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Killer birds bite off bats heads

2009-09-09T14:20:00.000-04:00

Killer birds bite off bats' heads

00:00 09 September 2009 by Sanjida O'Connell

It sounds like the avian equivalent of an Ozzy Osbourne legend. Great tits have been discovered killing and eating bats by pecking their heads open.

Although bats have been reported preying on songbirds before, this is the first time great tits have been observed to prey on bats.

Péter Estók of the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology, Germany, first saw a bat being captured by a tit in a Hungarian cave in 1996.

Ten years later, he and fellow bat ecologist Björn Siemers recorded 18 examples of pipistrelle bat predation by great tits, over the course of two winters in the same cave in the Bükk Mountains.

Bat hunting

The birds seek out bats as they wake from hibernation and usually eat them in the cave, though sometimes they carry them to a nearby tree.

"The birds don't kill the bats before they start eating them," says Siemers, "but the bats eventually die when the birds peck open their brain case."

As the bats are still very cold, only a degree above ambient temperature, they are extremely slow and easy for the birds to subdue. Nevertheless, it is a considerable feat for the tits given that a pipistrelle weighs approximately 5 grams and a great tit only four times as much.

Sly birds

The scientists ran an experiment to supply the tits with food, and discovered that this reduced consumption.

"This shows that the birds are predating the bats for food in times of scarcity. It shows how inventive this species can be," says Siemers.

Estók and Siemers also ran a playback experiment where they recorded and played the calls that the bats made as they woke from hibernation. The great tits were attracted to the calls.

"For a bat, these calls are very low frequency, a maximum of 15 kiloHertz, but at a high frequency for the tits, above scientifically established hearing levels for this species, yet they react to them," says Siemers.

Who started it?

Gareth Jones, an expert on bat behaviour at the University of Bristol, says the finding is unexpected and novel. "I don't know of any other studies of predation of hibernating bats by small birds. It's a big jump for the tits, given that their normal prey are caterpillars."

As the birds have been anecdotally observed to eat bats in this cave for a decade, Siemers speculates that this is an example of cultural transmission. There are also four anecdotal reports of bats being eaten by tits in Sweden and Poland.

Jones says, "Presumably this is learned behaviour, but it is much too strong an inference to suggest that it could be culturally transmitted from Poland to Hungary."

Journal reference: Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.0611 (in press)

South African lesbians live in fear of 'corrective rape'

2009-08-30T12:39:00.000-04:00

South African lesbians live in fear of 'corrective rape'

Murdered football star Eudy Simelane is just one of many township women violently assaulted to 'cure' their sexuality

By Tanya Braun

afp

The men accused of the murder of Eudy Simelane

enlarge

In the antiseptic setting of a modern courthouse in a town near Johannesburg, the life and death of a young sports star is being dissected. She was no ordinary young woman. An outstanding footballer, she had captained her country and was hoping to be the first female to referee at a World Cup. But her brutal death, and the apparent motive for it, is all too ordinary here. For Eudy Simelane was a lesbian, and this, say campaigners, was why she was raped and savagely murdered.

This is the land of "corrective rape". Despite South Africa having one of the most enlightened constitutions in the world, traditional views about sexuality still run deep. In many quarters, especially male ones, lesbians are resented, perhaps even feared. And to some young men the remedy is simple: rape.

Each year, ActionAid estimates, 500,000 women are raped in South Africa, with lesbians a particular target. The warped logic is that the assault will "cure" them. As a result, says ActionAid, 86 per cent of black lesbians live in fear of rape. Their anxiety is understandable: only a minority of rapes are reported to the police and, of these, only one in five ends up in court, with a meagre 4 per cent of them ending in a conviction.

So when, on the night of 28 April 2008, Eudy Simelane left her local tavern in the small township of Kwa Thema, she would, for all her athleticism and strength, have cause to be wary. The following facts of that night are not in doubt: Simelane, a recognisable sports star and openly lesbian, was ambushed in a public park. She was raped, perhaps many times, and then repeatedly and frenziedly stabbed, leaving 25 visible wounds from her face down to her feet. Her body was found partially clothed, face-down in a creek.

Her close friend, Pretty, said: "Her blood and clothes were still everywhere but the police had just left it all there. I will never forget her dad on his hands and knees wiping up the blood with his hands."

Several men were arrested. On 13 February this year, one of them, Thato Mphiti, was tried alone, pleaded guilty, and was convicted of Simelane's rape and murder. He was sentenced to 31 years behind bars. Last week, the trial began of three men also charged with Simelane's rape and murder. They pleaded not guilty, saying they were mere onlookers. They were due to have been tried last month, but proceedings were delayed because Mphiti changed his story and took sole responsibility for the rape and murder. Although Simelane's lesbianism was not allowed to be part of the first trial, it was raised in that of the three other men, which continues.

South African human rights organisations such as Triangle, claim Mphiti's trial resulted in the first conviction out of 30 cases of lesbian murder in the past decade. All too common are cases like the murders of Sizakele Sigasa, a HIV campaigner, and Salome Massooa, who, in 2007, were gang-raped, tortured and then killed with a shot to their heads. Men were questioned about these crimes, but no one has yet been brought to trial for them.

In 2008, the country's Human Rights Commission reported a growing phenomenon of "corrective rape" in schools across the country.

ActionAid reported in March this year: "Support groups now say that rape is fast becoming the most widespread hate crime against lesbian women in townships across South Africa. One Cape Town lesbian and gay support group says it is dealing with 10 new cases every week. It is a toll that shows no sign of decreasing."

Sisters of '77

2009-08-30T01:55:00.000-04:00

The Rachel Maddow Show: Revisionist History

2009-08-29T01:36:00.001-04:00

By Heather Friday Aug 28, 2009 5:00pm

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Rachel Maddow on the Republicans attempt at revisionist history that Ted Kennedy would have been all about compromising to the point of making it a lousy bill just to get something passed on health care reform.

Maddow: In other words if only Ted Kennedy were still here. If only he had a health care bill those Republicans say they would have voted for that. You know, ah, Ted Kennedy did have a health care bill. Senator Kennedy was chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee which approved a health care reform package in July. It's called the Kennedy bill. And Senator Kennedy, helped write that bill. Senators Hatch, and McCain and Gregg, all voted against it. But the revisionist history goes even deeper. They aren't just saying they would have voted for a Kennedy health care bill, even though they had the chance and they didn't.

They're saying they would have voted for a Kennedy health care bill because Ted Kennedy would have compromised with them, because Ted Kennedy was all about making concessions to Republicans.

[.....]

Apparently in the history of Ted Kennedy's life and work as imagined by the GOP today Senator Kennedy was the great compromiser. Ready to water down health care reform in order to bring Republicans on board.

As Rachel notes, Kennedy was anything but that. And to add to Rachel's point, here's a little mash up of some of the "news" coverage from today calling for "Kennedy-like" bipartisanship.

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Later in her show Rachel gave some kudos to friend of the site Bob Cesca for his column at the HuffPo titled, Healthcare Reform Named After Ted Kennedy Must Not Suck. If there's one point to get across with all this yapping about what Senator Kennedy would have or would not have done to reform our health care system, I agree with Rachel that Bob's very simple, yet honest statement hits the nail on the head. Bipartisanship be damned if it means passing a lousy piece of legislation, and do not put Senator Kennedy's name on it if that's what we're going to end up with.

GOP Rep. says party must find 'Great White Hope' to fight Obama

2009-08-27T21:02:00.000-04:00

GOP Rep. says party must find 'Great White Hope' to fight Obama

A junior Republican congresswoman thinks her party needs to find the "Great White Hope" to fight President Barack Obama's agenda.

Yes, those were the words she used.

In a conservative town hall forum Aug. 19, Topeka Republican Rep. Lynn Jenkins declared that her party would need to embrace a "White Hope" to derail the agenda of President Obama and Congressional Democrats.

The comments were revealed by The Topeka Capital-Journal.

"Republicans are struggling right now to find the great white hope," Jenkins told a Kansas crowd. "I suggest to any of you who are concerned about that, who are Republican, there are some great young Republican minds in Washington."

A tape shows that Jenkins identified three of the alleged leading lights of her party by name: House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). All three men are white.

A Jenkins spokesman, contacted Wednesday by a local paper, said the congresswoman didn't mean her remarks to be offensive.

"There may be some misunderstanding there when she talked about the great white hope," Jenkins spokesman Mary Geiger was quoted as saying. "What she meant by it is they have a bright future. They're bright lights within the party."

The phrase "Great White Hope" is most well-known as a reference to heavyweight boxing champion James J. Jeffries, used by the press before a 1910 boxing match. The media referred to Jeffries as a "Great White Hope" capable of fighting off African American boxer Jack Johnson.

"I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro," Jeffries said.

At the match, a ringside band played, "All coons look alike to me."

A photograph of Jeffries follows.

-John Byrne

Co-workers discover they're married to same man

2009-08-23T22:13:00.000-04:00

Co-workers discover they're married to same man

(Getty Images)

Two Chinese women who work at the same factory were shocked to discover they were both married to the same man.

Cui Bin reportedly married Zhang Dandan first and they had a daughter. But Cui wanted a son.

That's when he met and married Wang Na with whom he had a son.

Cui split up his time between the two households and made up excuses for the absences.

Meantime the two women had become friends because they both loved karaoke.

The truth came out when Wang grew suspicious after she heard her husband on the phone with someone she thought was another woman. So she called the number back and recognized the voice on the other end as her friend Zhang.

Cui is now in jail.

Ana B'Ko'ach (A Kabbalistic Prayer) (2 Versions - Music and Acapella)

2009-08-22T13:30:00.001-04:00

The Kabbalists reveal that this sequence of Hebrew letters encompasses the actual power of creation. The Ana B'Koach is built from 42 letters and is also known as the 42 Letter Name of God. Whenever we make a connection the 42 Letter Name, we are tapping into the primordial force of creation."

"Ana BeKoach (Ana BeCoach or Ana B'Koach) prayer was written in the first century by a great kabalistic Rabbi - Rabbi Nehonia. It is said daily at least 3 times, often more, if it's Shabbat or Yontif. [Holy Day.]"

Music by Ovadia Hamama
Flash by Kabbalah.com
Edited by Lila

*There is also a solo voice version at the end of this video courtesy of kabbalahgroup.org

The 42 Letter Name of God is an ancient word of Power. This Name of God is divided into seven lines.

Each line can be seen as a DNA sequence that represent seven different types of energy. Each line, or sequence, contains six words that provide Divine Energy for helping us to solve the problems of life.

Line 1: This is the most powerful line of the prayer, created to be concentrated upon in time of extreme stress or danger; the DNA sequence of power to provide sustenance in a time of dire need.

Line 2: Grants the user the power to move events and control negative forces.

Line 3: Empowers one with the ability to make the right decision, with the proper balance and compassion.

Line 4: Grants the endurance necessary to follow through and prove victorious.

Line 5: Provides the energy of deep insight, creates a form of clairvoyance that allows the user to see into the future.

Line 6: Gives the ability to find peace and inner strength.

Line 7: Grants the power of renewal which allows one to start over again.
http://www.tybro.com/html/the_miracle...

Play it continuously on your speakers that it can set up a residence in your DNA to have an effect.

Ana B’Ko’ach (We Beg Thee)

2009-08-21T21:52:00.001-04:00

Ana B’Ko’ach (We Beg Thee) (Ovadia Hamama & kabbalahgroup.org) MP3 Video

Ana B’Ko’ach prayer was written in the first century by a great kabalistic Rabbi - Rabbi Nehonia. It is said daily at least 3 times, often more, if it's Shabbat or Yontif. [Holy Day.]"

Play it continuously on your speakers that it can set up a residence in your DNA to have an effect.

Ana becho'ach, g'dulat yemincha, tatir tz'rura
Kabel rinat amcha sagveinu, tahareinu nora (x2)
Na gibor dorshei yichudcha, k'vavat shamrem
Barchem taharem, rachamei tzidkatcha
Tamid gamlem, chasin kadosh
Berov tuvcha, nahel adatecha
Yachid ge'eh le'amcha p'neh, zochrei k'dushatecha
Shavateinu kabel ushma tza'akateinu, yode'a ta'alumot
(Baruch shem k'vod malchuto le'olam va'ed)

We beg thee with the strength and greatness of thy right arm-Untangle our knotted fate.
Accept your people's song, elevate and purify us (x2)
Please, heroic one, those who pursue your uniqueness-
guard them as the pupil of an eye.
Bless them, purify them, pity them,
may your righteousness always reward them.
Powerful and Holy One, in goodness lead your flock.
Unique and proud one, to your people turn,
who remember your holiness.
Accept our cries, and hear our screams,
oh knower of mysteries.
(Blessed is the name of his noble kingdom forever and ever.)

