Fox News Analyst's Analysis--Just Kill 'Em

Fox News Strategic Analyst Col. Ralph Peters says that he's not concerned about the human rights of terrorists. He thinks they should all be killed. In fact he says, "Fight for human rights; kill terrorists." Let's watch:



The problem is, we don't know which detainees are really terrorists. Peters admits that he doesn't care. Well, good for him, but that is fucked up. Some of these people were sold into detention by locals with a grudge or out to make a quick buck.

A highly disputed report that says 1 in 7 terror detainees that were released from Guantanamo are suspected to or confirmed to have returned to militant activities. That means 6 out of 7 were released and did not participate in militant activities. Wouldn't that mean they probably weren't terrorists in the first place? Doesn't matter to Col. Peters.

TAGS: Human Rights, The Dependent Media, Guantanamo, Fox News

Nothing Wrong, Eh?

While chatting in the studio with Olympics host Bob Costas, President Bush had the temerity to object to Costas's premise that our country has it's own problems (h/t AmerikaGulag, Think Progress has the video).

COSTAS: This past week, you restated America’s fundamental differences with China. But given China’s growing strength, and America’s own problems, realistically, how much leverage does the U.S. have here?

BUSH: First of all, I don’t see America having problems. I see America as a nation that is a world leader that has got great values.

Today I walked through my local grocery store and I saw a woman at the customer service counter talking about how tight money had gotten for her and her family. As I passed out of earshot the last thing I heard her say was, "I'm one of the assholes with the adjustable rate mortgages."

After hearing each of these statements a chill went up my spine. I think it's clear which of these two people are the asshole. It's not the lady with the ARM. It's the man the American people have allowed to tell them nothing is wrong for eight years while he set about the task of making sure that for most Americans, lots of things are wrong.

So much so that what it means to be an American has changed. That's what Bob Costas was trying to tell the President. He was trying to tell him that the world is gathering for fun and games in a country that commits outrageous atrocities routinely while our deranged "friend" Putin sent his army to rough up one of it's democratic neighbors and we can't really say anything to either of them, can we? That's what "America's own problems" means.

TAGS: President Bush, Economy, Human Rights, Russia

A Very Important Speech

Yes, Even More Important
Than Hillary's Concession Speech

Bill Moyers' entire NCMR address (40 minutes)

- or click here to go to YouTube,
(if you wish to watch it full-screen.)

You can't help feeling that Mr. Moyers isn't really talking about the media so much as he's talking about a last-ditch effort to save democracy. But he can speak for himself as well as anyone, and better than most, so I'll just excerpt a couple of what I consider to be his most important statements.

What we need to know to make democracy work for all Americans is compromised by media institutions deeply embedded in the power structures of society.
[...]
Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent while enhancing the power of the state and the privileged interests protected by it.

As the state has accumulated more power it has simultaneously devolved towards protecting the privileged. At the same time the media has been co-opted into serving those very same privileged interests. This is decidedly NOT a good thing. The multinational corporatocracy has a huge incentive on getting a grip on the power structures of American (and international) society. The people have to wake up to the realization that they have a vested interest in opposing this naked fascist power grab.

RISE UP! Before it's too late.

---

BONUS VIDEO: I know that the Bill Moyers speech, at 40 minutes, is very long for YouTube, or for anyone on the rapid-fire internet to devote their time to. Still, I give you this five minute speech from John F. Kennedy on the dangers of secret societies. It was delivered to the National News Publishers Association on April 27, 1961.

Somehow I feel as if the US federal government has become a branch office of Skull and Bones, with the co-operation of FOX news, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal. Everything is secret, and no-one seems willing to expose any of it. Everything that Kennedy warned of has come to life. Anyway, kudos to the person who posted this - the series of accompanying images is very appropriate. More here, with a transcript of the entire (19 minute) speech.

TAGS: Bill Moyers, Addresses the NCMR, Media Reform
Talking Overpaid Bobbleheads Pushing Pre-processed Pablum Down the Necks of a Gormless Public

Stealthy, Like a Ninja...

