the LBJ connection.”
Mr. Goldstein’s wife, Peggy Goldstein, died in 2003.
In addition to his son, survivors include a daughter, Susan Lipsitch of Atlanta; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Source. / Washington Post
When I got to UT in September 1963 the dormitories were all segregated. This was becoming somewhat of an embarrassment for Vice President Johnson and after the President was assassinated in Dallas it became even more so for the new President who had a daughter living in Kinsolving. I am not acquainted with the civil rights movement prior to the fall of 1963 but during 1963-1964 I never heard of any movement to integrate the dorms. Just before graduation in June 1964, Charlie Smith, with me as a look-out, slipped in through a little known unlocked door in Kinsolving at 3:30 a.m. and put leaflets under the doors with the message that there would be big demonstrations at Commencement if the dorms weren’t integrated. This was all a bluff since we were going to Mississippi and nobody knew about it but Charlie and me. But, to our surprise, they did integrate the dorms. Not because of us for sure, but maybe we were the straw that convinced them. President Johnson was coming to UT and didn’t want to be embarrassed.
A sidelight is that the alumni didn’t want their daughters forced to live in a dorm room with a black woman so they abolished the rule that all women had to live in approved housing and be in by 10 p.m.. They could move out of the dorm, get an apartment off-campus and stay out all night if they wanted rather than live with a black person. That opened the door for the SDS communal houses, all night meetings etc etc.
Robert Pardun / The Rag Blog
Thanks to Doyle Niemann / The Rag Blog
More Guilty of Terminal Indifference Than Venality
Where Is the Outrage?
by Robert Scheer / May 28, 2008
Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
Because the report was widely cited in the media and easily accessed as a pdf file on the Internet, it is fair to assume that those of our citizens who remain ignorant of the extent of their government’s commitment to torture as an official policy have made a choice not to be informed. A less appealing conclusion would be that they are aware of the heinous acts fully authorized by our president but conclude that such barbarism is not inconsistent with that American way of life that we celebrate.
But that troubling assessment of moral indifference is contradicted by the scores of law enforcement officers, mostly from the FBI, who were so appalled by what they observed as routine official practice in the treatment of prisoners by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo that they risked their careers to officially complain. A few brave souls from the FBI even compiled a “war crimes file,” suggesting the unthinkable — that we might come to be judged as guilty by the standard we have imposed on others. Superiors in the Justice Department soon put a stop to such FBI efforts to hold CIA agents and other U.S. officials accountable for the crimes they committed.
That this systematic torture was carried out not by a few conveniently described “bad apples” but rather represented official policy condoned at the highest level of government was captured in one of those rare media reports that remind us why the Founding Fathers signed off on the First Amendment.
“These were not random acts,” The New York Times editorialized. “It is clear from the inspector general’s report that this was organized behavior by both civilian and military interrogators following the specific orders of top officials. The report shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners.”
One of those top officials, who stands revealed in the inspector general’s report as approving the torture policy, is Condoleezza Rice, who in her capacity as White House national security adviser turned away the concerns of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft as to the severe interrogation measures being employed. Rice, as ABC-TV reported in April, chaired the top-level meetings in 2002 in the White House Situation Room that signed off on the CIA treatment of prisoners — “whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called water boarding. …” According to the report, the former academic provost of Stanford University came down on the side of simulated drowning.
As further proof that women are not necessarily more squeamish than men in condoning such practices, the report offers examples of sexual and religious denigration of the mostly Muslim prisoners by female interrogators carrying out an official policy of “invasion of space by a female.” In one recorded instance observed by startled FBI agents, a female interrogator was seen with a prisoner “bending his thumbs back and grabbing his genitals … to cause him pain.” One of the agents testified that this was not “a case of a rogue interrogator acting on her own.” He said he witnessed a “pep rally” meeting conducted by a top Defense Department official “in which the interrogators were encouraged to get as close to the torture statute line as possible.”
That was evidently the norm, according to FBI agents who witnessed the interrogations. As The New York Times reported, “One bureau memorandum spoke of ‘torture techniques’ used by military interrogators. Agents described seeing things like inmates handcuffed in a fetal position for up to 24 hours, left to defecate on themselves, intimidated by dogs, made to wear women’s underwear and subjected to strobe lights and extreme heat and cold.”