Line 1: This is the most powerful line of the prayer, created to be concentrated upon in time of extreme stress or danger; the DNA sequence of power to provide sustenance in a time of dire need.
Line 2: Grants the user the power to move events and control negative forces.
Line 3: Empowers one with the ability to make the right decision, with the proper balance and compassion.
Line 4: Grants the endurance necessary to follow through and prove victorious.
Line 5: Provides the energy of deep insight, creates a form of clairvoyance that allows the user to see into the future.
Line 6: Gives the ability to find peace and inner strength.
Line 7: Grants the power of renewal which allows one to start over again.

http://www.tybro.com/html/the_miracle_prayer.html

Flying rabbis fight swine flu

2009-08-19T22:50:00.001-04:00

Flying rabbis fight swine flu

Rabbis and Kabbalah mystics recite prayers to ward off swine flu

A group of rabbis and Jewish mystics has taken to the skies over Israel, praying and blowing ceremonial horns in a plane to ward off swine flu.

About 50 religious leaders circled over the country on Monday, chanting prayers and blowing horns, called shofars.

The flight's aim was "to stop the pandemic so people will stop dying from it", Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri was quoted as saying in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

The flu is often called simply "H1N1" in Israel, as pigs are seen as unclean.

SWINE FLU

Swine flu is a respiratory disease thought to spread through coughing and sneezing

Symptoms mimic those of normal flu

Good hygiene like using a tissue and washing hands thoroughly can help reduce transmission

Eating pork is banned under Jewish dietary laws.

According to Israel's health ministry, there have been more than 2,000 cases of swine flu in the country, with five fatalities so far.

"We are certain that, thanks to the prayer, the danger is already behind us," added Mr Batzri was quoted as saying.

Television footage showed rabbis in black hats rocking backwards and forwards as they read prayers from Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism which counts the singer Madonna among its devotees.

The shofar is the horn of a ram, and is used to mark major religious occasions in Judaism.

Bill Maher - New Rules

2009-08-19T00:06:00.001-04:00

Obama "has not begun working with Congress to repeal" DOMA

2009-08-18T22:44:00.001-04:00

Just posted this over at the main site via Greg Sargent. Bottom line is that Obama has not even started working with Congress to repeal DOMA. Despite all the nice talk from Obama and his appointees about how bad DOMA is, that "abhorrent" law won't repeal itself. And, Congress won't take it seriously until Obama gets involved. He knows that. Congress knows that.

Dick Armey fact check: MoveOn did not run Bush-Hitler ad

2009-08-17T18:36:00.001-04:00

Dick Armey fact check: MoveOn did not run Bush-Hitler ad

MSNBC's liberal anchor Rachel Maddow took to Meet the Press on Sunday morning for a debate over health care reform, but ended up correcting a grievous misstatement by former Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey.

In his opening remarks, Armey claimed that Democratic activist group MoveOn.org had "ran those ads" comparing President George W. Bush to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Armey's group FreedomWorks has stayed busy as of late by promoting Democratic lawmakers' town hall meetings and encouraging "forceful" displays against President Barack Obama's allegedly "socialist" health insurance reforms.

Maddow, who has been on a roll in the fight against health insurance reform misinformation, was quick to provide a counter-weight.

"They didn't," she said, shaking her head. "They never ran an ad that compared..."

"You're gonna get a chance to talk," he said with a smile. "I just looked at the MoveOn.org ad ... It ... It was a horrible thing."

(The ad he's speaking about was later linked by FreedomWorks, without qualification.)

Later in the discussion, Meet the Press host David Gregory asked Armey if he would repudiate Nazi imagery as applied to President Barack Obama.

"Absolutely," he said. "I repudiated it when MoveOn.org did that to George Bush. Did anybody here at this table repudiate it?"

Pointing his hands toward Maddow, Army added, "We've just heard it was alright when MoveOn did it. It's not right when anybody does it."

Of course, during the broadcast Maddow did not suggest it was "alright" for MoveOn to compare George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler. She said MoveOn did not make such an analogy.

Instead of taking more time to refute Armey's claim, Maddow glanced at her notes and got back to current affairs.

FreedomWorks, she noted, is associated with the "Tea Party Patriots," which had until Sunday afternoon distributed a video that she said promoted town hall violence "as if that were a good thing."

Maddow added: "Is that what the Health Care Freedom Coalition wants to have done in the health care debate? FreedomWorks is part of that coalition. You can say that you denounce it, but the organization that you head is part of it."

In the clip provided below, she does not explain to the former Republican majority leader how incorrect his claim really is.

However, Maddow is indeed correct.

At no point did MoveOn promote, "run" or even publicly condone the video which Armey's group now circulates. The clip Armey attributes to MoveOn was apparently submitted as part of a contest to help determine how the group should advertise against the Bush administration in the run-up to the 2004 election.

Astute political observers may remember this. In 2003, MoveOn held a contest called "Bush in 30 Seconds." Entries were judged by a panel of celebrities that included Jack Black, Moby, then-comedian (now Senator) Al Franken, famed Democratic strategist James Carville and others.

The Bush-Hitler ad was not chosen. This writer could not even find it among the top 150 user-submitted videos.

Claiming that MoveOn "ran" a Bush-Hitler ad is false. By re-posting the rejected video without disclosing its true origin, FreedomWorks is only perpetuating a lie born this morning on MSNBC.

-- Stephen C. Webster

This video is from MSNBC's Meet the Press, broadcast Sunday, August 16, 2009.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

When Should Gay Marriage Advocates Try to Reverse California's Prop 8?

2009-08-11T15:27:00.001-04:00

When Should Gay Marriage Advocates Try to Reverse California's Prop 8?

Whether we like it or not, gay marriage opponents had a devastatingly effective advertising campaign in California.

When should Californians try to reverse last November's Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage? That's the question on tap this week, and for awhile going forward.

While Barack Obama won a 61% to 37% victory in California last November, the Prop 8 amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage also passed, 52% to 48%. It was a striking rebuke to pro-gay rights forces, who had just won the right in a notable California Supreme Court decision, and seemed poised to hold it in the election.

This week, a few organizations championing same-sex marriage will announce their opinions as to to whether to try to reverse Prop 8 in 2010 or 2012. In order to place an initiative on the November 2010 ballot, initiative language must be submitted to California Attorney General Jerry Brown by September 25th. Equality California and Courage Campaign will announce their decisions this week. This won't end the process, of course, as key funding decisions are yet to be made.

So, the question for human rights advocates is, when best to try again, the seeming slam dunk of 2008 having been screwed up in various ways.

California's same-sex marriage advocates have heard from their pollsters, they've heard from selected political consultants, and they've heard from activists. Now they need to decide whether to try to reverse Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment adopted last November, in 2010 or in 2012.

The pollsters said that 2012 would be a better option. The political consultants said that 2012 would be a better option. The activist leaders prefer 2010.

If there is to be an initiative to bring back the right to same-sex marriage -- established by the California Supreme Court last year and overturned by California voters last November -- ballot language is due by September 25th.

Here are some points to consider.

**The Polling

Gay marriage advocates -- and please excuse this sympathetic straight guy for using the short form rather than the full, and politically correct, LGBT language -- commissioned a poll on this point. Which was conducted before the Republican majority California Supreme Court, which had granted the right in the first place, predictably upheld Prop 8 last spring. Predictably because most gay rights advocates had sued on the technical basis that Prop 8 constituted a fundamental revision of the California Constitution rather than an amendment. Ignoring the fact that the Prop 13 property tax amendment was actually was actually far more far-reaching.

On June 3rd, I went on a media conference call sponsored by same-sex marriage proponents. Pollsters Amy Simon and David Binder discussed their poll, which indicated that the opponents of same-sex marriage have an eyelash thin one to two-point edge over proponents among all California voters. Not unlike other polling before the passage of the gay marriage ban.

The advocates' pollsters read is that 2012 is a marginally better year in which to do a gay marriage initiative than 2010, due to higher turnout of more Democratic voters in a presidential election. They're less pronounced, however, in the view that 2012 is preferable to 2010 than are the two leading public pollsters remaining in the state: Field Poll director Mark di Camillo and Public Policy Institute of California poll director Mark Baldassare.

There is a sort of inexorable quality to this. As time passes, the opponents of gay marriage increasingly pass away.

Nothwithstanding what their pollsters, or any others, think, the impression I got from the groups represented on the call before I had to move on to the next task is that they intend to move ahead on a same-sex marriage initiative for 2010. And are planning public events promoting same-sex marriage in dozens of cities.

**The Political Consultants Gay marriage advocates Equality California asked a selected panel of supportive California political consultants which year is best to reverse Prop 8, 2010 or 2012. The unanimous view? 2012.

Former Los Angeles Times pollster Jill Darling said: "Did the 2008 campaign move voters? Are the post-elections efforts having any effect? Nothing measurable."

Democratic consultant Gale Kaufman, named campaign manager of the year by the American Association of Political Consultants for defeating Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2005 special election initiatives, notes that an initiative for November 2010 needs to be submitted to the Attorney General by the end of September. "Has the perfect initiative been drafted? Is everyone who should be consulted on the legal language, not to mention whatever nuances we want to add, signed off? Is the campaign structure in place to sustain the process that goes along with the beginning stages of an initiative campaign?

"I pose these questions because I think I know the answer. And I think the answer is 'No,'" Kaufman said.

This late ad by Samuel L. Jackson casting opposition to gay marriage in a long line of anti-civil rights moves was too little to counter problems with the Latino and African American communities.

**The Activist Groups Older, more established groups are more skeptical of the idea of going right away back to the ballot. Others, are more into it. Of course, action equals funding in the world of activist politics.

Constant campaigning equals constant mobilization equals constant funding.

A gathering of activist group leaders last month in San Bernardino showed most in favor of going to the ballot in 2010. 93 voted to go in 2010, with 49 in favor of 2012, and 20 undecided.

** The Initiative Dynamic. California voters have dealt with hundreds of initiatives over the past several decades. The dynamic has become well established.

It is much easier to defeat an initiative than to pass one.

This is why 2008 was such a gigantic missed opportunity for the gay rights movement.

Former Governor-turned-Attorney General Jerry Brown provided the appropriate frame for the initiative, casting it in ballot language as taking away a right. Which infuriated the far right forces behind the initiative. But which was entirely accurate, given the fact that a Republican majority state Supreme Court had just granted the right.

And so the No on 8 side had a good lead in the polls starting out last year.

However, the obvious frame for the election proceeded to be completely blown by the No on 8 campaign until the last few weeks. First by a campaign which emphasized a sort of "getting-to-know-us" theme and, ultimately, by mistakes made by gay marriage proponent Gavin Newsom.

Same-sex marriage stalled out earlier this year in liberal New York, after a much-ballyhooed introduction.

**The Overall Environment Today's California political environment is dominated by the sharp economic downturn and by a closely aligned reality, namely California's chronic-turned-chaotic budget crisis. In this context of ongoing economic, financial, and fiscal emergency, gay marriage is not a top-rung issue for most Californians.

As a wild card indicator, there is the relative failure of the movie, Bruno. Some gay rights advocates saw it as a leading edge into the culture. Others worried that it was an unnecessary stereotyping of gay culture. I noted that its sharp fall-off after its opening day was no surprise, given its aggressively in-your-face nature. Putting aside the longer analysis of the movie, which I provided here on the Huffington Post, a relevant fact is that it will end up less than half as popular as Sacha Baron Cohen's previous provocation, the 2006 hit Borat.

And as a fine a movie as Milk is -- with its Best Actor Oscar for Sean Penn for his great portrayal of the intriguing Harvey Milk, with whom I was acquainted, and Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for former colleague Josh Brolin for his great portrayal of Milk assassin Dan White -- the movie makes Bulworth look like a blockbuster.

A same-sex marriage ceremony at San Francisco City Hall a few weeks before the election, presided over by Mayor Gavin Newsom, with first graders in attendance, effectively countered Prop 8 opponents' arguments that the schools were being raised as a scare tactic.

**The Newsom Factor San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom catapulted himself into a role as chief proponent of gay marriage with his swiftly overturned declaration in 2004 that same-sex marriage was legal in San Francisco. When the California Supreme Court declared it a right in 2008, Newsom promptly made himself the inadvertent star of the Yes on 8 TV ads with his notorious, braying declaration that gay marriage is inevitable in America, "Whether you like it or not."

Which is, probably, true, in the long run. Not that you want to say it as Newsom did. Because few things are inevitable in politics. And anything can be lost with enough arrogance and stupidity.

Later, with the No on 8 side's lead declining, Newsom presided over a lesbian wedding at San Francisco City Hall. Which first graders in one of the newlywed's classes attended. This provided endless ammunition for gay marriage opponents, who had been struggling to prove their contention that the right to same-sex marriage means that the gay lifestyle will be promoted in the public schools.

Newsom is trying to run for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2010. He's not doing well. He's just had major blow-ups in both his political and City Hall operations, and has less than one-eighth the campaign funds available to spend that frontrunner Jerry Brown has.

Nevertheless, his prominent role, at least for now, in the politics of 2010 places him front and center in the debate over the repeal of Prop 8. Given his record of boneheaded moves, gay marriage opponents are happy about this.