...Economic Woes Take the Media by Surprise

For the last five years a lot of extremely smart economists have written about the timebomb economics of the Bush administration. Yet the media consistently bought into the Bush administration's strenuous selling of a sunny view of the economy simplistically reinforced by pointing to growth and the stock market while the dollar radically devalued, national debt and the deficit skyrocketed, and salaries froze in place. Plenty of analysis showed that the growth we were experiencing only went to the richest Americans while the rest of the country lived a recessionary existence.

Now that the stock market is catching cold and the subprime crisis and the debt crunch have emerged as high profile news stories, the narrative of the impending collapse of the American economy is so plain to see that even the lamestream media can no longer ignore it.

Watch this clip from CNN. They're covering the economy like it's a natural disaster that just struck out of nowhere. Fear Factor~!


The economy is even sneaking up on the President, who was shocked, shocked, to hear that gas prices are projected to go above $4/gallon.

Crossposted at Ice Station Tango.

TAGS: Economy, Media, CNN, Bush Administration

The only thing we have to fear is...

… stupid questions like the one Katie Couric was posing on The CBS Evening News last night.

(CBS News) Dec. 12- For the series “Primary Questions: Character, Leadership
& The Candidates,” CBS News anchor Katie Couric asked the 10 leading presidential candidates 10 questions designed to go beyond politics and show what really makes them tick.

For the fourth part of the special series “Primary Questions,” Couric asked the candidates: “What country frightens you the most?”In a new CBS News / New York Times poll, Iran was named most often by Americans asked what country they fear most, followed by Iraq and China. Two percent said the United States is its own worst enemy.

You can read a transcript of this thing here, if you want to. I’ll give you a few highlights, if you want to save time:

- Joe Biden is afraid of Pakistan and Iran.

- Hillary Clinton is frightened of Pakistan.

- John Edwards hides under the bed when he hears the word “China.”

- Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee start screaming “Run away! Run away!” when they think of Iran, too.

- John “Straight Talk” McCain is afeared of Iran, too, but he’s even more afraid of someplace called “radical Islamic extremism.” I couldn’t find that place on Google Earth, by the way.

- Barack Obama and Bill Richardson both wet themselves at the thought of… can you guess? Very good! Iran wins again!

- Mitt Romney made sure he covered all his fears by listing Iran, North Korea, and Russia. That way, when someone asks him the question again, he has a better chance of guessing right as to what he said the first time…

- Fred Thompson is afraid of the “zealotry of the mullahs.” Or something.

Like, am I the only one in the room who thinks this whole question is, like, way stupid? Do we really want to hear that all of these people, each of whom want to be our next president, are afraid of these countries? China worries me, but that’s for largely reasons of our own making, mostly having to do with our economic and trade connections to them. That, and the fact that their military is growing by the day. But seriously, Iran? Pakistan? North Korea? People in North Korea have nothing to eat, for pity’s sake. Neither Iran nor Pakistan would have been nearly the threat they both supposedly are if we hadn’t invaded Iraq and destabilized the whole region (not to mention pissing off millions of people), and done a lot of the other nonsense in that area of the world that’s passed for “foreign policy” since World War Two.

C’mon now, this is a question for a would-be leader? I have a better idea. How about this one, Katie: Why not ask “What country on the planet would you most like to build a diplomatic and economic bridge to? Who should we be reaching out to that we’re not reaching out to now?” See, that’s what a real leader would do. Build, not destroy. Reach out, not push away. Embrace, not attack.

I don’t know about you, but you know what my answer would be? The country I fear the most is The Land of Stupid.

And some days, when I hear and read stuff like this, I feel like I live there.

Civics Lesson

This is Richard Dreyfus celebrating democracy at the National Education Association Representative Assembly:

I don't agree with his Canada and Costa Rico comment, but there is much to appreciate here. Indeed:

"You're teachers; you know a secret. You know that smart is better than stupid."

