"Officer Bubbles"

the video is from July 2010. This Gizmodo item is more recent:
Meet the YouTube Commenter Sued for Mocking 'Officer Bubbles'

There's a Fox News discussion of this on Youtube, which is too irritating for me to post it as an embedded video, but FYI the link is here.

Ladysmith black mambazo

the original is here.

"For 40 years, the choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo has captured the hearts and minds of people around the world, including former South African President, Nelson Mandela"

Howard Zinn X2, from 2009

'Howard Zinn: relying on charity from the rich'

A Youtuber, mr1001nights, writes:

"From a talk I recorded at Harvard's JFK school of government in March, 2009, on a break from recording Thomas Ferguson for my documentary Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Politics"

*****

and,from jpreeeter, "Howard Zinn on President Obama Recieving Nobel Peace Prize"

"The honorable author, historian, and social activist, Howard Zinn, taped at Lower Cape TV on Cape Cod 10/9/2009 commenting on President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace prize."

Robert Greenwald vs. the History Channel

www.stopkennedysmears.com -A petition telling the History Channel that until they stop running politically motivated fiction as historical "fact," you will refuse to watch their programming.

Robert Greenwald: "Joel Surnow, a hard-right activist and former Fox News producer who supported Rick Santorum and is close friends with Rush Limbaugh, is the executive producer of an upcoming mini-series on the Kennedys that is character assassination of the most disgusting kind.

Unfortunately, in its desperate quest for ratings, The History Channel has decided to let fiction pass for historical scholarship. The History Channel has decided to push Surnows sleaze, degrading the accomplishments and trashing the memory of one of our nations most beloved families."

Dos Americas: The Reconstruction of New Orleans

via UC Television.

9.12. Now what?

First, the nice young lady above is Lori Harfenist of The Resident. I imagine a lot of people, whether they lived in NYC in 2001 or not, share her view that fretting about conspiracies is redundant, while allowing that a generally corrupt government is likely. I wonder if she actually does look at things that way, given how she characterizes suspicion of the government, and I wonder what she and Bob from Pacifica would make of each other's views.

As you may have noticed, I closed the comments on Rob's 9.10 post, "Riding old 9/11". For now, comments still aren't moderated. I'd prefer to avoid that, and I don't want to have to reprimand anybody, regular visitors especially. I regard all the persons who participated in the previous comments as regular visitors, and feel all are due respect, and need to offer it in kind.

Over at A Tiny Revolution, Bernard Chazelle posted "Everything's a Lie" discussing some the same issues Rob and the commenters touched upon below, in Rob's post.

Here's Chazelle:

But here's the funny thing. People don't seem to mind [i.e.the lying] very much. This is pure Hegelian alienation: the acceptance that some creatures, by virtue of their function status, are normatively alien from us. They may do things (lie, kill, steal) that no one else would be allowed even to consider. Normative is the key word here, because they can't just do anything. They are strict norms of conduct they must abide by. So a senator who steals a stamp may go to jail, but if the same senator pushes for a billion-dollar bill to favor a baby-killing (military) industry that will make him mega-rich once he leaves office, that's fine. He can go on and give speeches about taking on the baby killers. If a president lies about his intern's extracurriculars, he gets impeached. But if he lies about a bogus threat and bombs the crap out of the Sudan, that's OK. So it's not true that anything goes. The modalities of lying have to be accepted. It's what you might call a normative alienation. See the division of labor: they get to lie and the little guy doesn't, but the little guy gets to approve the norms and they don't. This applies not just in politics but across all modes of power.

Here's part of what I wrote over at ATR:

I don't know if Walter Mondale was uniformly honest, I imagine he wasn't. But he was honest about the possibility of raising taxes, and got walloped in '84. Bill Clinton promised everybody that he would be a warm, huggable kind of conservative-- essentially-- and was wildly successful.