**The History The right to same-sex marriage will, in the end, win out. It's the getting there that is messy. And it need not have been as messy as the passage of Prop 8, and its expected upholding last spring by the California Supreme Court, has made it. (Fortunately, the 18,000 same-sex marriages legally carried out under the short-lived law will stand.)

Ironically, it was this very court that granted the right of same-sex marriage just last year.

Overturning an earlier anti-gay marriage initiative, Chief Justice Ron George, a Republican, wrote in his majority opinion: "An individual's capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon an individual's sexual orientation. ... An individual's sexual orientation -- like a person's race or gender -- does not constitute a legitimate basis to deny or withhold legal rights."

The state Supreme Court's decision fueled a right-wing drive to enshrine opposition to same-sex marriage in California's constitution.

Gay marriage opponents got a huge gift immediately from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's comments. Newsom had enraged top national Democrats, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by unilaterally declaring same-sex marriage lawful in San Francisco in the midst of the 2004 presidential race. Though it was a move that was predictably easily overturned, national Republican strategists credited the furor it caused with playing a propulsive role in turning out huge numbers of fundamentalist voters in Ohio, the lynchpin of George W. Bush's 2004 re-election.

In the spring of 2008, Newsom delighted the proponents of what became Proposition 8 by delivering a gloating set of remarks.

"By the way, as California goes, so goes the rest of the nation," he said. "It's inevitable. This door's wide open now. It's gonna happen. Whether you like it or not. This is the future. And it's now."

The foolish remarks helped galvanize religious conservatives around the country, and they poured millions into the California campaign. It also formed the cornerstone for the Yes on 8 ad campaign.

A few weeks before the election, with opponents of Prop 8 fighting back against distracting assertions that the right to same-sex marriage means that "homosexuality" will be promoted in the public schools, Newsom presided over the same-sex wedding of a first grade teacher at San Francisco City Hall. 18 of her students were on hand to toss rose petals and blow bubbles on their just married teacher and her new wife.

The Yes on 8 forces had a field day with this, successfully pushing back against new No on 8 ads. And what seemed like the likely defeat of Prop 8 turned into a 52% to 48% victory.

And so the question remains: When best to try to roll back the ultimate failure of 2008? In 2010 or in 2012?

The emotional answer is clearly the former. The more measured answer the latter. But politics frequently turns, for better or worse, on emotion.

Manhattan Entertainment Spotlight Special -0709

2009-08-09T01:06:00.000-04:00

Interviews with Sal Nastasi of Ready In 10, jazz artist Kemba Cofield. Video footage of Levente Egry and Stefani Scovolo.

Manhattan Entertainment Spotlight Special is a television show which highlights entertainers, artists, performers, actors, playwrights and theatre companies in New York City. It is aired on Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN) and streamed live over the internet at air time.

Obama's Mother was NEVER IN KENYA

2009-08-05T18:29:00.000-04:00

Letter From the Editor: 'Birther' Movement Reeks With the Rotten Stench of Racism

Why Is CNN's Lou Dobbs Giving a Platform for Conspiracy Theorists Linked to White Supremacists Who Falsely Insist -- Despite Overwhelming Documentary Evidence to the Contrary -- That the Hawaii-Born Obama is a Foreigner Who's Constitutionally Ineligible to be President?

Lou Dobbs, the longtime CNN financial news anchor-turned-commentator, has seen the ratings for his nightly program, "Lou Dobbs Tonight," plunge dramatically in recent weeks, after Dobbs repeatedly challenged -- despite being repeatedly contradicted on-air by both his CNN colleagues and by his rivals on other networks -- the veracity of President Obama's birth in Hawaii in 1961, effectively agreeing with conspiracy theorists who insist that the nation's first African-American president is a foreigner who is constitutionally ineligible to be the nation's chief executive. But the so-called "Birther" movement against Obama has ties to known white supremacists -- including the gunman in the attack on the U.S. Holocaust Museum in June -- who cannot countenance a black man occupying the nation's highest office. (Photo courtesy CNN)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, August 3, 2009)
(Updated 5:00 p.m. EDT Wednesday, August 5, 2009)

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A 'SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL
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Has Lou Dobbs taken leave of his senses?

The longtime CNN financial news anchor-turned-outspoken commentator who in recent years has generated a lot of controversy over his campaign against illegal immigration -- a campaign that critics have charged is motivated by anti-Latino bias -- may very well have bitten off more than he can chew by airing on his nightly show claims that President Obama is not a native-born U.S. citizen, despite overwhelming documentary evidence to the contrary.

The Associated Press reported Saturday that Dobbs, who's said on the air his belief that the president was born in Hawaii, "has become a publicity nightmare for CNN, [embarrassing] his boss and [hosting] a show that seemed to contradict the network's 'no bias' brand" that seeks to set CNN apart from the left-leaning MSNBC and the right-leaning Fox News Channel.

Dobbs has on several occasions invited members of the so-called "Birther Movement" who stubbornly insist Obama is not a native-born U.S. citizen to air their claims without providing a shred of proof to back them up -- and has even gone so far as to demand that the president make public his birth certificate, even though he did just that during the 2008 election campaign.

But Dobbs kept the controversy alive on his "Lou Dobbs Tonight" program despite a memorandum from CNN President Jon Klein that declared the Obama birth-certificate story "dead" -- and despite a precipitous plunge in the ratings for Dobbs' nightly 6 p.m. EDT program as a result of the controversy, according to the New York Observer.

The newspaper reports that since Dobbs brought up the Obama birth certificate issue in mid-July, his show's ratings have nosedived by 15 percent of his total viewership and by an even more precipitous 27 percent in the all-important 25-54 age bracket most sought after by advertisers.

That Dobbs has given a platform for the "Birthers" on his program has drawn fire even from conservative commentators Ann Coulter and Mike Huckabee -- neither of whom will likely ever be accused of being allies of the president.

A NEW BREED OF CONSPIRACY THEORISTS: THE 'BIRTHER MOVEMENT'

By now, you know the story of the so-called "Birther Movement" -- conspiracy theorists who bullheadedly insist without a shred of proof that Obama is a Kenyan-born foreigner who is barred by the Constitution from even running for president, let alone being the nation's CEO and commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Never mind the fact that Obama was born on August 4, 1961 -- two years after Hawaii became America's 50th state -- in Honolulu's Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital and that the document exists to prove it. Obama's birth certificate was issued by the Hawaii Department of Health, which confirmed last week that it has the document -- copies of which have been circulating on the Internet for months -- on file.

Never mind the fact that both of Honolulu's major newspapers, the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin, published announcements about the president's birth to "Mr. & Mrs. Barack H. Obama [of] 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy." in Honolulu, in their August 13 and August 14, 1961 editions, respectively.

Never mind the fact that a Honolulu resident, Eleanor Nordyke, gave birth to twin girls in the same hospital the day after Obama was born -- and whose daughters attended the same Honolulu school Obama attended -- and likely knew the boy who would grow up to become America's first African-American president.

Never mind the fact that certified copies of the president's birth certificate can be ordered through the Hawaii Department of Health's Online Vital Records Ordering System, albeit on a strictly limited basis in accordance with the state's privacy law.

Never mind the fact that the original Obama birth certificate itself was viewed, verified as authentic, photographed and posted online last November by the nonpartisan Web site, FactCheck.org, which declared that the document "meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false."

ALLEGED KENYAN BIRTH CERTIFICATE RIDDLED WITH INCONSISTENCIES

The far-right-wing WorldNetDaily.com posted what it said were photographs purporting to show a certified copy of a birth certficate for Barack Hueesin Obama II on August 4, 1961 at the Central Coast Provincial Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya.

The photos were released by California attorney Orly Taitz, who has filed a number of lawsuits demanding proof of Obama's eligibility to serve as president -- only to see the suits dismissed as being without merit.

An examination of the photos reveal several inconsistencies in the alleged Kenyan birth certificate. They do not show the signatures of either the president's white, Kansas-born mother, Ann Dunham or of his black, Kenyan-born father, Barack Obama, Sr. Nor do they show any signatures by the registrar or by the attending physicians. Kenya was under British rule in 1961. Under British law, birth certificates are not legally valid without such signatures.

Other discrepancies in the alleged Kenyan birth certificate include listing Obama's mother under his father's surname -- when, in fact, Dunham legally kept her maiden name throughout her marriage. And it lists Dunham's age as 16, when, in fact, she was 18 when she gave birth to the future president.

The lower-left-hand corner of the alleged documents refers to the "Republic of Kenya." But Kenya did not gain its independence from Britain until 1963 -- when the young Barack was two years old.

Most importantly, Dunham never set foot on Kenyan soil -- it would have been extremely unsafe for her to be there. Tribal warfare between the Kikuyus and the Luos was raging in Kenya at the time of her pregnancy. The ethnic warfare erupted in the immediate aftermath of the Mau Mau uprising against the British colonialists. There's no way that Barack Obama Sr., a Luo, would have dared to bring his pregnant white American wife to Kenya at the time, knowing full well that her safety -- and that of their unborn son -- would have been in grave jeopardy.

In fact, the president's mother did not leave the United States until 1967, when she moved to Indonesia to live with her second husband, Lolo Seotoro (She divorced the senior Obama in 1964 after she learned that he was married to another woman in Kenya).

And contrary to the claims of the "Birthers," Dunham never renounced her U.S. citizenship, returning to the States -- with 11-year-old Barack -- in 1972.

WHITE SUPREMACISTS INVOLVED IN 'BIRTHER' MOVEMENT

So why, despite so much clear evidence that the president was indeed born in Hawaii two years after statehood and is therefore a native-born U.S. citizen, are these conspiracy theorists continuing to insist that Obama was not born in the U.S., but rather in his father's native Kenya?

Conspiracy theorists are notorious for stubbornly clinging to their beliefs, no matter how much or how solid evidence exists to disprove their theories. And the "Birther Movement" is no exception.

But this particular conspiracy-theory movement is more sinister than most. The 'Skeeter Bites Report has uncovered a wealth of evidence that the "Birther Movement" against the president is inextricably tied to white supremacists and other far-right extremists -- and is profoundly marked by an absolute refusal among its practitioners to accept Obama as president because he is black, or because of an equally-false belief that he is a Muslim.

The person who planted the seeds for the "Birther Movement" is Andy Martin, a perennial fringe candidate for public office who is also credited with first spreading false rumors of the president being a Muslim with ties to Islamic extremists. Martin -- a frequent guest on Sean Hannity's Fox News Channel program -- was exposed as a notoriously anti-Jewish bigot.

In a campaign fundraising letter he issued during an unsuccessful run for a Connecticut congressional seat in 1986, Martin -- then known as Anthony R. Martin-Trigona -- pledged to "exterminate Jew Power in America," claimed that "Jew babies are fed with subsidized American taxpayer money" and that Jews were "schooled in blood-sucking and money-grubbing from birth." Martin's anti-Semitic diatribe was obtained and posted by TheSmokingGun.com.

Martin subsequently moved to Florida and sought the Republican nomination for a state Senate seat a decade later. After learning of Martin's prior anti-Semitic fundraising pitch, GOP officials withdrew their support for him. The 62-year-old Martin now lives in Chicago, the president's adopted hometown.

Martin started his anti-Obama smear campaign in 2004 after Obama, then a U.S. Senate candidate, delivered the keynote address that electrified the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Boston and put the future president on the national political radar screen.

In several guest appearances on the "Hannity" show, Martin accused Obama -- without offering any proof -- of being "in training for radical overthrow of the government," based on his relationship with former 1960s radical William Ayres.

According to TheSmokingGun.com, Martin was wanted in New York and Florida on outstanding arrest warrants as of last October. The New York warrant, out of Ulster County, resulted from harassment charges related to a child custody battle. The Florida warrant, from Palm Beach County, was filed in connection with a criminal contempt conviction.

WHITE-SUPREMACIST WEB SITES TOUTING OBAMA'S ALLEGED FOREIGN BIRTH

The belief that Obama is a foreigner has spread like wildfire among white- supremacist circles and Web sites, including Stormfront, the largest and best-known self-styled "white nationalist" site on the Web; the Council of Conservative Citizens, listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "the largest white nationalist group in America," a reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils that were formed to resist desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s; and VDARE.com, a virulently anti-immigrant site.

That white-supremacist groups are heavily involved in the "Birther Movement" against the president should come as no surprise, given the massive coronary they collectively suffered last November when Obama was elected. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which monitors and exposes extremist activity and rhetoric, anger among white supremacists and other right-wing extremists in response to Obama's victory "resulted in an avalanche of vitriolic postings on racist Web sites" -- at one point, causing Stormfront's server to crash.

HOLOCAUST MUSEUM GUNMAN WAS ALSO A WHITE-SUPREMACIST 'BIRTHER'

Questions remain unanswered about James von Brunn, the 89-year-old white supremacist gunman who shot and killed a black security officer inside the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington in June. Investigators found a notebook in von Brunn's car that listed up to nine other target areas in the nation's capital -- including the White House.