Also, on Maher, "An Uneducated Electorate Promotes Democracy Lost":

We, the People, who wish to form a more perfect union...

There is no we did it already; it is we are doing it. Never forget that.

Let us remember to Dream.

TAGS: Civics, Dreyfus, Democracy, Constitution, Bill of Rights, Preamble

Silencing the drums, before it's too late.

Chris Hedges, writing in The Nation, on the coming war with Iran:

I will not pay my income tax if we go to war with Iran. I realize this is a desperate and perhaps futile gesture. But an attack on Iran–which appears increasingly likely before the coming presidential election–will unleash a regional conflict of catastrophic proportions. This war, and especially Iranian retaliatory strikes on American targets, will be used to silence domestic dissent and abolish what is left of our civil liberties. It will solidify the slow-motion coup d’état that has been under way since the 9/11 attacks. It could mean the death of the Republic.

Let us hope sanity prevails. But sanity is a rare commodity in a White House that has twisted Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution into a policy of permanent war with nefarious aims–to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to strip citizens of their constitutional rights.

A war with Iran is doomed. It will be no more successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that militant group. The Israeli bombing did not pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when we begin to pound a country of 65 million people whose land mass is three times the size of France?

The rest is here. I recommend this article to you, and I also recommend that we all start figuring out exactly how we - WE THE PEOPLE - are going to organize against this war. Because I firmly believe it’s coming, and soon, probably as the early primaries unfold after the holidays. The White House propaganda machine has been gining up its anti-Iran efforts for months, and every week, yet another story somehow tying Iran to the debacle in Iraq comes out. Listen to an hour or so of any conservative talk radio show. As soon as they get done with their latest anti-Hillary Clinton paranoic rant, it’s back to the “threat” posed by Iran. Hour after hour, day after day. And we know who’s feeding them this garbage. It’s just a matter of time before the covert actions across the border by U.S. forces, followed by a bombing campaign, will begin. With, I’m sure, all the dire consequences that Hedges predicts here.

So what do we do? When the Democratic candidates “debate” - that is, when they are not wasting their time and ours attacking each other like school children - the questions from the Blitzers and the Russerts of the Bootlicking Corporate Media all focus on somehow taking a stand that encourages war. NEVER is the question posed, to any candidate, on either side, “what can and should be done to avoid going to war with Iran?” NEVER are any of the candidates who now hold seats in the Senate asked “What will you do to STOP the Bush/Cheney regime from going to war with Iran, as they seem determined to do?” Instead, they are asked to show how “tough” they are by being pushed toward taking a pro-war stance.

Of course, any of them, if they wanted to, could answer differently. Only the C-list few seem interested, if they even get a chance to speak. Of course, they could make campaign speeches on this issue, but who’d listen? Bush, Inc. will find a way to scare enough people, with either fears about terr’ism at shopping malls (just in time for Christmas) or high gasoline prices as the bait. Obviously, as Hedges points out, those are two things that are GUARANTEED to occur should we launch another war.

So, again I’ll ask, what can we do? I’m going to start with composing letters to the editor of our local newspapers, and getting them out as soon as possible. If the pundit class is going to bang the drum for this war, or remain silent, as so many have so far, it’s up to us to speak out. In the newspapers, online, on call-in shows, on street corners, in our houses of worship, WE must SPEAK OUT. In fact, your church or temple or whatever would be a GREAT place to start. If Bush’s war on Iraq is illegal, immoral, and totally unjustified, what about this one? How can anyone POSSIBLY defend this action?

The point is, they can’t. Unless they truly are delusional. Or fascists. Or both. And, they can, if we let them.

The war in Iraq has been a disaster, in so many ways. A war with Iran will produce unspeakable horrors that we can only hint at now. It’s time for us - ALL OF US - to find a way to speak up and speak out. WE have to stop looking for other people to be the ones to wage peace. We have to be the peacemongers.