I'm lying myself, because that's not what Clinton said in '92, but a more accurate description of how he refashioned himself in '95.
[...]
If regular readers of lefty blogs all sit on their hands and stay out of the 2010 midterms, I'm guessing this will reduce turn-out by 1 or 2 percent at the most. If those same blog readers go and vote for whoever among 3rd party candidates make the ballot-- even if it's libertarians-- then presumably 3rd party candidates might poll at 1.5 to 2.0 percent nationally, instead of 0.5 to 1.0 per cent.

But some liberals would blanch at the thought of doing this, in part out of fear that the TV talking heads would spin it as support for social security privatization. (But most who think of doing it but decide against it, I'd wager, would only stop themselves because of the thought that it might mean the republican might get in or stay in.)

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Ray McGovern in Denton

This past Friday Ray McGovern came here to Denton, about 35 miles north of Dallas, to give a lecture about torture and the politicization of the CIA. As you may already know he was in Dallas(Richardson) the day before, and discussed his planning on speaking there in Counterpunch last Thursday. McGovern is a retired CIA analyst who first came to wider prominence when he publicly confronted Donald Rumsfeld a few years ago about his inconsistent statements regarding the likelihood that Saddam had WMDs.

McGovern seems like a nice enough person, but implicit in his spiel, if I'm reading it right , is that Gitmo and Bush II should be regarded as aberrations. He also said that Obama was heroic for releasing the torture memos(!), and that he regarded McNamara as a tragic figure(!!). To his credit he did criticize Panetta for not being sufficiently forthcoming, and noted that the US hasn't stopped torturing post GWB. It may be that he was being diplomatic in praising Obama, per reading his audience on Friday night as party-line rank-and-file dems who couldn't otherwise be reached unless you avoid criticizing Obama. I don't know enough about McGovern to judge. There is no video of the speech he gave here in Denton, but it was very similar to the video of the full speech he gave in Seattle in March(about 56:00, link here) which is what the 7 minute excerpt above is drawn from. At around the 8 minute mark he says "on January 20th we got rid of the Nazis" which he didn't say in Denton but seems in keeping with the tenor of the speech I heard. A goodly portion of his speech, both in the 56 minute link and last week, was about fighting the good fight, etc, etc, and the importance of resistance irrespective of the likelihood of success.

To me, fighting the good fight irrespective of the odds of success in 2008 would've meant, at the very least, voting for a third party candidate like Cynthia McKinney or Nader in order to register discontent with the corrupt prevailing political order. But my sense, sitting in the small crowd of 30-35 or so people who attended, was I surrounded by democratic party faithful, most of whom would have a hard time doing that, even here in solidly red Texas.

My sense also was that McGovern wasn't about to suggest such a strategy to the gathered group. In the brief Q and A at the end of his talk, one lady asked, "what can we do, to show our friends and neighbors who are so preoccupied with religion and believe whatever their preachers tell them about republicans and the war, how they're misguided and show them the...more enlightened view?"

Mine is a very rough paraphrase and I don't know if I'm adequately capturing her sentiment. I wanted to say, "have you tried not voting for pro-war democrats?" but felt that since I was not a regular attendee and hadn't been to one of Peace/Action/Denton's events in several years that it would have been rude. Besides, strictly speaking I don't know how the crowd that was present voted, or even that voting actually matters. Like Ray McGovern I felt they were nice people, even if they may be part of the problem. And if they are, who am I to decide that, let alone tell them?

McNamara, on the other hand, I feel more comfortable rejecting as a "tragic figure". Stephen Walt recently wrote this about him:

Some commentators see McNamara as a tragic figure; a talented, driven, and dedicated public servant who mishandled a foolish war and spent the remainder of his life trying to atone for it. The obituary in today's New York Times takes this line, describing him as having "spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war's moral consequences," and as someone who "wore the expression of a haunted man."

I see his fate differently. Unlike the American soldiers who fought in Indochina, or the millions of Indochinese who died there, McNamara did not suffer significant hardship as a result of his decisions. He lived a long and comfortable life, and he remained a respected member of the foreign policy establishment. He had no trouble getting his ideas into print, or getting the media to pay attention to his pronouncements. Not much tragedy there.