According to Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, von Brunn not only believed that Obama was not born in the U.S. and ineligible to be president, but "he also believed that Hitler didn't kill enough Jews. He had a history of anti-Semitic, hateful views."

Von Brunn is also the founder of a white-supremacist Web site, HolyWesternEmpire,org, which is laced with anti-Semitic quotations.

The site was taken offline after von Brunn's arrest, but according to former Fox News host Alan Colmes, von Brunn published on his Web site in 2002 a book that detailed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, with chapters such as "The Holocaust Hoax" and "The Negro." The book was mostly anti-Semitic but also attacked all nonwhite ethnicities.

"We are witnessing today on the world stage a tragedy of enormous proportions: the calculated destruction of the White Race," Colmes quoted von Brunn as having written. He threatened to take action against nonwhites, writing, "We will offer a plan to remove the cancer from our cultural organism."

IS DOBBS' ATTITUDE TOWARD OBAMA ALSO RACIALLY TAINTED?

This is not the first time that Dobbs has come under fire about Obama. Last September, while attending a Values Voters summit over the weekend in Washington, Dobbs purchased a box of so-called "Obama Waffles" that featured racially offensive charactures of the then-Illinois senator.

Photographs of Dobbs with the controversial waffle mix, which portrays Obama with popping eyes and big, thick lips as he stares at a plate of waffles and smiles broadly -- an image more reminiscent of Stephin Fetchit than of Aunt Jemima -- were taken down from the Web site of the Family Research Council, the conservative organization that hosted the summit -- but not before DailyKos.com snapped a screen shot of the photos.

"My wife will love this!" Dobbs was quoted as saying about the "Obama Waffles."

Nearly a year later, we have to wonder if Mrs. Dobbs still does -- if she ever did. And if America still loves Lou Dobbs. Based on the latest Nielsens, it sure doesn't look like it.

Sincerely,
Skeeter Sanders
Editor & Publisher
The 'Skeeter Bites Report

Widespread Domestic Surveillance Continues Under Obama: Restore My Goddam 4th Amendment rights!!!

2009-07-30T03:22:00.000-04:00

Widespread Domestic Surveillance Continues Under Obama: Restore My Goddam 4th Amendment rights!!!

AUDIO: Peter B. Collins speaks to the whistleblowers and experts still sounding the alarm as Bush-era big government intrusion continues unabated...

Guest Blogged by Peter B. Collins

Since I signed off the syndicated Peter B. Collins radio show in March, I've been able to zoom out from the close-up view of day-to-day political combat.

On a daily basis, I reflect on the "change we can believe in" that candidate Obama promised us just a year ago. Certainly, the new administration is better than the Bush/Cheney gang on many fronts; and Bush left Obama an economic meltdown and other serious problems that need attention.

But consider:

we still have 135,000 troops and even more contractors in Iraq, with no clear plan or timeline for our exit, just vague promises and the hope that the Iraqis will kick us out next year. Most of the US troops that have left Iraq went to Afghanistan;

the escalation of our presence in Afghanistan is very dangerous, and contradicts some of Obama's own statements about the prospects for "success" there. He had the chance to reverse direction after the election, but chose to double down on the "good war";

the massive interception of domestic electronic communications continues, and the Obama Justice Department has reinforced and expanded on the bad legal precedents set under Bush/Cheney. Most Democrats are silent on this issue, and I see no effort to restore our privacy rights.

Remember how they dubbed Ronnie Reagan the "Teflon president"? Obama seems to have a new and improved coating, I call it "Leftlon", protecting him from challenges from the progressives who helped him beat Hillary for the nomination.

He keeps reaching out to GOP nuts who want to scuttle his tepid health care "reform", refuses to allow investigations while Cheney spits at him regularly, and expects us to trust the Goldman Sachs Alumni Association to fix the economy that they continue to plunder.

When will Obama deliver for the progressives who got him elected?

That's the central question I'm exploring in my new podcast series. Drop in to www.peterbcollins.com or you can subscribe (free, FREE!) at iTunes.

Here are two fresh programs I'd like you to check out. You can download each and/or listen online below. One is co-hosted with me by FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, featuring NSA expert James Bamford as guest. The other is my exclusive interview with Mark Klein, former AT&T technician turned NSA surveillance program whistleblower...

• Episode #18 is the first episode of The Boiling Frogs, an interview series co-hosted by Sibel Edmonds. Sibel, who was famously "gagged" by the Bush Justice Department, is now speaking quite freely, and our first show features NSA expert James Bamford. He describes the massive scale of domestic surveillance, the complicity of Democrats in legalizing Bush's violations of our 4th Amendment rights, and the bungling of pre-9/11 intel by the spook community, especially the NSA.

Download MP3, or listen online here (appx. 1 hour)...

• Episode #19 is an exclusive 90-minute conversation with Mark Klein, a former technician at AT&T who exposed the NSA's secret room in San Francisco where they installed a splitter that routes all traffic to the NSA. Klein tells what he discovered, and how big media outlets like 60 Minutes, NY Times and the LA Times spiked or buried his story. The LA Times took his confidential information directly to Intel Czar Negroponte and NSA chief Hayden, then screwed Klein by not running a story and leaving him exposed. Klein also explains how leading Democrats like Sen. Feinstein knew about his revelations, refused to meet with him or allow him to testify, and worked to protect the phone giants and the NSA.

Download MP3, or listen online here (appx. 90 mins)...

Give them a listen

Heretic’s Foundation VIII: Seeing Beneath Twelfth Night

2009-07-28T01:52:00.001-04:00

Heretic’s Foundation VIII: Seeing Beneath Twelfth Night

Friday, July 24, 2009
Heretic’s Foundation

By John Hudson
darkladyplayers@aol.com
Special to the Clyde Fitch Report

http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=3294&cpage=1#comment-3527

Arab leaders forced Palestinians to become refugees

2009-07-27T07:58:00.000-04:00

A Palestinian blames Arab leaders for causing his parents to become refugees. Ibrahim Sarsur, head of Islamic Movement in Israel, affirms and condems.
[PATV (Fatah), April 30, 1999]

Phone caller from Gaza:
"Mr. Ibrahim, I address you as a Muslim. My father and grandfather told me that during the "Catastrophe" [establishment of Israel - 1948] our district officer issued an order that whoever stays in Palestine and in Majdel [near Ashkelon, southern Israel] is a traitor, he is a traitor... "
Ibrahim Sarsur, head of Islamic Movement in Israel, responds:
"I don't want to blame the one who caused this situation, but we are forced to cope with this situation. The one who gave the order forbidding them to stay there bears guilt for this, in this life and the Afterlife, throughout history until Resurrection Day."

SHAKESPEARE- A biblical allegory

2009-07-27T07:02:00.000-04:00

Arab leaders are responsible for refugee problem

2009-07-27T06:29:00.000-04:00

PMW Bulletins

Arab leaders are responsible for refugee problem

by by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
July 23, 2009

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"The radio stations of the Arab regimes kept repeating to us: 'Get away from the battle lines. It's a matter of ten days or two weeks at the most, and we'll bring you back to Ein-Kerem [near Jerusalem].' And we said to ourselves, 'That's a very long time. What is this? Two weeks? That's a lot!' That's what we thought [then]. And now 50 years have gone by." [PATV, July 7, 2009]

With these words an Arab resident of a refugee camp recounts the reason why his family left Israel in 1948, in an interview broadcast on PA TV this month.

In recent years, Palestinian leaders, writers and refugees have spoken out in the Palestinian media, blaming the Arab leadership for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. According to these accounts, and contrary to the Palestinian myth that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were deported by Israel in 1948, the vast majority of the Arab exodus from Israel was voluntary, and the result of orders by the Arab leadership.

Furthermore, the fact that this information has been openly discussed by public figures and refugees in the Palestinian Authority media itself suggests that awareness of this responsibility may be widespread - even though Palestinian leaders continue to blame Israel for "the expulsion" for propaganda purposes.

The following statements in the PA media shed significant light on the events of 1948 and counter the attempts by the Palestinian Authority to hide this part of history.

Click here to view the Palestinian testimonies

1. Arab resident of refugee camp:

"This picture was taken a week before we left Ein-Kerem [near Jerusalem] in June 1948, in front of our house. The radio stations of the Arab regimes kept repeating to us: 'Get away from the battle lines. It's a matter of ten days or two weeks at the most, and we'll bring you back to Ein-Kerem.' And we said to ourselves, 'That's a very long time. What is this? Two weeks? That's a lot!' That's what we thought [then]. And now 50 years have gone by."

[PATV, July 7, 2009]

2. Jawad Al-Bashiti, Palestinian journalist in Jordan:

"Remind me of one real cause from all the factors that have caused the 'Palestinian Catastrophe' [the establishment of Israel and the creation of the refugee problem], and I will remind you that it still exists... The reasons for the Palestinian Catastrophe are the same reasons that have produced and are still producing our Catastrophes today.
During the Little Catastrophe, meaning the Palestinian Catastrophe, the following happened: the first war between Arabs and Israel had started and the 'Arab Salvation Army' came and told the Palestinians: 'We have come to you in order to liquidate the Zionists and their state. Leave your houses and villages, you will return to them in a few days safely. Leave them so we can fulfill our mission (destroy Israel) in the best way and so you won't be hurt.' It became clear already then, when it was too late, that the support of the Arab states (against Israel) was a big illusion. The Arabs fought as if intending to cause the 'Palestinian Catastrophe'."

[Al-Ayyam, May 13, 2008]

3. Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Palestinian journalist in PA official daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida:

"The leaders and the elites promised us at the beginning of the 'Catastrophe' in 1948 that the duration of the exile would not be long, and that it would not last more than a few days or months, and afterwards the refugees would return to their homes, which most of them did not leave only until they put their trust in those "Orkubian" promises made by the leaders and the political elites. Afterwards, days passed, months, years and decades, and the promises were lost with the strain of the succession of events..."
[The term "Orkubian" invokes Orkub, a figure from Arab tradition who was known for breaking his promises and for his lies.]

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 13, 2006]

4. Asmaa Jabir Balasimah, woman who fled Israel in 1948:

"We heard sounds of explosions and of gunfire at the beginning of the summer in the year of the 'Catastrophe' [1948]. They [Arab leaders] told us: The Jews attacked our region and it is better to evacuate the village and return after the battle is over. And indeed there were among us [those who fled Israel] those who left a fire burning under the pot, those who left their flock [of sheep] and those who left their money and gold behind, based on the assumption that we would return after a few hours."

[Al-Ayyam, May 16, 2006]

5. Ibrahim Sarsur, Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel:
An Arab viewer called Palestinian Authority TV and quoted his father, saying that in 1948 the Arab District Officer ordered all Arabs to leave Palestine or be labeled traitors. In response, Ibrahim Sarsur, now Arab Member of Israeli Parliament Knesset, then Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, cursed those Arab leaders, thus acknowledging Israel's historical record.

Viewer: "Mr. Ibrahim [Sarsur]: I address you as a Muslim. My father and grandfather told me that during the 'Catastrophe' [in 1948], our District Officer issued an order that whoever stays in Palestine and in Majdel [near Ashkelon - southern Israel] is a traitor, he is a traitor."
Ibrahim Sarsur, now MK, then Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel: "The one who gave the order forbidding them to stay there bears guilt for this, in this life and the Afterlife throughout history until Resurrection Day."

[PA TV April 30, 1999]

6. Fuad Abu Hajla, senior Palestinian journalist:
Fuad Abu Hajla, then a regular columnist in the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, wrote an article before an Arab Summit, criticizing Arab leaders. One of the failures he cited, in the name of a prisoner, was that an earlier generation of Arab leaders had "forced" them to leave Israel in 1948.

"I have received a letter from a prisoner in Acre prison, to the Arab summit:
To the [Arab and Muslim] Kings and Presidents: Poverty is killing us, the symptoms are exhausting us and the souls are leaving our body, yet you are still searching for the way to provide aid, like one who is looking for a needle in a haystack or like the armies of your predecessors in the year of 1948, who forced us to leave [Israel], on the pretext of clearing the battlefields of civilians... So what will your summit do now?"

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 19, 2001]

Free Events in NYC

2009-07-26T08:04:00.001-04:00

Dessert Walking Tour

FreeNYC Event Flyer

Date: Sunday, July 26th
Time: 11:00am
Location: Meet at Madeleine Patisserie, (132 West 23rd St, b/n 6th & 7th)
Cost: Free

This may take the cake for NYC walking tours. This is the 9th consecutive monthly tour of the city's neighborhood sweet spots. This walk will explore Union Square which has 5 delicious dessert makers. For starters a small Parisian bakery offers the freshest macaroons, followed by a dense Belgian brownie, our third stop has a totally original
pretzel croissant, next up are gourmet chocolates, and our last course is home-made gelato. Tour lasts approximately 2 hours and the walking distance is about 1 mile. The desserts are free to drool over, but affordably priced for consumption. For more info on the Walking Tours site and be on the look-out for a tour guide in a red ball cap.