Silence is no longer an option. Silence means complicity. Silence means surrender.

Are you ready for that?

Who gets to decide who gets to speak?

First, thanks to all of you who chimed in on my recent post at my blog, wherein I exercised my freedom of choice. In the post, I said I chose to waste many unrecoverable minutes of my life actually listening to the drooling ranting of the “president” of Iran. We had a great dialogue: it was fun (I don’t get out much, so bear with me…).

Anyway, today, I recalled that conversation as I read this essay by someone who works for something called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who says this:

In Burma, an ominous silence has fallen. The ruling military junta has been answering the peaceful protests of dissident monks with beatings, arrests and untold killings. Even United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, too often reticent about criticizing tyrannies, issued a statement Monday deploring the repression and asserting that in the current crackdown, Burma’s protesters “have become invisible.”

But not all Burmese have been stifled. At the United Nations’ headquarters in New York, all 192 members have just enjoyed their allotted 15 minutes of fame on the General Assembly stage. So it was that on Monday, while troops in Burma were reportedly hunting down dissidents, Burma’s minister for foreign affairs, U Nyan Win, a mouthpiece for the junta, mounted the steps to the main stage. There, before the great golden backdrop, facing the grand annual meeting of the world’s sovereign states, he delivered a speech in which the core message was that normalcy had now returned in Myanmar.

There is plenty to question in that perverse sentiment. But one question to which the free nations of the world - including our own - seem to devote far too little thought is: Why did the U.N. allow Nyan Win that world platform in the first place?

Then the author goes on to list a number of horrible people who, in her opinion, should also be denied the world stage provided by the United Nations. And she concludes with this:

Surely it is not too much to ask that the United Nations, which runs chiefly on the tax money and credibility of the free world, find a way to deprive the worst regimes of those annual 15 minutes of glory on its lofty stage.

Okay. So she and her friends at this particular right-wing think tank are offended by what they hear every year when the General Assembly convenes. And yes, much of what is said there is offensive to thinking people, such as what the representative from Burma said the other day.

But.

Surely it’s not too much to then ask this question: Who gets to decide who gets to speak? Who gets to be the final arbiter of what is right to say, and what cannot be said? The staff of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies? Or how about Code Pink? The National Education Association? Fox News? The judges from American Idol? Who exactly gets to pick what we all get to hear? And on what criteria will they base this decision?

Here’s an example. Suppose we have a world leader who, in the opinion of a significant number of his own people, and based on significant evidence, came to power (and subsequently held onto it) based on two fraudulent (stolen) elections. This leader has repeatedly announced that he has no intention of obeying or enforcing laws that were legally passed into being. The members of this leader’s ruling junta routinely behave as if they are above the laws laid out in this particular country’s constitution. They have used torture and kidnapping as part of their defense policy. This leader and his cohorts support detaining citizens - both foreign and domestic - without charge, access to counsel, or trial by jury. This leader has presided over the invasion of two sovereign countries, in both cases without receiving the (legal) consent of the country’s legislative branch via a formal, constitutionally-mandated declaration of war. This leader is thus responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Meanwhile, this leader has engaged in extra-legal electronic spying and data mining on his own citizens, and he has openly encouraged citizens to spy on one another. He has allowed agents of federal law enforcement agencies to spy on citizens while they are attending their houses of worship. He has blatantly attempted to stifle dissent. Members of his administration have been paid to disseminate false information and to report it as “news.” This leader has ignored or rejected legitimate scientific data, including medical information, and replaced it with junk science and outright lies, thus placing the health and lives of his citizens at risk. He has also ignored the overwhelming suffering endured by thousands of his people following natural disasters.

Would such a leader as this have the right to speak?

Hmmm? Just askin'...

One aspect of "The War" that Ken Burns probably won't be telling us about.

Nine days from now, PBS will begin presenting the latest documentary from one of the masters of the genre, Ken Burns. The War is a seven part series that, according to the official series web site, will “[tell] the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of a handful of men and women from four quintessentially American towns. The series explores the most intimate human dimensions of the greatest cataclysm in history — a worldwide catastrophe that touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America — and demonstrates that in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives.”