But I agree with McGovern about what he calls the "fawning corporate media", and I note that he encouraged everyone gathered to read the torture memos now that they are available, so here is the address for the ACLU's downloadable PDF of those memos.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

not a twitter revolution

from the Real News.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Iran, continued

This recent al Jazeera video (via Juan Cole) seems to partially confirm what I wrote earlier this week about Ahmedinejad's support among rural voters.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Painted green

Green may be the current cool color in Western pop culture, but it seems the Mousavi-ites dubbed their movement the green revolution because green is the color is of Islam(!). Or maybe that's just an explanation for global public consumption, so that we don't get too suspicious of all those Iranian young people holding up signs in English. Members of the Anglo press are always flattered when people in foreign countries wave signs in English that speak of freedom, even those TV-types who until very recently had been advocating bombing the crap out of Iran, as Glenn Greenwald has recently pointed out.

(Perhaps especially the ones who had been calling for bombing you.) We don't care about you, just what you stand for, so be a dear and stand for something we understand...

To be honest, I find it awfully difficult to evaluate the current goings-on in Iran. Was the election stolen? I no longer assume that the talking heads on TV care about telling me the unvarnished truth, and given how many decades US elites have invested in meddling in the middle east, it's hard not to be skeptical. On one hand we're told that opposition candidate Mousavi held a narrow lead in Iranian election polling just before the vote. On the other hand, it's hard to know how reliable polling methods are in Iran, and the gap in access to technology between country and rural folk may be substantial. Remember the famous story of how the Literary Digest predicted that FDR would lose reelection in '36 because they relied on polls of persons with telephones, which skewed their results to the republicans? On the other, other hand, as it were, just because a phenomenon plays out the way foreign elites(with a history of meddling in Iran's internal affairs) might have desired, doesn't mean it's bogus.

I note that Xymphora is suspicious that Israel and the US have interfered with the events in Iran, spurring the protests on. Even though Xymphora is prone to see a Zionist conspiracy behind every bush, this strikes me as plausible.

We're getting lots of images of rioting, but in a country of 70 plus million, about 20 million of whom live in the Tehran metro area, the only images we're getting are from the capitol, as opposed to from where the other 50 million live. Pepe Escobar has recently noted [video link]that Ahmedinejad's strongest constituency has always been among the rural poor, i.e., people who are less likely to have internet access. Call them, pace Nixon, Ahmedinejad's "silent majority."

Obviously we don't really know if their election was stolen, and we don't know if it wasn't. Apparently the Iranian government will do a recount of some disputed votes, but one assumes this is more about preserving order and shoring up its legitimacy than intrinsic concern.

I'll admit I wonder, as Xymphora and others do, if outside forces are egging on the disorder. But I also wonder if Americans could be moved to stand up for their rights in a similarly bold way without it being borne out of manipulation by elites.(I suppose I'm over-using that word at this point.)

Maybe, in our post McLuhan, insufferably postmodern, SMS/RSS/Social networking age, it's both easier for authentic grassroots phenomena to catch fire-- and easier than ever to manufacture them. Good luck Iran, even when the West has lost interest in your green revolution, so-called or otherwise, and moved on.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

from "Russia Today" Saturday's antiwar protest in D.C.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Here Comes the New Boss

Stelios Varias,Reuters



A friend who knows my political views asked me: "you're not looking forward to tomorrow, are you?" Referring of course to the ascent of Obama to the presidential throne. Now to be honest, I don't know how I feel about Obama, expressed on a simple level of positive/negative, good/bad, what have you. Unlike Rob Payne, I'm willing to acknowledge that between Obama and McCain, Obama might be marginally preferable, notwithstanding the embarrassment evoked by the contingent who insist on treating him like he can part the sea and persuade the sun to shine.