Posted by Lindsay at 11:00 AM | View This Article | Email to a friend

The New Museum Block Party

FreeNYC Event Flyer

Date: Sunday, July 26th
Time: 12:00pm - 7:00pm
Location: Sara D. Roosevelt Park
Cost: Free

"A day of art activities and performances in Sara D. Roosevelt Park. First, enjoy a range of artist- and educator-led interactive projects and programs related to the neighborhood and the New Museum. Then join the Block Party Parade in a raucous processional marching from the park to the New Museum. Explore the current exhibitions with a free docent-led highlights tour, culminating in a special performance at the New Museum. The New Museum Block Party is free and open to the public. Participants receive a complementary guest pass to visit the New Museum on the day of the event."

Cine Brunch - Yojimbo

FreeNYC Event Flyer

Date: Sunday, July 26th
Time: 12:30pm
Location: (Le) Poisson Rouge (158 Bleeker St.)
Cost: Free

"Cine-Brunch at (Le) Poisson Rouge is a new take on the summer movie season - a free afternoon screening of art-house cinema classics... Cine-Brunch offers an alternative to the summer blockbuster: refined entertainment in a cool, comfortable environment where viewers can enjoy brunch or LPR's regular menu of tapas while taking in classic cinema and sipping a cocktail. And best of all, it's free!" Today's film is the Akira Kurosawa samauri classic Yojimbo. The screening is free but you're brunch ($7) and cocktails ($3 specials, $7 bloodies) are not.

Ain't Nothin' But a Beach Party

FreeNYC Event Flyer

Date: Sunday, July 26th
Time: 1:00pm - 10:00pm
Location: Water Taxi Beach (2 Bordon Ave, LIC)
Cost: Free

NYC House music legend Jellybean Benitez brings his feel vibes (a la their Ain't Nothin' But a House Party events) to the Water Taxi Beach today. This is a great, rare chance to catch a classic house spinner on the waterfront. 21+

Pool Parties on the Waterfront: And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead

FreeNYC Event Flyer

Date: Sundays through August 30th
Time: gates at 2pm
Location: Kent St btw. N 8th and N 9th Sts on the East River, W'burg)
Cost: Free

With the McCarren Pool under renovations, the Williamsburg Pool Parties move to the waterfront this summer with seven weeks of free shows. In edition to the free music there will be "DODGEBALL, basketball, DJ’s, bands, burgers the works!" for you to enjoy. Afterparties at Public Assembly. This week features And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, The Black Lips, Health, and Grupo Fantasmo. Full line-up below. All ages!

Judy Collins on Governor's Island

FreeNYC Event Flyer

Date: Sunday, July 26th
Time: 2:00pm
Location: Governor's Island (Travel Directions)
Cost: Free

"For forty years, folk music legend Judy Collins has created music of hope and healing that speaks to the heart and inspires the world." (River to River) Today Judy Collins sings the day away on Governor's Island. Whether you are a fan or not the island is always worth the free ferry ride. Part of Folks on the Island.

Ginuwine, Joe and Chico DeBarge at Summerstage

FreeNYC Event Flyer

Date: Sunday, July 26th
Time: 3:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: Summerstage (Rumsey Playfield, Central Park)
Cost: Free

"After a four-year hiatus from making records, Ginuwine is back in the saddle with the release of his new album A Man’s Thoughts. Ginuwine first emerged on the music scene in 1996 with the multi-platinum release of The Bachelor which paired his silky smooth vocals with Timbaland’s jagged, hyperkinetic beats, creating a fresh new R&B sound... R&B singer Joe has had a remarkable career, having sold over eleven million albums worldwide. The son of two preachers, Joe grew up in the church playing guitar and eventually directing the choir... In 2000 Joe released his break-out, multi-platinum album My Name is Joe forever securing his place among the finest in R&B history. Sultry soul crooner Chico DeBarge will make a return to music with the forthcoming release of his new album Addiction. Earning his musical chops as a member of the famed Motown group, Switch and DeBarge, the singer broke out on his own in 1986, with the release of his debut solo album." More info here.

3rd Ward Pig Roast and Dance Party

FreeNYC Event Flyer

Date: Sunday, July 26th
Time: 4:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: 3rd Ward (195 Morgan Ave., BK)
Cost: Free with RSVP

"3rd Ward & Brooklyn Based present the 2nd Annual Pig Roast & Dance Party... Stand by as Pig Roasting Extraordinaire Tom Mylan (from Marlow and Sons, Diner and Bonita) and Chef Eric Sherman turn 200 lbs. of hog into finger-licking good & nicely priced pork tacos. We'll also have sides-a rice, beans and mexi-slaw and Brooklyn Based will top you off with some ice cream. The Colt 45 will be free from 4 to 5pm and the cold drinks will all be under $6. Featuring live music from Stumblebum Brass Band, Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers, In Cadeo and DJ Tanner all afternoon long. Plus bring your own t-shirts for $1 pig inspired screen-printing and bring your sweetest smile for a carnival style photobooth."

A Shadow in the Dark

FreeNYC Event Flyer

Date: Sunday, July 26th
Time: 8:00pm
Location: The Living Theatre (21 Clinton Street)
Cost: Free

Tonight, The Living Theatre continues it Readings Above Realism Series with a free staged reading of A Shadow in the Dark by Jared Latore. "The subject of Latore’s stunning play is simple enough: a man who spreads disease to his partners. The characters are like us, dealing as best they can with the realities of life. What’s extraordinary is that they meet their fates among characters who are perhaps not personalities at all. They may be ideas… demons? The world of the play is like ours – actual and imagined, with spirits walking among us." All Ages

2009-07-17T10:28:00.002-04:00

Drug rescues memory lost to Alzheimer's disease

2009-07-11T09:45:00.001-04:00

Irvine, Calif., July 14, 2009 A drug similar to one used in clinical trials for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis has been found to rescue memory in mice exhibiting Alzheimer's symptoms.

The discovery by UC Irvine scientists offers hope that a new treatment may be on the horizon for people in the early stages of Alzheimer's, the leading cause of elderly dementia afflicting more than 5 million people in the U.S. and for which no cure exists.

The drug, called PMX205, prevented inflamed immune cells from gathering in brain regions with Alzheimer's lesions called amyloid plaques. Cell inflammation in these areas accelerates neuron damage, exacerbating the disease.

"We used a multidisciplinary approach combining an understanding of immunology and neurobiology to uncover a completely different target than other therapies," said Andrea Tenner, lead author of the study that led to the findings and a molecular biology & biochemistry professor at UCI.

Study results are reported in the July 15 edition of the Journal of Immunology.

For 12 weeks, Tenner and colleagues added PMX205 to the drinking water of mice genetically altered to develop age-related Alzheimer's-like symptoms. The treatment occurred at an age when plaques were accumulating in their brains.

Scientists gave the treated mice learning and memory tests and then examined their brains for evidence of the disease. Alzheimer's mice that were not given the drug performed significantly worse on the test than normal mice. But in all but one case the treated Alzheimer's mice performed almost as well as the normal mice. Those with the rescued cognitive ability had more than 50 percent fewer Alzheimer's lesions and inflammatory immune cells than the untreated diseased mice.

PMX53, a similar drug that can be taken orally, passed Phase 1 human clinical trials for safety with no major problems reported. Possible side effects include
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NAACP refuses to take a position on gay marriage; discounts connection between black civil rights and gay civil rights

2009-07-11T09:45:00.000-04:00

NAACP refuses to take a position on gay marriage; discounts connection between black civil rights and gay civil rights

by John Aravosis (DC) on 7/12/2009 04:20:00 PM

It's pretty sickening to watch the head of the NAACP, Benjamin Todd Jealous, squirm when asked about the civil rights of gays and lesbians, as he does throughout this interview. I suspect the NAACP leadership is afraid of its own membership on this issue.

You simply do not get to be a real civil rights organization by taking polls on whether or not you're going to get criticized for recognizing the civil rights of other human beings. Would the NAACP have us take polls on whether its membership's civil rights should be recognized and accepted as equal to other civil rights struggles? Just as bad, the NAACP head seems to suggest in this interview that it may take the NAACP decades before they endorse gay marriage. He then goes on to disagree with those who equate gay civil rights with the African-American civil rights struggle (good thing that the head of the NAACP agrees with John McCain about the civil rights of gays and lesbians). Though, while agreeing with John McCain, Mr. Jealous disagrees with Coretta Scott King, who says the civil rights battles are all the same.

Definitely not your daddy's civil rights leaders.

Jesus, the World's Most Popular Literary Character

2009-07-10T11:32:00.002-04:00

Heretic’s Foundation VII: Jesus, the World’s Most Popular Literary Character

Friday, July 10, 2009
Heretic’s Foundation

By John Hudson
darkladyplayers@aol.com
Special to the Clyde Fitch Report

The Heretic’s Foundation is now ready to address one of our most pressing literary and cultural problems: the figure of Jesus. Atheists are getting more attention nowadays, with an atheist campaign in London to put ads on the sides of buses, while in the U.S., according to the New York Times, atheists are linking up and “liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement, which lifted off when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public.” It has been a long time in coming.

For the last 2,000 years, expressing disbelief in Jesus has been a heresy that led directly to the torture chamber or the bonfire. Yet, the view that the Gospels are literary texts, and Jesus no more than a literary character, goes back to the philosopher Porphyry in the 3rd century, whose works were suppressed and burnt by the church. In Elizabethan London, the most prominent nonbeliever in Jesus was Christopher Marlowe, one of the most expert literary figures of his age, a man who certainly knew how to distinguish a work of clever, imaginative, Menippean literature from a historical, factual account. Marlowe knew the difference between fact and fiction.

He claimed, for example, that the sacred Gospels were “all of one man’s making”; that, as Thomas Beard recorded, the figure of Jesus was merely a “deceiver” in “vain and idle stories.” Marlowe makes Barabas in The Jew of Malta state that “swine-eating Christians…were never thought upon” until after Titus and Vespasian conquered Jerusalem — in other words, that Christianity itself did not exist before. It is becoming clear in my research that Marlowe was right: the Gospels are not accounts of the life of a historical, Jewish Jesus compiled by his followers 60 years after his death, but Roman literary creations. As one of the most radical strands of New Testament scholarship is showing, the Gospels were devised as war propaganda to trick Messianic Jews into worshipping the Roman Flavian emperors “in disguise.” They were written by the Romans as literary satires of the battles in the Roman-Jewish war (66-73 C.E.) in which the Jews were defeated.

The evidence shows that most of the key events in the “life” of Jesus were satirical; many are elegant literary satires of a military battle in which the Jewish armies had been defeated by the Romans. The Jewish War, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem temple in 70 C.E., devastated the Mediterranean economy and the Romans were anxious to prevent another outbreak of messianiac fervor. To make any economic and civil reconstruction lasting, the Romans needed to offer the Jews alternative stories to distract them from the messianic messages inherent in the Torah, and to persuade them to accept Roman values and worship Caesar.

The Romans’ solution was to create a special kind of postwar propaganda. They called it, in Greek, evangelion, a technical term meaning “good news of military victory,” which is translated into English as “gospel.” The word is, in fact, ironic humor: the Romans were amusing themselves with the notion of making the Jews accept, as the actions of the messiah Jesus, what were literary echoes of the very battles in which they had defeated Jewish armies. A further joke was buried in unmistakable parallels between the life of Jesus and that of Titus: In worshiping Jesus, those Jews who adopted Christianity, as it came to be called, were in proxy hailing the emperor of their conquerors as god, the key strategic Roman objective.

To replace the Torah, this view maintains that the Romans created a literary parody in the Gospel of Matthew and shortly thereafter rewrote it as the versions known as Luke and Mark, modeled respectively on the Aeneid and on Homer. The central literary character of the Gospels, called Jesus (or Joshua), inhabits a plot with various peculiar features. He begins his efforts by the Lake of Galilee. He sends a legion of devils out of a demon-possessed man and into pigs. He offers his flesh to be eaten. He mentions signs of the destruction of Jerusalem. In Gethsemane, a naked man escapes. Jesus is captured at Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. Simon denies knowing him. He is crucified with two other men and only he survives. He is taken down from the cross by a man called Joseph of Arimathea. His disciple, John, survives, but his disciple Simon is sent off to die in Rome. After his death, his disciple Judas dies by eviscerating himself.

Each of these peculiar events has a parallel in the writings of Josephus, our sole record of the military encounters between the Jews and their Roman conquerors — even to the unusual crucifixion in which three men are crucified and a man named Joseph takes one, who survives, down.

There are a dozen such examples which appear in both sets of texts — in the same order — providing statistical evidence that both works were created together as a single literary endeavor in the 80s C.E., thus demonstrating the anti-historicity of the Gospel accounts. Individual parallels have also been detected by half a dozen well known New Testament scholars, but the entire set of them, with all their implications, is summarized in Atwill’s book Caesar’s Messiah, long out of print but now available inexpensively online.