In the end, what seems to have most outraged the hundreds of FBI agents interviewed for the report is that the interrogation tactics were counterproductive. Evidently the FBI’s long history in such matters had led to a protocol that stressed gaining the confidence of witnesses rather than terrorizing them into madness. But an insane prisoner is the one most likely to tell this president of the United States what he wants to hear: They hate us for our values.
[Robert Scheer’s new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America, will be released June 9 by Twelve. ]
Source / Common Dreams / TruthDig
The Rag Blog
Friggin’ Shake Your Buns Out !!
Well, this was an interesting contribution from one of our Friends. Morality Rock is a Web site all about who George Bush really is. And let’s be clear, it’s scary!
The Morality Rock Story: Defending Urination
by M. Rock
Morality Rock didn’t get its start in anyone’s garage, or in the Seattle club scene. It got its start in my unassuming and unhip office, where my small desk is cluttered with a variety of computers, peripherals, compact disks, and technical manuals. Morality Rock evolved quite by accident from an experiment with speech recognition software, which dictates computer users’ spoken words, converting them instantly into text on the screen.
I had been testing a new speech recognition product and inadvertently left my computer on overnight. When I arrived at work the next morning, I was shocked to find that my computer, in a presumably silent office, had produced a poem:
When The Idaho
over the foot
of the oversight
on 80000
have a high ionizing
a Have Been ionizing
Then a Lead
a Day
the Only When It Was
Nothing in His Essay
a Liaison
Last Move into How the Government Can Occur
Wednesday the DVD Can
I Do
Mounting an Inventor
and a Number
of the Move
Is the Means of Losing
This Is Nicely
on Earnings It Happens
That Ends
in an Omitted
and the Netherlands was Nothing
Removed Disease Toe
Him and I
the from
the Fund
and from the from
Using
If You Have the Time to Come
and Can and Can
the Old
the In
the End
of the Human
The last stanza was particularly chilling, coming from a computer. Needing answers, I frantically asked co-workers, the sanitation crew, and building security if anyone could possibly have been in my office that night. The unanimous answer: No. This led to my belief that my computer was tapping into a deeper reality. Whether these were the voices of ghosts, or far away voices imperceptible to human hearing, my computer was listening, and was recording every word. Perhaps I should briefly describe how speech recognition works. When someone (i.e., user, distant unassuming bystander, or ghost) speaks, my computer receives the signal through a microphone, then translates the incoming auditory signal into binary code. If the signal is distorted (for example, if there’s background noise), my computer activates her noise filtration algorithms so she can focus her perception entirely on the speaker to whom she’s listening. She then matches the result against the information stored in her vast language database, and does so in a fraction of the time required for comparable processing by the human brain. With a speech processing system this advanced, my computer is far better at ascertaining the contents of a spoken message than I am.
Since that night, I have questioned the reality that I had previously accepted at face value. If the room I’m in seems to be silent, is it truly silent? When you speak to me, do I hear and understand you correctly? When the President speaks, am I hearing the truth? Given my newfound distrust of all words previously trusted, the latter question particularly troubled me. What if we were being subtly, subliminally deceived by our government? What if the actual words of George W. Bush were different than those we perceived? I had to know the truth.
So one by one I fed to my computer the recorded audio from each of the President’s speeches, and watched as the words filled my computer’s screen, words like these:
From President Bush’s First Radio Address to the Nation
Children and parents need better Georges.
From President Bush’s Unveiling of his New Energy Policy
Many others, we are the land color hydropower in the year. And other energy shortages are mental pollution in all the hard-hit night.
Loyalist vanity is the land of the late in half, and miles away from the real impact of reservoir and ankle. In Arctic, I like and warmed Millrose. I can literally melt away with a kind, and is going to protect wildlife.
Read all about this here.
Thanks to Betsy Gaines / The Rag Blog
Arianna Huffington : Scotty Come Lately
Seven takes on Scott McClellan’s new book
by Arianna Huffington / May 28, 2008
Take One: What Took You So Long?