That's not the same as saying I think he was a desirable choice for president per se, or even for the democratic nomination-- but I'll get to that. This April Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens will turn 89, later this year Ruth Bader Ginsberg will be 76, and in fact the youngest of the liberal members of the court, Stephen Breyer, will turn 70 in 2009. I would have preferred somebody like Dennis Kucinich or even John Edwards had been the president to appoint Stevens's and Ginsberg's replacements, but that was not to be. I note this because it's pretty likely they will retire soon, and with a certain unease I'll nevertheless assert that I prefer Obama rather than McCain(or Palin) be the person to appoint their replacements.

In spite of what I see as the broader reality of Obama's nature as a corporatist quisling, I imagine some modest benefits will emerge from Obama being president rather than McCain. Federal policy on stem-cell research may become sane again, and (possibly) his environmental policies will be better than McCain's would have been. But as far as foreign and economic policy go, I doubt we'll see anything that represents "hope" or "change", with or without ironic quotation marks.

I suppose the thing I find so maddening about the ascendancy of Obama is it comes along at precisely the moment that the broader public was probably readier than they have been in decades for a real liberal reformer in the white house, what with the many missteps of the second George Bush and his cronies. And instead we get Barack Obama, who seems intent on repackaging soak-the-poor and destroy-the-welfare-state politics as the new, new liberalism, the variety you didn't know you wanted until he came along and cleared things up. It seems so abundantly clear to me that he's a fraud, a speaker of pretty words that flatter the ill-informed, and that his bipartisan, "post-ideological" ethos is really just craven opportunism, the positioning of a product-- which in this case is also a person-- in the marketplace of politics so it looks its best in the available light.

And yet, on one side of our screwy political culture we have the Obamazoids who want to flash a victory sign and cheer their new messiah so they can stop thinking and just groove on a warm feeling, and on the other the talk-radio cretins who insist that he's a socialist(?!), possibly because he doesn't want to bomb Ahmedinejad without talking to him first, or because he's never hunted moose from an airplane. Or because he's black.

About that. Although the historical significance of our first black president has been over-sold, I think even people understandably leery of the hype and the cult of Obama need to allow that his election is a sign of social progress, even if you have to qualify it by also recognizing how strenuously Obama bent over backwards to reassure middle America that he was the nice, non-threatening type of black guy, the one that Hollywood leads us to believe will absolve us of our sins in the great shopping mall in the sky.

Another friend tells me to "give him a chance," as if my attitude makes the least bit of difference. While I don't think my attitude towards Obama is remotely relevant, I'm guessing my attitude towards his flock does matter. It's probably vanity to hope to personally change the political landscape for the better, at least in terms of measurable individual effort. But collective effort is the sum of the individuals who try to achieve.....thing x, whatever that thing is, whether it's through the march of a million people or the raising of a hundred million dollars for a cause.

When I saw a news story in October about the Obama organization raising 150 million dollars in 30 days, roughly concurrent with the demise of Cursor, I couldn't help but think about that, about how the flesh is willing, the collective progressive impulse is there, but the collective mind is weak, misdirected by personality-oriented politics. The people at Cursor said all they need is about 75 grand to run for a year,a sum Obama could raise in less than half an hour. And Cursor did more to wake people up to the issues of the day than a hundred celebrity-penned Huffington Post op-eds. Not in terms of audience size, unfortunately, but in terms of the quality and relevance of the content.

But-- also unfortunately-- that clearly isn't enough. I thought about that ironic disconnect again today, when I saw the images of over one million-- and possibly close to two million-- people converging at the mall in D.C. to see Obama become president-- of how the collective progressive impulse is there, but that, functionally, Obama is an agent of (the co-option of) change.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people," or so the old saying goes. It may well be true, but making fun of those millions who believe in Obama the savior of America rather than reaching out to them is willful and vain and stupid. Large numbers of them, black and white and otherwise, will experience a letdown when Obama emerges as just another politician, and to borrow from Barack himself, that will be a "teachable moment."

Remind yourself of 2003, and how unlikely George Bush's days with lower ratings than Nixon seemed when he was prancing around on that aircraft carrier. Obama undoubtedly has more sense than Bush Junior, at least as far as permitting himself such an unrestrained display of hubris, but even he has to realize that you can't get an 80 percent approval rating just for being the president-elect without an inevitable falling action being in store. And how much of his current approval is mere approval for his not-George-Bush quality? Even you and I and the cashier at Quiznos possess that same quality, and as far as I know nobody voted for us.