The evidence shows that Marlowe was right: the Gospels are, indeed, vain and idle stories; the figure of Jesus is, indeed, a “deceiver” because the stories in the Gospels are not historical accounts of events that happened in the 30s C.E. On the contrary, they are literary satires of battles and other events fought by Titus and Vespasian in the aforementioned Roman-Jewish war. And so, Jesus was not a historical figure but simply, as Harold Bloom suggested, the world’s best known literary character – a sort of allegorical disguise for Titus, the man who destroyed Jerusalem and became the second Flavian Caesar. Anyone who succumbed and worshipped Jesus would merely be worshipping Caesar in disguise.

Because Marlowe alludes to all this in the allegories in his plays, this was almost certainly the knowledge in the lecture on atheism he gave to the School of the Night, and which provided “more sound reasons” for his non belief than any clergyman had for divinity. Presumably this was also the specific knowledge that got Marlowe killed, and led the author of the Shakespearean plays to conceal aspects of the same knowledge as the deepest allegorical level of the plays, such as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the comic, scathing parodies of the Virgin Mary.

Today, thankfully, this knowledge can be posted to the Internet and even on the sides of buses. Perhaps one day it will even stimulate a new interest in understanding the deepest allegorical meanings of Elizabethan plays.

John Hudson is a strategic consultant who specializes in new industry models and has helped create several telecoms and Internet companies. He has recently been consulting to a leading think tank on the future of the theater industry and is pioneering an innovative Shakespeare theory, as dramaturge to the Dark Lady Players. This Fall he will be Artist in Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University. He has degrees in Theater and Shakespeare, in Management, and in Social Science.

AIDS activists shut down US Capitol rotunda

2009-07-09T13:53:00.000-04:00

AIDS activists shut down US Capitol rotunda over Obama reversal on AIDS policy

by John Aravosis (DC) on 7/09/2009 12:35:00 PM

UPDATE: That White House Web site pledge to support repeal of the federal ban on needle exchange? It appears to be gone.

Woah. Joe and I got wind of this last night. (Great picture on the home page of Roll Call.)

A group of 26 AIDS activists chained themselves to each other in the Capitol Rotunda on Thursday morning, startling visitors, shutting down the landmark area and prompting their arrest by Capitol Police.

The group, which was protesting President Barack Obama’s failure to get rid of a ban on funding needle exchange programs, arrived at the Rotunda around 10 a.m.

Candidate Obama said he would help overturn the ban on needle exchange. President Obama reversed himself and banned federal funding for needle exchanges in his budget this year.

The quote from Obama's spokesman is priceless:

Obama, during the primary campaign, pledged his support of needle exchange programs to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS. When he took over the White House, the administration website affirmed: "The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users."

Yet Obama's budget includes language that bans spending federal money on needle-exchange programs.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said the administration isn't yet ready to lift the ban - but Obama still supports needle exchange.

"We have not removed the ban in our budget proposal because we want to work with Congress and the American public to build support for this change," he said.

Let's see...

1. The candidate promised to lift the ban.
2. The White House Web site reaffirmed the president's commitment to lifting the ban.
3. The White House Web site no longer reaffirms his commitment to lifting the ban.
4. The president now refuses to lift the ban.
5. The president actually affirmatively makes things worse by administratively supporting defending the ban.
6. The spokesman reiterates the president's support for lifting the ban, some day, once Congress gets around to it.

Sound familiar?

My Interview with Prisca Ouya of Luzimbu Opera

2009-06-30T10:18:00.002-04:00

“The Trial”: Prisca Ouya ’s Luzimbu Opera Presents Tragedy and Judgement in the Congo

La MaMa E.T.C. is pleased to announce the presentation of a new opera, sung in African languages, Korean and English, by popular director, actor and choreographer Prisca Ouya, o pening June 18-28, 2009 in New York.

Synopsis of Luzimbu: The Trial

A secret abortion has left Lila, a young Congolese woman, sterile. Her new husband, Minimona, is unhappy with their childless relationship and decides to marry a second wife, Biwa , to bear him children. Biwa quickly produces two children, making her the more “successful” wife by community standards. Lila’s jealousy increases, pushing her to invoke the Goddess of Fertility and make a pact that ultimately will have terrible consequences for both women. Meanwhile, Biwa , still young, is not a responsible mother; she is unwilling to give up partying and drinking with her friends every day. She leaves the care of her two children to her co-spouse Lila. Caring for Biwa 's children only makes Lila crave children of her own even more. One day, while bathing the baby at the river, Lila hears the older child screaming as she falls from a tree. Horrified, Lila's instinctive reaction is to rush to help, but by doing so, she leaves the baby in the water. At the foot of the tree, the child dies, and the baby, left behind, drowns. To avoid facing the wrath of her rival, Lila runs away and finds refuge in a society of outcast women. But the day soon arrives when Biwa finds Lila and asks the community for justice. The outcast elder, Mfumu Nzonzi, agrees to a death-penalty trial on the condition that both women, not just Lila, are to be judged.

At its core, Luzimbu exposes women's hopes and fears and lays bare the consequences of judgments based on traditional morals. Do both of the women share responsibility for the childrens’ deaths? Lila was the one on duty when the children died, but Biwa is their real mother and therefore the one ultimately responsible for their well-being. The outcome of the trial, and what follows afterwards, are based on traditional Congolese morality and a complex spiritual value system overlayed by the often tragic and brutal experiences suffered by the women. Who is judged guilty, and by whom?

The Music and Dance of Luzimbu

Luzimbu is an opera sung in two of the languages of the Congo , Lingala and Lari, with narrative song in Korean and English. The spectacular performances choreographed throughout Luzimbu reflect the duality of its director – they are essentially traditional Congolese dance fused and updated with American modern staging.

Just as the dance is a modern take on Congolese tradition, so is the music of Luzimbu – its powerful rhythms draw from both traditional Congolese and modern Western music. In the hands of master drummers, a hollowed-out log is transformed into an ngoma, a powerful and expressive musical voice that lends power and direction to the dance. In the Congo , the ngoma drum is considered a healing force and certain traditional rhythms are associated with particular life events and rituals. In Luzimbu, the drums evoke the power of tradition while adapting new musical elements into the performance.

Humanitarian Action

Violence against women in the Congo has been at a crisis point for far too long. In keeping with the philosophy of Luzimbu and its director, a portion of the proceeds from the performances will be contributed to two international non-profit organizations:

1. Doctors Without Borders. Doctors Without Borders is an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, natural disasters, or exclusion from health care in nearly 60 countries. MSF received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. Website: www.msf.org.

2. V-Day. Founded by playwright, performer and activist Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. Website: www.vday.org.

The director and cast salute these organizations and encourage our audiences to learn about the crisis in the Congo and do whatever they can to end the violence in the beautiful countries of the region.

About Prisca Ouya

Luzimbu is Prisca Ouya 's second show as a director at LaMaMa. Her first show, Mami Wata, opened in December 2005 and was brought back by popular demand in January 2006. She has performed in numerous shows at LaMaMa under the direction of LaMaMa founder Ellen Stewart, and elsewhere. Ms. Ouya teaches master-level Congolese dance workshops in Hawaii , California and New York . Ms. Ouya is a gifted and spectacular dancer; the professional dance magazine Attitude once described her as having “magic hips.” She is able to fuse traditional African dance and modern Western dance with grace, strength and beauty. The result, as seen in Luzimbu, continues to delight audiences with its expression of powerful femininity. In 2008, Le Maintenant, a major Congolese newspaper, said: “Ms. Ouya is the ambassador of Congolese dramatic art in the U.S.”

Ms. Ouya was born and raised in Paris and has lived in the United States for twelve years. The third of four sisters, Ms. Ouya draws much of her inspiration from the female members of her family. She is also strongly influenced by the ongoing tragedies resulting from the violence in both of the Congos ( Republic of Congo and Democratic Republic of Congo). However, Ms. Ouya was drawn to the script of Luzimbu in some measure because of her desire to show the more positive side of Congolese men than recent media coverage of the war has shown. “Although women in the Congo are victims of rape and sexual mutilation by soldiers and guerilla fighters, and I don’t want to lessen our outrage over these atrocities, I also want people to know that there are good and decent men in the Congo , trying to hold their families together and earn a living. They are not all barbarians.”

Show Times and Ticket Information

Thursday - Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 2:30 pm. $25 / $20 for students and seniors.

The meaning of Neda

2009-06-22T20:06:00.001-04:00

The meaning of Neda

By scarce Monday Jun 22, 2009 1:00pm

DOWNLOADS: (333)

PLAYS: (1571)

Melody Moezzi, a contributor to the Huffington Post, explains the the deep significance of martyrs in Shia culture. In Farsi, they are now saying on the streets of Tehran "Give me the power of Neda."

ENDA, DADT and DOMA have no chance

2009-06-15T03:42:00.000-04:00

Top gay in the administration says ENDA, DADT, and DOMA have no chance at this point (and then he lies, to boot)

by John Aravosis (DC) on 6/14/2009 09:24:00 PM

UPDATE: Pam Spaulding is no more than impressed than I with Berry's interview.

John Berry, the openly gay head of the Office of Personnel Management, did an interview today with Kerry Eleveld of the Advocate. It's horrifying. I have to parse it for you. I'm simply astounded that they let him speak publicly, and that he let himself be used like this.

1. Berry suggests that Obama may wait until his second term to do anything on gay rights.

BERRY: Now, I’m not going to pledge -- and nor is the president -- that this is going to be done by some certain date. The pledge and the promise is that, this will be done before the sun sets on this administration – our goal is to have this entire agenda accomplished and enacted into law so that it is secure.

THE ADVOCATE: Does that include a second term? A lot of people have talked about DOMA being pushed back until a second term.

BERRY: I say this in a broad sense -- our goal is to get this done on this administration’s watch.

2. The president does not have the option to oppose existing law, at all, no exceptions, zero, nothing -- Berry claims. That's a flat out lie, as we showed earlier with the essay by former Clinton White House special assistant Richard Socarides. (We also listed four cases where Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton and Bush Jr. all refused to defend existing statutes.)

BERRY: This president took a solemn oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and he does not get to decide and choose which laws he enforces. He has to enforce the laws that have been enacted appropriately and that he has inherited. It would be wrong for me or any of our community to advise him to lie or to shirk his responsibility. He’s doing his job.

That's a flat out lie. The president can ask DOJ to oppose laws in cases where there are important political and social issues at stake. Period. We've proven that they're lying about this, it's no longer debatable.

Oh, and where in the Constitution does it say that the president is required to compare our marriages to incest and pedophilia? We still haven't heard an explanation for that one. Nor have we heard an apology.

3. Did you catch how Berry said, above, that if we asked the president to file a brief opposing DOMA, we'd be asking him to "lie"? (First off, Berry admits that Obama owns the brief - so no more of this, "it was the lawyers" - it's Obama.) Anyway, so asking Obama to oppose DOMA in the brief would be asking him to "lie." What the hell is that supposed to mean? You mean the president was telling the truth when his brief claimed that gay marriage is like incest? He actually believes that? When the president claimed that Loving v. Virginia has nothing to do with our battle for marriage equality, he was saying he really believes that somehow the civil rights battle of African-Americans is different, better, than ours? Obama really believes that it's unfair to ask straight taxpayers to pay for our spousal benefits when we already pay for theirs? Obama thinks DOMA doesn't discriminate against gays? That it doesn't deny us benefits? That it's good for America in these tight budget times?

We're now to believe that Obama actually agrees with the bigoted crap that the White House let the DOJ put in that hateful brief? WTF?

4. We shouldn't be bothering Obama with our pesky complaints, we should be busy rallying votes for overturning DOMA on the Hill:

He has made clear that he stands for the repeal of DOMA. It will be part of this administration’s agenda to accomplish that act. We ought not waste energy and angst attacking him when we should be focusing the energy and effort on getting 218 votes in the house and 60 votes in the Senate, and that’s where we ought to target the energy and the strength of this community and this president is with us, this is our agenda and it’s his agenda.

Yes, we should be lobbying Congress over DOMA. But what about YOU? What do you plan to do about DOMA? All we've heard is that the president still supports repeal, but we haven't heard one thing about him lifting a finger to help? Writing a brief detailing why DOMA is good for the country does not help us convince Congress to repeal it.

5. And best of all, the White House, Berry tells us, thinks we currently have no chance of getting ENDA, DADT or DOMA. Whoopee!

The Advocate: And what about “don’t ask, don’t tell,” is that being pushed back?

Berry: We don’t have the votes to do Hate Crimes right now, we don’t have the votes to do ENDA, how are we going [to get “don’t ask, don’t tell]?

Yes, how are we going to get Don't ask Don't Tell? Clearly the White House doesn't think we stand a chance.

Anybody still think these people are committed to doing something, anything, to help us secure our civil rights?