In What Happened, Scott McClellan offers withering portraits of George Bush, Karl Rove, Condi Rice, and Scooter Libby, confirms that we went to war in Iraq under false pretenses, and that we were serially lied to about the outing of Valerie Plame.
Interesting stuff, Scott. But about five years too late.
It’s George Tenet déjà vu all over again. How many times are we going to have a key Bush administration official try to wash the blood off his hands — and add a chunk of change to his bank account — by writing a come-clean book years after the fact, pointing the finger at everyone else while painting himself as an innocent bystander to history who saw all the horrible things that were happening but, somehow, had no choice but to go along?
McClellan told the Washington Post that he wrote the book to “provide an open and honest look at how things went off course and what can be learned from it.” And he told Cox News Service, “My job was to advocate and defend [Bush’s] policies and speak on his behalf. This is an opportunity for me now to share my own views and perspective on things.”
Great. We need all the openness and honesty we can get. But it would have been a lot more helpful if he had taken the “opportunity” when it really mattered — say before the 2004 election, when it could have potentially saved thousands of lives.
What Happened is page-turning reading. What Didn’t Happen — namely McClellan telling the truth in service to his country rather than in service to his book sales — is a stomach-turning disappointment.
Take Two: The Rationale for Iraq is Even Worse Than We Thought
McClellan really lets it rip on Iraq. He says that Bush led a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” to sell the war, was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” managed the runup to war “in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option,” “largely ignored or simply disregarded” contradictory intelligence on the war, and as the war went poorly responded by “never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising.”
McClellan’s scathing conclusion: “History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”
Perhaps the most damning revelation regarding Iraq is McClellan’s assertion that the real reason Bush wanted to invade Iraq was the “opportunity to create a legacy of greatness” by transforming the Middle East into a land of peace and brotherhood. Over 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers sacrificed for a neo-con wet dream of democratic dominoes across the region. How chilling is that?
McClellan also tosses in a pinch of Oedipal subtext: “The president had promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office. And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating.”
Such is the stuff foreign policy nightmares are made of.
Take Three: The Press Secretary Presses the Press
McClellan points an accusatory finger at the mainstream media — he calls them “enablers” and says they were too easy on the administration during the selling of the war:
“The national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”
Great point, Scotty. We and many others made it back in 2003.
It’s such a great point, it caused Karl Rove to act like something nefarious has happened to McClellan, transforming him from the lie-spouting sock puppet he has “known for a long time” into somebody who “sounds like a left-wing blogger.” Have anyone specific in mind, Karl?
Take Four: Rove More Turd Blossom Than Boy Genius
Speaking of Rove, McClellan’s tome continues the obliteration of the Rove mystique, reminding us what an out-and-out liar Rove was and is — more than willing to assure McClellan that he wasn’t involved in the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity when, in fact, he was up to his Turd Blossom in the sordid affair, having discussed Plame with Matt Cooper and Bob Novak in an effort to discredit Joe Wilson.
McClellan also makes it clear that the indelible, says-all-you-need-to-know-about-this-administration photo of Bush looking out the window of Air Force One during his too-busy-to-stop flyover of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina was a Rove special: “Karl was convinced we needed to do it — and the president agreed.”
Take Five: Truthiness in Government
Stephen Colbert satirized the Bush approach when he coined the concept of “truthiness”: the truth we want, in our gut, to exist, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
McClellan reveals how much the joke matched the reality, saying that Bush’s “leadership style is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate.” Citing Bush’s assertion that he honestly couldn’t remember if he’d ever done cocaine, McClellan says he felt he “was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true.”
But who needs reality when you have faith? Who needs truth when you have truthiness? As George Costanza put it on Seinfeld: “Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.”
A fantastic philosophy for a sit-com character. A disastrous philosophy for a sitting president.
Take Six: Truth in Government
According to McClellan, the Secret Service code name for the White House press secretary was “Matrix.”
As any Keanu Reaves fan will tell you, the Matrix is a simulated reality used to pacify and subdue the human population in a dystopian future.
Who knew Secret Service agents have such an arch sense of humor?
Take Seven: Heckuva Job, Scotty!