I could say, "naturally I hope I'm wrong about Obama...." largely out of a desire to seem like a reasonable person. Well sure, I do hope I'm wrong, but I think such a hope is insufficient, and the afore-mentioned letdown is coming. And I repeat: simply making fun of the millions who believe in him is unwise, insofar as large numbers of them WILL decide he isn't what they hoped he would be. And then what? Some of them are-- will be-- reachable.

(If anything, I'd guess that a lot of the newly politicized Obamazoids are among the more reachable, because their brains aren't as full of the accomodationist bullshit that so many regular rank-and-file democrats have crammed their craniums with, the kind of folks that Dennis Perrin regularly warns us about.)

In the meantime, liberalism is bleeding in the gutter where it was left by Reagan, and the Clintons, and Fox news, and by the democratic party leadership, and the faux-liberal putative left who eagerly swallow one "third way" capitulation after another, and by the rest of the news networks... and Obama.


cross-posted at Dead Horse.

Two from Reuters video

Helen Suzman(2):



Gaza assaults spark global backlash:



As always, the shoes are a nice touch.

cross-posted at "Dead Horse"

Talaam Acey: "True Lies"

Apropos of April being national poetry month, here's that Talaam Acey feller.

More from The Real News and Winter Soldiers

Winter Soldiers: Clifton Hicks and Steven Casey

The Real News main site, and their Youtube channel.

15 mar 2008

testimony from "Winter Soldier"(more here)

As you may already know, the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition had a large demonstration scheduled for the mall in DC for this weekend, to commemorate and protest the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, which they discuss here(see below, from their bulletin):

Regarding the March 15, 2008
Fifth Anniversary Mass March on Washington DC:
In December, the ANSWER Coalition sent out an email that contained an announcement from the Year5 Coalition (that included 17 anti-war organizations) about plans for a mass demonstration in Washington DC on March 15, 2008.

This announcement was the culmination of several national meetings hosted by Cindy Sheehan. The purpose of the Year5 Coalition was to create the maximum unity between many anti-war coalitions and organizations so as to mobilize a huge outpouring of the people in Washington DC on the fifth anniversary of the start of this criminal war and occupation.

The ANSWER Coalition was committed to doing everything in its power to support the effort to unify the movement for a massive mobilization. The fifth anniversary is a critical time and will be marked by protests around the world. Saturday March 15 was chosen for a huge march on Washington because the following weekend is Easter weekend and it was considered much more difficult to bring people from all over the country to DC.

Not all anti-war groups concurred that it was a good idea to carry out a mass march in DC on the 5th anniversary. That was the stated position of UFPJ for instance. But 17 organizations did issue a call for the March 15 national march in Washington DC. The day following the announcement by the Year5 Coalition a public letter was sent and circulated by the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) asking that there be no national mass march in DC or any protests at all in DC against the war from Thursday March 13 through the weekend ending Sunday March 16. The IVAW explained that it was planning its own event called Winter Soldier (that will take place in a DC suburb in Maryland.) Winter Soldier is an indoor event that will feature the live testimony from Iraq veterans and others about war crimes committed in Iraq. IVAW asked that there be no mass march during their four days of testimony.

Is this tactically astute? I don't know. I wonder, just as I wondered if the real reason the ANSWER people called off the march was because they were afraid that with the increased restrictions the government has instituted on demonstrations at the mall, the demonstration would either turn counterproductively tepid, or violent, and the request of the Winter Soldier group merely gave them cover. Besides, why should the Winter Soldier group insist that there be no march? The corporate media tends to downplay the marches as much as they can anyway, and they might have even given "Winter Soldier" more coverage as an example of "well-behaved" protest as a counter-example, if they just waited and had their events after the A.N.S.W.E.R. protest. Who knows?