Armageddon Prophecy

2009-06-06T05:39:00.000-04:00

Main Articles - Disaster Prophecy

Written by Armageddon Online Articles

June 04, 2007

2012: The End of the World?

The ancient peoples of Mesoamerica were of a vast interconnected empire, filled with rich art, education and destruction. The Maya were one of these tribes. Other than archaeological intrigue why are these people so studied? Their written language was based on pictographs, much like the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Mayan culture was like most other native cultures.

The Maya had an understanding of mathematics and understood the value of zero long before its discovery in the Eastern parts of the world. Their understanding of numbers and astronomy gave us the Mayan calendars of the Long and Short Counts. So why does this calendar attract so much attention now? The Mayan calendar ends on the Gregorian calendar date of December 21, 2012, which most people believe is the total end of civilization, as we know it, while others believe it is simply a change of enlightenment in this current time. Many theories have sprung up about this end date, ranging from the laughable, to the religious, to the scientific.

There are actually three Mayan calendar systems, the 365-day Solar year, the 260-day Ritual year, and the 5,128 years of the World Time calendar. The Haab or Solar year was broken down into an 18 month plus five days cycle. 18 months of 20 days and the 5 soulless days which were thought to be of ill omen, kind of like 5 days of Friday the 13th. The Tzolkin (zol-KEEN) or Sacred Round was the 260-day ritual calendar was broken down by days, not months. This religious calendar was the basis on how the people, singly and collectively, went on with their day-to-day lives according to destiny.

August 11, 3.114 B.C. when the world began in, long count to Gregorian translation. This beginning date was reached by finding a point in future time (December 21 2012) and counting backwards, as theories go, which gives us a 5,126 year span, not including year zero. This is still one year off if year zero is included. The Mayan World calendar is a series of 5,128 years per span. What is the extra year? Were translations wrong somehow, it is quite possible.

So what is supposed to happen on this magical date of December 21, 2012?

One theory suggests that a Magnetic Field shift will occur around this time, that the calendar was based on pole shifts, which have occurred repetitively throughout the Earths history. The Maya, understanding the time periods between these shifts created their Long count calendar around them and come up with the final date for the next pole shift. But how would they know what to look for to expect another shift? How much time was supposed to pass between these shifts and how did they know it? Was there record passed down to them from long ago recounting a time when there was a prior pole shift so that mathematics could be used to predict the next one to come? Or did the ancients study a form of dendrochronology the study of climate changes by looking at tree rings. Others suggest a much more mythical or religious approach. December 21, 2012 is also the Winter Solstice, and provides us with a view that will not be seen again in any of our lifetimes. The Sun will conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way in the ecliptic, giving us view of the Sacred Tree as called by the Maya, giving us view of the Tree of Life. Both of these scenarios are quite possible, one scientific explanation, and one religious. What we still do not know, and probably will not know is what will happen after this end date until it actually occurs. A new dawn of enlightenment would be a step towards progression, in that mankind would become more aware of their surroundings and the impact that they have on the Earth as well as a higher intelligence and consciousness and a better mindset for helping their fellow man. Perhaps this is the end, when Mother Nature finally decides to shrug off the oppressiveness that has been created by the children and start anew. We may just end up living through another doomsday prophecy, going to work or school as usual, looking back on the prophecies and laughing them off. Peter may have cried wolf too often for our cynical minds.

City21: Multiple Perspectives on Urban Futures

2009-06-04T00:57:00.001-04:00

http://city21.info/
This film production is designed to be a unique cinematic journey into the various experimental forms that will influence and shape the 21st Century City.

The underlying quest of the filmmakers is to reframe the conventional and uninspiring visions of the urban future with an unprecedented combination of fresh, invigorating, sustainable, economically viable, and life enhancing concepts.

Below are some of the themes we have explored in an effort to loosen the geometric and economic grip on the urban imagination:

-The Sacred Origins of the City: Arnold Toynbee on the origin of Civilization/City Plans through time.

-Magic Architecture: The intentional eco-community of Damanhur, Italy.

-Utopia Imagination: Poetry and Architecture/The Open City Project
in Ritoque, Chile.

-Regenerative Design: Nature and Architecture, the transformation of
the Biosphere2 Project into Eco-Village design.

-Nation State Energy Independence: The White Gold of the North/Renewable energy in Iceland.

-The City as Memory Theater: mythic design wisdom transmitted through the generations.

-The Creative Green City: The Lighthouse Project in Glasgow.

-Creating Eco-Villages--The Findhorn Experiment in Scotland

-Cities and Time—The Long Now perspective with Stewart Brand

While the filmmakers have been enormously pleased with the success of our previous documentary: Ecological Design: Inventing the Future.
We are convinced that powerfully destructive forces like: over-population, unrelenting urban sprawl, and generic design programs, threaten the promising conceptual breakthrough of recent times.

A debilitating resignation about these pressures, often expressed in jaded phrases like:you cant fight City Hall makes it imperative that alternative and eminently achievable visions of the future be known to as many people as possible. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, otherwise we will get the cities we deserve.

This quest is an example of heuristic filmmaking in search of a magic synthesis that inspires new insights and actions in support of making the World a more livable place for the children of all the species on planet Earth.....
Christopher Zelov

Marriage Equality in the U.S.

2009-05-30T09:02:00.001-04:00

The LA Times has a nice interactive map of gay marriage rights by state that shows the many changes that have taken place over the past decade or so. Here's how things stood in 2000:

And here's where things stand today:

The scale represents the range of rights denied or afforded to gay couples, from "constitutional amendment ban[ning] gay marriage and other legal rights for gay couples" (dark red) to "domestic partnership legal" (pale green) to "gay marriage legal" (dark green). You can mouse ove states for details. They also have a timeline depicting the various votes, judicial rulings, and other events that have produced the civil rights hodgepodge depicted on this map.

On the face of it, it looks like there's been a lot of movement both for and against legal recognition for gay marriage; while some states have extended full marriage rights, others have retrenched with constitutional amendments banning the same. But I think it makes sense to see these as two sorts of steps that are actually fundamentally moving in the same direction. After all, prior to 2000 or so, marriage equality wasn't really seen as conceivable - not in the foreseeable future, at any rate. But then - possibly because of a genuine sense of a shifting ground in public sentiment - a bunch of states amended their constitutions. This was a defensive move which anticipated the possibility that gay people might be allowed to marry which, like most changes in social institutions, tended to freak out people with more traditionalist orientations. But even though the effect was that a bunch of anti-equality measures got written into law, this was a symptom of a general progressive movement on the issue of gay marriage.

In retrospect, I think you might even say that the big movement earlier this decade to amend state constitutions to explicitly ban gay marriage actually spurred further progressive movement. Those votes - many of which were orchestrated in an effort to get more people to come out and vote Republican in 2004 and 2006 - raised the profile of the issue, certainly, and perhaps placed a veneer of plausibility on the concept of gay marriage. After all, if it was a concept that had to be fought at the ballot box, it must have been a concept that needed to be taken seriously, right? And with several states approving gay marriage this year, following the high-profile loss of gay marriage rights in California last November, I wonder if all the efforts at thwarting gay marriage have just had the net effect of telescoping the timeline of the spread of marriage equality.

Ventura on The View: If waterboarding is fine, why don’t cops do it?

2009-05-18T23:46:00.000-04:00

Ventura on The View: If waterboarding is fine, why don’t cops do it?

Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, making a guest appearance on ABC’s The View, gave co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck a lesson or two about the torture technique known as waterboarding.

Ventura, who underwent a barrage of torture techniques at the military Survival, Evade, Resist and Escape (SERE) school, confirmed for Hasselbeck that waterboarding is torture and not just an “enhanced interrogation technique.”

“If waterboarding is okay, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects to learn what they know?” he asked to a chorus of applause.

“That’s an interesting question,” Hasselbeck said. “I understand that question.”

“If waterboarding is okay, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and [Terry] Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? What’s your answer to that?” he asked. “We only seem to waterboard Muslims.”

“That’s an extremist statement,” said Hasselbeck.

“Aha!” cheered Ventura. “Have we waterboarded anybody else? Name me someone else we’ve waterboarded.”

She could not, instead shifting focus to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) who has been criticized by Republicans for a seeming contradiction in disclosing what she knew about then-President Bush’s torture program, and when.

“They want her out because she lied?” asked Ventura. “Why didn’t they ask for Bush and Cheney to go out when they lied about why we went into Iraq?”

This video is from MSNBC’s News Live, broadcast May 18, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

Live NASA video feed

2009-05-17T03:43:00.000-04:00

NASA TV

Jerusalem News

2009-05-06T06:03:00.002-04:00

MESS-TV

2009-05-04T03:49:00.001-04:00

John Dean:Rice may have admitted to conspiracy,

2009-05-02T16:20:00.001-04:00

Rice may have admitted to conspiracy, former Nixon counsel says

In little-noticed comments Thursday, the former White House counsel for President Richard Nixon John Dean said Thursday that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may have unwittingly admitted to a criminal conspiracy when questioned about torture by a group of student videographers at Stanford.

Rice told students at Stanford that she didn’t authorize torture, she merely forwarded the authorization for it. Dean, who became a poster child for whistleblowing after aiding the prosecution of the Watergate affair, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that Rice may have admitted to a criminal conspiracy.

In a video that surfaced Thursday, Rice said, “The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligation, legal obligations under the convention against torture… I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.” (Video of Rice’s comments appears at the bottom of this article.)

Her comments raised eyebrows from online observers, who compared Rice’s answer to that of Richard Nixon’s infamous quip: “When the President does it, that means that it’s not illegal.”

Dean said he found Rice’s comments “surprising” and put her in a legal mire of possible conspiracy.

“She tried to say she didn’t authorize anything, then proceeded to say she did pass orders along to the CIA to engage in torture if it was legal by the standard of the Department of Justice,” Dean said. “This really puts her right in the middle of a common plan, as it’s known in international law, or a conspiracy, as it’s known in American law, and this indeed is a crime. If it indeed happened the way we think it did happen.”

Asked if the comparison between her comments and Nixon’s were fair, Dean said it was “fuzzy.”

“She was obviously trying to extricate herself and keep herself in a safe distance, that she was only operating under some general guidance of the president making things legal,” he said. “So it’s not clear whether this is a full-throated Nixonian-type defense or whether it’s a lot of confusion of the facts and throwing things up there to try to protect herself.”

“These kinds of statements are going to come back and be interesting to any investigator,” he added.

Olbermann asked Dean whether Obama was violating the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture himself by refusing to prosecute those responsible.

“He is indeed is in violation if the United States does not undertake investigation of this, or ultimately prosecution, if that’s necessary,” Dean asserted. “It’s not only the Geneva Convention, the Convention Against Torture also requires this. There are no exceptions with torture. There are no real things like “torture light.” The world community I think is going to hold the United States responsible, and if we don’t proceed, somebody is going to proceed.”

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast Apr. 30, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

This video is from The Young Turks via YouTube, broadcast Apr. 30, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

Several typographical errors have been corrected in this version.

Anglo American Vaccine Industry Behind Flu

2009-04-30T12:31:00.003-04:00

Dr. Horowitz: Anglo-American Vaccine Industry Behind Swine Flu Outbreak

YouTube
April 29, 2009

This unprecedented H1N1-H5N1 flu outbreak implicates the Ango-American Vaccine Pipeline, says world leading consumer health protector, Dr. Leonard Horowitz

Consider the skyrocketing stock values of Novavax, Inc., precipitated by dozens of alleged flu deaths in Mexico. Then investigate the leading Anglo-American network of genetic engineers manipulating, mutating, and distributing these viruses. The evidence compels you, for the benefit of public health and safety to seriously consider, even decree, a conspiracy to commit genocide, according to this Harvard trained expert in emerging diseases.

Here, Dr. Horowitz urges an investigation of Dr. James S. Robertson, Englands leading bioengineer of flu viruses for the vaccine industry, and avid promoter of U.S. Government funding for lucrative biodefense contracts, along with collaborators at the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). These suspects helped Novavax, Inc., in Bethesda, Maryland, produce genetically-modified recombinants of the avian, swine, and Spanish flu viruses, H5N1 and H1N1, nearly identical to the unprecedented Mexican virus that is allegedly spreading to the United States at the time of this posting. The outbreak was precisely timed to promote the companys new research and huge vaccine stockpiling contracts.

Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are implicated through collaborations and publications involving private contracts with Novavax, a company that obtains its biosimulars through CDC Influenza Branch director, Ruben O. Donis, and Dr. Rick Bright, previously working with Donis at the CDC, now Novavaxs Vice President of Global Influenza Programs.

Descriptions of this virus is pathognomonic, or diagnostic, of a virus that came from Robertsons circle of friends, Dr. Horowitz charges. No other group in the world takes H5N1 Asian flu infected chickens, brings them to Europe, extracts their DNA, combines their proteins with H1N1 viruses from the 1918 Spanish flu isolate, additionally mixes in swine flu genes from pigs, then reverse engineers them to infect humans. The end product could only have ended up in Mexico via the United States from Britain in care of the CDC. The CDC had to have sent them to Novavax, where Rick Brights team is now implicated in a conspiracy to commit genocide—the mass killing of people for profit.