On the day McClellan resigned as press secretary, Bush pictured a time down the road when he and his former aide would “be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days and his time as the press secretary. And I can assure you, I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, ‘Job well done.'”
Maybe not. Although, since, according to McClellan, Bush “has a way of falling back on the hazy memory to protect himself from potential political embarrassment,” who knows?
I can already see the blurb on the back of the paperback edition of What Happened: “Heckuva job, Scotty!” – George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States
Source. / The Huffington Post
Also see White House Responds To Scott McClellan’s Accusations. / The Huffington Post
And go here to read the Politico.com exclusive that broke the story and to watch a video with Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. / The Rag Blog
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"Situational Ethics" and the Clinton Campaign
Clearly some kind of compromise must be and will be worked out concerning Michigan and Florida delegates. Hell, it’s not their fault and they deserve some representation. But I’ll tell you one thing: if I were a voter in one of those states and didn’t vote — or voted “uncommitted” — because I was told the vote wouldn’t count in the nominating process, and then they turned around and announced that the election counted after all, I’d certainly be angry and feel disenfrancised and cheated.
It’d be like the Sox having an uncatchable lead for the playoffs and the Yankees arguing that preseason exhibition games should be counted in the standings.
The following discusses how the Clinton camp originally supported the sanctions against those states. It makes their sudden about-face a textbook case, says Harold Meyerson, of “situational ethics.”
Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog
Clinton’s Two-State Two-Step
By Harold Meyerson / May 28, 2008
On Saturday, when the Rules Committee of the Democratic National Committee meets to determine the fate of Florida and Michigan’s delegations to this summer’s convention, it will have some company. A group of Hillary Clinton supporters has announced it will demonstrate outside.
That Clinton has impassioned supporters, many of whom link her candidacy to the feminist cause, hardly qualifies as news. And it’s certainly true that along the campaign trail Clinton has encountered some outrageously sexist treatment, just as Barack Obama has been on the receiving end of bigoted treatment. (Obama has even been subjected to anti-Muslim bigotry despite the fact that he’s not Muslim.) But somehow, a number of Clinton supporters have come to identify the seating of Michigan and Florida not merely with Clinton’s prospects but with the causes of democracy and feminism — an equation that makes a mockery of democracy and feminism.
Clinton herself is largely responsible for this absurdity. Over the past couple of weeks, she has equated the seating of the two delegations with African Americans’ struggle for suffrage in the Jim Crow South, and with the efforts of the democratic forces in Zimbabwe to get a fair count of the votes in their presidential election.
Somehow, I doubt that the activists opposing Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe would appreciate this equation.
But the Clintonistas who have called Saturday’s demonstration make it sound as if they’ll be marching in Selma in support of a universal right to vote. The DNC, says one of their Web sites, “must honor our core democratic principles and enfranchise the people of Michigan and Florida.”
Had Florida and Michigan conducted their primaries the way the other 48 states conducted their own primaries and caucuses — that is, in accord with the very clear calendar laid down by the DNC well before the primaries began — then Clinton’s marchers would be utterly justified in their claims. But when the two states flouted those rules by moving their primaries outside the prescribed time frame, the DNC, which gave neither state a waiver to do so, decreed that their primaries would not count and enjoined all presidential candidates from campaigning in those states. Obama and John Edwards complied with the DNC’s dictates by removing their names from the Michigan ballot. Clinton did not.
Seating Michigan in full would mean the party validates the kind of one-candidate election (well, 1.03, to give Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd and Mike Gravel, who also remained on the ballot, their due) that is more common in autocracies than democracies. It would mean rewarding the one serious candidate who didn’t remove her name from the ballot when all her rivals, in deference to the national party rules, did just that.
What’s particularly outrageous is that the Clinton campaign supported the calendar, and the sanctions against Michigan and Florida, until Clinton won those states and needed to have their delegations seated.
Last August, when the DNC Rules Committee voted to strip Florida (and Michigan, if it persisted in clinging to its date) of its delegates, the Clinton delegates on the committee backed those sanctions. All 12 Clinton supporters on the committee supported the penalties. (The only member of the committee to vote against them was an Obama supporter from Florida.) Harold Ickes, a committee member, leading Clinton strategist and acknowledged master of the political game, said, “This committee feels very strongly that the rules ought to be enforced.” Patty Solis Doyle, then Clinton’s campaign manager, further affirmed the decision. “We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process,” she said, referring to the four states that the committee authorized to hold the first contests. “And we believe the DNC’s rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role. Thus, we will be signing the pledge to adhere to the DNC-approved nominating calendar.”