Well, I’d chime in that even in “ordinary times” (please tell me when those happen, okay?), there are no “ordinary lives," but that’s another post…

Anyway, I really like the work of Ken Burns. If I could afford them, I’d own copies of his other “masterpieces,” The Civil War and Jazz and Baseball. Yes, I know some people quibble and fuss over his work, particularly about what he “leaves out” or emphasizes “at the expense” of something else. Critics complained, for two examples, that there were “too many white musicians” discussed in his Jazz series, or that it seemed like an awful lot of Baseball focused on the teams from New York (one in particular) and Boston. Those might be fair points, but I have to ask in response, can you please tell me, of anyone else who has ever devoted 1, 140 minutes to the subject of jazz, or anything close to that, anywhere? I’ll wait… Didn’t think so. I think Ken Burns does amazing work, and I can still watch those three series over and over again and never be bored by them. It helps that I’m fascinated by the subject matter to start with, but I know many people who were especially entranced by The Civil War, who came away with a new understanding of our most important and definitive national tragedy.

Now comes The War, Burns’ treatment of World War Two. He says he wanted to do this after he learned that something like 2,000 WW2 vets die every day (correct that figure if I’m mis-paraphrasing). Realizing that there would soon come a time when all these folks would be gone, Burns wanted to get their up close and personal recollections and reflections on film, before it was too late. It’s a terrific idea. To me, oral history by the “every day people” who lived it is the most interesting kind. And now, instead of having actors and actresses read what someone else wrote about their experiences, we will see the faces of those who were there, and hear their words from their own mouths. And hearts.

I will watch every minute of this series, and I’ll be watching particularly closely to see if Burns spends any time on the issue of conscientious objectors. Several thousand Americans refused to allow themselves to be conscripted into military service during “The Good War,” a war that the overwhelming majority of people believe had to be fought and had to be won to save the world from evil. Some entered non-combat military service, and served bravely and valiantly in the military as combat medics, ambulance drivers, or hospital workers. Some were part of Civilian Public Service (CPS), and worked as smoke-jumpers, attendants in mental hospitals (who were responsible for many important reforms in the treatment of the patients in the “snake pit” institutions of the 1940s), as laborers on civilian construction projects (such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike), or as human ”guinea pigs” who allowed themselves to be test subjects in various medical experiments. Some others refused to be part of the “system” in any way, and went to federal prison for their beliefs, where they suffered as if they were common criminals. Some suffered more than that, because of why they were there.

I spent many, many hours reading about these brave Americans this past summer. I still have a couple thick books left to read. I was amazed that, even with all the stuff I’ve read about World War Two over the years (yeah, a Quaker military history nut: go figure), I’d never heard about this aspect of our history. In fact, until I became a Quaker, I’d never heard about this at all, at least in the context of World War Two. Conscientious objection was not a wide-spread movement during this war, but it does say something about the spirit and character of these men that they could stand up to what had to be enormous pressure to resist participating in something they felt was morally wrong, based on their (primarily but not always) religious beliefs (most COs were members of traditional "peace churches," such as Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren).

There were many COs who refused to fight in Vietnam, but with the end of the draft, anyone who now wishes to opt out of service can simply refuse to enlist (although males still have to register for Selective Service or face legal penalties). At least for now, that is. Some current military personnel are refusing deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, or they are refusing to return after having been overseas. The media is ignoring them, as are many folks who should know better here in cyberspace. (You can read about - and sign up to support - them right here, gang.) They deserve our respect and support, if we really believe in peace.

So, we’ll see if Ken Burns mentions this particular band of brothers starting on September 23rd. I’ll be watching. But I won’t be surprised if that particular brand of heroism is ignored. I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with what’s in my books. And with spreading the word.

TAGS: War, Peace movement, History, Media