I haven't been to a protest march, but I wonder if a lot of the people who put them down do so because they've never participated in one. As far as the question of whether or not protests are effective, I wish I knew a way to measure this objectively-- I am agnostic about it myself. Davis Fleetwood has some thoughts about protests, here, apropo of the 9.15.2007 protest[video].

Wexler, Cheney, this and that: 12.20.2007

1.Wexler and company now have over 100,000 signatures for their impeach let's-have-hearings-regarding Cheney website(previously discussed here.) In spite of the (substantial)skepticism I feel regarding whether such gestures as signing an internet petition actually worth a tinker's dam to characters like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, I recognize that it's that same skepticism that leads some people to support "viable" candidates like HRC and other ostensible progressives who are just kinder, gentler war boosters.

Nevertheless, signing an internet petition isn't the same as supporting phoney-baloney liberals with votes and money, so there's something to be said for signing them, as long as you don't allow yourself to be suckered by a broader-- and mostly false-- sense of optimism about the democratic party as a whole.

I'd like to revisit this topic later- actually I think it's two topics:

1.How can one be a liberal when the figureheads of liberalism*, generally speaking, aren't particularly liberal?

(*I would say "progressive," which for better or worse is presently trendier, but the word has begun to bug me as it's begun to have a "better-management-of-failed-policies" stink about it of late. Call it not wanting to belong to a club that would have someone like Joe Biden as a member, to paraphrase Groucho Marx. Liberalism.)

2. How do you explain to ordinary, non-wonkish people why, to so many of us,** "The Left is the New Right"? (And definitely not in a good way.)

A lot of decent, reasonably smart people who mean well and don't necessarily want the US to be a bloodthirsty empire only understand things in terms dictated by CNN and their ilk, and think someone like Mike Gravel or Dennis Kucinich is too liberal, as if everything political could be measured on a simple two-dimensional continuum, but if you ask them what "too liberal" means they either don't have a clue or only understand the concept in terms of assertions they've heard regularly spouting out of deliberately ignorant big-media loudmouths like Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity.


(**Maybe it goes without saying, but even though I tend to identify certain bloggers and others as being part of an informal association of like-minded persons who look at it this way, I will only presume to speak for myself. Maybe I should just wish that Arthur Silber might tackle a general field theory of why the left is the new right, as I imagine he'd do it ten or twenty times better than I could-- but to paraphrase Rob Payne's friend Charlie Parker, I will light my fire, set up my skillet and see what I can cook up with this weekend.)

Sibel Edmonds, the motion picture

"KILL THE MESSENGER - UNE FEMME A ABATTRE"

via Lukery: "The Sibel Edmonds case: the real culprits of 9.11"

Much as I hate to say it, but this promotional trailer seems a bit too slick to me, making Sibel Edmonds come across more like a Hollywood diva playing a real-life whistleblower than a real person.

I hope this just a symptom of some unfortunate editing choices and not a reflection of someone who started out as earnest but who has since acquired an inflated sense of self-importance. Don't get me wrong-- Sibel Edmonds' experiences working for the government, and her subsequent struggles are important-- it's just that she doesn't do her cause any justice if she has since become pompously self-righteous in her presentational style.

Sibel Edmonds' official site, Just a Citizen

Sept15.org, pt 2

War of Words: Protestors take on Iraq war

one of my correspondents informs me that even the AP is getting into the video hosting thing now, albeit via www.livevideo.com. (The picture quality is better at the link above, but it's too large to fit on this template without compressing the image.)

also, here are some Youtube links to videos of the demonstration. I almost went but had an unexpected obligation I couldn't wriggle out of.

(8.32; this one shows a lot of back-and-forth between "gathering of eagles" and some of the antiwar protesters.)

(1:44; essentially a shorter version of the 8:32 clip, with the emphasis on the more obnoxious persons and none of the humor of the previous clip.)

(7:01; a vid by the war supporters .)

(back to the lefties:9:54;pt 1)

(3:31; pt 2 from the same guy, above.)

(5:22; Cindy Sheehan--unfortunately this is a very poor quality video.)