Not a single Clinton campaign official or DNC Rules Committee member, much less the candidate herself, said at the time that the sanctions imposed on Florida or Michigan were in any way a patriarchal plot or an affront to democratic values. The threat that these rules posed to our fundamental beliefs was discovered only ex post facto — the facto in question being Clinton’s current need to seat the delegations whose seatings she had opposed when she thought she’d cruise to the nomination.
Clinton’s supporters have every right to demonstrate on Saturday, of course. But their larger cause is neither democracy nor feminism; it’s situational ethics. To insist otherwise is to degrade democracy and turn feminism into the last refuge of scoundrels.
Source. / Washington Post
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CNN Still Promotes the Generals’ Propaganda
Pentagon Shill Returns to CNN to Talk About Iran
By Andrew Tilghman / May 27, 2008
Brig. Gen. David L. Grange doesn’t wear a star on his shoulder much since his retirement in 1999. But he’s on the list of retired officers the Pentagon has cultivated in an effort to influence domestic news coverage of military matters.
In fact, Grange, a CNN analyst, was tagged as the most visible shill for the Pentagon since 2002.
The Pentagon suspended the analysts’ program and its weekly briefings shortly after the Times published its story in April revealing the extent of the Pentagon’s message massaging.
When Grange appeared again on CNN late last week, host Lou Dobbs made no mention of Grange’s previous participation in the Pentagon program. But he did ask him about Iran.
Here’s a bit of the transcript:
DOBBS: Well, here is — on another issue. Let’s take a listen to what General Petraeus had to say today about Iran.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, CMDR. MULTI-NATIONAL FORCE-IRAQ: Iran continues to be a destabilizing influence in the region. It persists in its nontransparent pursuit of nuclear technology and continues to fund, train and arm dangerous militia organizations.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DOBBS: What are we supposed to do with that?
GRANGE: Believe it.
DOBBS: OK. Then what?
GRANGE: Then we take — make sure that we take the diplomatic informational (ph), military and economic measures to make sure Iran understands the line in the sand that must be drawn.
Grange, who led much of the U.S. military operations in the Balkans in the 1990s, is now the president and chief executive of the McCormick Foundation, a Chicago-based charity.
Apparently, Grange doesn’t really see himself as a direct surrogate. He told the New York Times that he thought all those background sessions with Pentagon leaders were “just upfront information.”
But a Pentagon memo called them “message force multipliers.” The Defense Department often paid their travel expenses and hired a private defense contractor to monitor everything the analysts said in public.
Source / TPM Muckraker
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Stop Being a Presidential Romantic
Poisonous Plutocracy Pushes Economic Inequality
By Joel Hirschhorn / May 28, 2008
Americans Must Find the Courage to Use Their Vote to Reject the Two-party Plutocracy Harming Them Financially
The biggest political issue receiving no attention by the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates is the powerful plutocracy that has captured the government to produce rising economic inequality.
Both major parties have enabled, promoted and supported this Upper Class plutocracy. Myriad federal policies make the rich super-rich and the powerful dominant in both good and bad economic times. Meanwhile, despite elections, the middle class sinks into one big Lower Class as the plutocracy ensures that national prosperity is unshared.
Why no attention? Why no explicit reference to a plutocracy that makes a mockery of American democracy? Simple answer: because both major parties and their candidates are subservient to numerous corporate and other special interests that use their money and influence to ensure that their elitist priorities prevail. Make no mistake. Barack Obama with all his slick rhetoric is just as much a supporter and benefactor of this Upper Class plutocracy as Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
Everyone that is not in the Upper Class who votes for any of these presidential candidates is voting against their own interests. They have been hoodwinked, conned, brainwashed and manipulated by campaign propaganda. They elect people for the visible government while they remain oblivious to the secret government – the powerful pulling the strings behind the stage. Money makes more money, financing more political influence.
One of the biggest delusions of Americans is that if they retain their constitutional rights that they still live in a country with a working democracy. Wrong. American democracy is delusional because the two-party plutocracy makes citizens economic slaves. This represses political dissent. It is 21st century tyranny. Two-party presidential candidates, unlike our nation’s Founders, lack courage to fight and revolt against domestic tyranny. Placebo voting distracts citizens from the political necessity of fighting the plutocracy.
Economic data show the plutocracy’s assault on American society. Consider these examples.
The top 20 percent of households earned more, after taxes, than the remaining 80 percent in 2005, while the topmost 1 percent took home more than the bottom 40 percent.
No American state has seen the gap between rich and poor widen faster than Connecticut. From 1987 through 2006, the top fifth of the state’s households saw their incomes increase by 44.8 percent, after inflation. Incomes for the bottom fifth fell 17.4 percent. On the other coast, just three of every 1,000 Californians in 2005 reported at least $1 million in income. But they got $213 of every $1,000 Californians earned in 2005 income. The state’s top 1 percent – average income $1.6 million – pay 7.1 percent of their incomes in income, sales, property, and gas taxes. The poorest fifth of California households pay 11.7 percent.
Real hourly wages for most workers have risen only 1 percent since 1979, even as those workers’ productivity has increased by 60 percent. Higher efficiency has rewarded business executives, owners and investors, but not workers. What’s more, American workers now work more hours per year than their counterparts in virtually every other advanced economy, even Japan, and without universal health care.
A typical hedge fund manager makes 31 times more in one hour than the typical American family makes in a year. In 2007, the top 50 hedge fund income-earners collected $29 billion – an average of $581 million each. John Paulson took home $3.7 billion from his hedge fund labors. These figures do not count profits from selling shares in their companies. Importantly, hedge fund players contributed nine times more to the Senate Democratic fundraising arm than they gave to Senate Republicans in 2007.
In 2009, Americans who make over $1 million a year will save an average $32,000 from the Bush tax cuts on capital gains and dividends. The average American household will save $20.
Between 1986 and 2005, the income of America’s top 1 percent of taxpayer jumped from 11.3 to 21.2 percent of the national total. Their federal income taxes dropped from 33.13 percent of total personal income in 1986 to 23.13 percent in 2005. From 2001 to 2008, the net worth of the wealthiest 1 percent grew from $186 billion to $816 billion.
Economic inequality and injustice reflect a political disaster, even with regular elections. It has resulted from government decisions on tax cuts, spending, trade agreements, deregulatory measures, labor unions, corporate handouts, and regulatory enforcement. All crafted to benefit the rich and powerful and leave the rest of us behind. It has happened under Democratic and Republican presidencies and congresses. Bipartisan domestic tyranny propels greed driven plutocracy.
What do we desperately need? A national discussion and referendum on inequality-pumping plutocracy, that none of the major presidential candidates shows any interest in having. Certainly not Barack Obama with his vacuous talk of change (but not about the political system) and John McCain’s incredulous talk of reform.
And it is delusional to think that populist global Internet connectivity producing what is called personal sovereignty threatens plutocracy. Networking among the rich and powerful strengthens the global plutocracy, placing it above national sovereignty. More than produce an army of revolutionaries to overturn the system, the Internet has fragmented every imaginable movement. Individuals indulge themselves with their own or social websites or fall victim to conventional politicians. Technology and media owned and controlled by plutocrats serves them while it shackles and deceives the multitudes.
Only one presidential candidate sees our core national problem and the need for revolutionary thinking and action to correct the system: Ralph Nader who said recently, “We need a Jeffersonian revolution.” Plutocrats should heed these wise words of John F. Kennedy: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” With all the guns and pain Americans have, the ruling class should worry and start reforms. To start, let third party and independent candidates into televised presidential debates. If the stage can be filled with a bunch of primary season candidates, why not more than two in the general election?
For electoral dissent, stop being a presidential romantic; use your vote to fight the plutocracy. Reject the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Put an end to serial disappointments. Time is running out. Talk is cheap. Action is crucial. Violent revolution is an option.
[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through http://www.delusionaldemocracy.com/.]
Source / Associated Content
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