Walt Whitman H.S. students shout down anti-gay protesters

2009-04-25T02:30:00.002-04:00

Walt Whitman H.S. students shout down anti-gay protesters

Muriel Kane
Published: Friday April 24, 2009

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS is notorious for its tasteless and frequently nonsensical anti-gay protests. Not only do they picket the funerals of victims of anti-gay hate crimes, but they have been known to protest concerts, football games, and even a hardware store selling Swedish vacuum cleaners. Most recently, they have been busy picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in the Iraq War, believing their deaths to be a judgment on America.

However, the Westboro protesters may have overreached when they attempted to picket Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, MD, named after the nineteenth century poet who many biographers believe to have been either homosexual or bisexual.

According to the Potomac Almanac, "When Whitman sophomore Ryan Hauck first heard about the scheduled protest at Whitman from a friend he thought it was a joke. Then he went online ... and saw just how serious the church is. 'I was just shocked just from the second I heard it and I knew I had to do something,' Hauck said. '[It was] the hatred of the whole thing that shocked me.'"

Hauck was aided by his fellow-sophomore Amar Mukunda, who "set up a Facebook group to generate support for the counter-protest through which more than 600 students have committed to attend. Mukunda said he doesn’t expect that many to show up on Friday, but that he does expect a healthy turnout."

As it happened, the turnout far exceeded Mukunda's expection of "a couple of hundred." The Washington Post reports that "faculty had spun the event into an interdisciplinary lesson. English teachers spent the day teaching Whitman's verse. Social studies teachers led a unit on tolerance. Math teachers fanned through the crowd, attempting a head count."

Although the handful of picketers initially had the street to themselves, that changed dramatically when school was dismissed at 2:10 and five hundred students marched out, chanting the school name alternating with "Go home!"

LGBT group Driving Equality had even set up a "Phelps-a-Thon" webpage, promising, "For every minute the 'God Hates Fags' clan is protesting, we will be collecting donations for the Walt Whitman High School gay/straight alliance. ... You can pledge any amount you chose, whether it be $0.25, $0.50, $1, or even $2 for every minute they protest. ... After the event, we will send Phelps a thank you card, telling him how much money he raised for LGBT equality."

Many of the students in the counter-protest were wearing T-shirts bearing a picture of Whitman and the line, "Let your soul stand cool and composed." However, far more sarcastic commentary on the day's events was provided by blogger Oliver Willis, who had taken note of the upcoming protest when it was first announced in March.

"I gotta say," Willis wrote, "if they’re devoting time and resources to protesting Walt Whitman they must have an insane amount of time on their hands. Leaves of grass, indeed."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Incredible Shrinking Audience

2009-04-22T01:48:00.000-04:00

youtube.com

Clearly, several dozen delegates at the United Nations anti-racism conference in Geneva, Switzerland, disagreed with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s assessment of Israel as a “racist government” on Monday, and they let their feet do the talking by walking out as Ahmadinejad was still speaking.

CNN via YouTube:

When Fascism Came to America

2009-04-22T01:23:00.001-04:00

By William Pfaff

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis, author of “Babbitt” and the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, published a novel entitled “It Can’t Happen Here.”

It was written to influence the 1936 presidential election. The enormously popular ex-governor of Louisiana, Sen. Huey Long, “the Kingfish,” who campaigned to “Share the Wealth” with the people, was widely thought to be a threat to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his bid for a second term.

The Lewis novel envisioned someone like Long winning the presidency and installing an American counterpart to the fascist dictatorships already in power in Italy and Germany. Lewis was much influenced by his second wife, Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the most important syndicated political columnists of the 1930s and was greatly concerned about the possibility of populist dictatorship crossing the Atlantic.

Long was not a fascist, although he could have become a dictator. His support was from the poor. Rightist and white-supremacist forces actually formed an armed militia to oppose him, but Long was killed by an assassin, presumably with a family grievance against him, in 1935.

The man who actually opposed Roosevelt in 1936 was Republican Alf Landon of Kansas, a moderate who was defeated by Roosevelt in the greatest presidential landslide in American history. That year, FDR carried all but eight electoral votes. Sinclair Lewis’ fears had been misplaced; “It” didn’t happen here.

In 2004, Philip Roth wrote another novel on the topic. This one was about the arrival of an anti-Semitic and fascist president in the United States in 1940, in the supposed person of the aviator, American anti-war nationalist and isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Roosevelt’s actual opponent in 1940 was the businessman Wendell Willkie, whom he comfortably defeated with 54.7 percent of the popular vote.

Lindbergh never retracted his opposition to U.S. entry into the European war, and following Pearl Harbor President Roosevelt refused ex-Col. Lindbergh’s effort to rejoin the military. Lindbergh found experimental and consultant work in the aviation industry, helped develop the Vought Corsair, the only American fighter in the Pacific war superior to the Japanese Zero, and despite remaining a civilian flew 36 combat missions in the Pacific. Once again, “It” had not happened in the United States.

When “It” did happen was in 2001-2008, in the George W. Bush administration. There was a takeover of the government by a self-willed executive power, unprecedented in American history. The president and vice president acted on a novel and legally unsupported claim to unlimited “wartime” presidential and executive-branch power. The justification was an illegal, undeclared war.

International law and American treaty obligations were defied, as were established American law on the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners, constitutional protections, and the surveillance of citizens.

All of this occurred without meeting serious, or at least successful, congressional or judicial challenge, with little or no objection from the national press, and all but unanimous support from the national audiovisual media. One needn’t go through all that again.

There were unsuccessful efforts by individuals inside and outside the government to overturn this state of affairs, but in two congressional elections, and in the presidential election of 2004, the electorate endorsed all that had been done. “It,” which Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth had both warned against, proved in fact to be very popular. At least this was so until 2008, when the practical and political consequences of this abandonment of law and history finally alienated the electorate.

All that is familiar. What concerns me in this article is something else. It is the fact that the mass of agents and officials of the government, and the vast majority of the population, passively accepted what was done, and even today disputes whether anyone should be held accountable.

President Obama’s unwillingness to see his first term dominated by the crimes of the Bush administration is comprehensible.

Yet there is a limit. The latest case of the human moral vacuum created and encouraged during the Bush years is so outrageous, perverse, sadistic and nihilistic that it demands attention, for all that it tells us about the rest that has happened. I speak of the ordered, authorized and conscientiously supervised waterboarding of two prisoners 266 times.

The men who authorized, ordered and performed such acts should be hanged. It is as simple as that.

It then would be possible to face the future with a response to the question, “Can It Happen Here?”

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.

Suze Orman To Bush: "You Owe The American People Every Penny Of Your Fortune And Your Family's Fortune"

2009-03-20T13:52:00.001-04:00

Suze Orman To Bush: "You Owe The American People Every Penny Of Your Fortune And Your Family's Fortune"

In a long profile by WWD's Jacob Bernstein, Suze Orman sounds off on George Bush and blames the ex-president for the financial crisis (near the bottom of the first page):

Sitting in a green room after her TV interviews, she lambasts everyone from Alan Greenspan to Larry Summers to the former president of the United States, who holds an especially dark place in her heart. "Commander in Chief?" she says of George W. Bush, with a mix of disbelief and scorn. "You blew up every single financial vessel we had and if you think you aren't personally responsible, well, the blame starts at the top. There is no higher top than you, SIR! If I were you, I would feel so absolutely horrific that I would take every penny I had and distribute it to anybody and everybody to help them in whatever way I could. You owe the American people every penny of your fortune and your family's fortune."

Orman also calls being impersonated by SNL's Kristen Wiig the “greatest honor of my career" and that often during her show she is forced to stop and think, "Ugh. I’m playing Kristen Wiig."

Read the full profile here at WWD.com.

Watch Kristen Wiig impersonate Suze Orman below:

Republicans in full whine mode because Obama is going to work around their obstructionist tactics

2009-03-18T23:01:00.000-04:00

Republicans in full whine mode because Obama is going to work around their obstructionist tactics
Joe Sudbay (DC) ·

The Republican whining about Obama and bipartisanship is getting tiresome. To work, bipartisanship has to be a two-way street. But, the Republicans have a roadblock on their side of the street -- and they bitch every time Obama tries to get around their obstructions:

Senior members of the Obama administration are pressing lawmakers to use a shortcut to drive the president's signature initiatives on health care and energy through Congress without Republican votes, a move that many lawmakers say would fly in the face of President Obama's pledge to restore bipartisanship to Washington.

Republicans are howling about the proposal to expand health coverage and tax greenhouse gas emissions without their input, warning that it could irrevocably damage relations with the new president.

"That would be the Chicago approach to governing: Strong-arm it through," said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who briefly considered joining the Obama administration as commerce secretary. "You're talking about the exact opposite of bipartisan. You're talking about running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River."

Obama went to the White House with a vow to change the way things are done. The Republicans are playing the same games. Obama vowed accomplishments for the American people. The Republicans on Capitol Hill are doing every thing they can to stop him. So, when Obama basically, says "Fine, I'll do it without you," the Republicans whine and run to the media. It's pathetic and it's gotten really old already.

NOTE FROM JOHN: "[W]arning that it could irrevocably damage relations with the new president." Right, those would be the relations where Obama bent over backwards, even offered the GOP 3 cabinet posts, and in return 3 of them - a whopping 3 - voted for the stimulus package. What "relations" are the Republicans talking about?

Rush Limbaugh, the leader of the GOP, has said repeatedly he wants Obama to fail. Most of the GOPers on the Hill are lemmings who follow (and fear) Rush. That's what Obama is up against. Republicans want to kill Obama's agenda. It's good that the White House has figured that out. Now, roll the Republicans. Team Obama should "Strong-arm it through." It's the only way to save the country from the economic disaster created by the Republicans.

China's last eunuch

2009-03-16T20:16:00.001-04:00

China's last eunuch spills sex secrets

Mon Mar 16, 2009 10:01am EDT

By Emma Graham-Harrison

BEIJING (Reuters) - Only two memories brought tears to Sun Yaoting's eyes in old age -- the day his father cut off his genitals, and the day his family threw away the pickled remains that should have made him a whole man again at death.

China's last eunuch was tormented and impoverished in youth, punished in revolutionary China for his role as the "Emperor's slave" but finally feted and valued, largely for outlasting his peers to become a unique relic, a piece of "living history."

He had stories of the tortuous rituals of the Forbidden City, Emperor Pu Yi's last moments there and the troubled puppet court run by the Japanese during the 1930s. He escaped back to the heart of a civil war, became a Communist official and then a target of radical leftists before being finally left in peace.

This turbulent life has been recorded in the "The Last Eunuch of China" by amateur historian Jia Yinghua, who over years of friendship drew out of Sun the secrets that were too painful or intimate to spill to prying journalists or state archivists.

He died in 1996, in an old temple that had become his home, and his biography was finally published in English this year.

It unveils formerly taboo subjects like the sex life of eunuchs and the emperor they served, the agonizing castrations often done at home and also often lethal, and the incontinence and shame that came with the promise of great power.

"He was conflicted over whether to tell the secrets of the emperor," said Jia, adding that Sun preserved a loyalty to the old system because he had dedicated so much of his life to it.

"I was the only person he trusted. He did not even confide in his family, after they threw away his 'treasure,'" Jia added, using traditional eunuchs' slang for their preserved genitals.

They were discarded during the chaotic 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when having anything from the "old society" could put lives at risk.

"He only cried about two things; when telling me about the castration and about the loss of his 'treasure'," said Jia, who works as an energy bureaucrat, but devotes all his spare time to chronicling the dying days of Imperial China after a childhood enthralled by the eunuchs and princes who were his neighbors.

STERILITY AND POWER

Over years of painstaking research, he has gleaned arcane details about every aspect of palace life, along with secrets about the emperor's sexuality and cruelty that would look at home on the front page of tabloid newspapers.

For centuries in China, the only men from outside the imperial family who were allowed into the Forbidden City's private quarters were castrated ones. They effectively swapped their reproductive organs for a hope of exclusive access to the emperor that made some into rich and influential politicians.

Sun's impoverished family set him on this painful, risky path in hopes that he might one day be able to crush a bullying village landlord who stole their fields and burned their house.

His desperate father performed the castration on the bed of their mud-walled home, with no anesthetic and only oil-soaked paper as a bandage. A goose quill was inserted in Sun's urethra to prevent it getting blocked as the wound healed.

He was unconscious for three days and could barely move for two months. When he finally rose from his bed, history played the first of a series of cruel tricks on him -- he discovered the emperor he hoped to serve had abdicated several weeks earlier.

"He had a very tragic life. He had thought it was worthwhile for his father, but the sacrifice was in vain," Jia said, in a house stacked with old books, newspapers and photos.

"He was very smart and shrewd. If the empire had not fallen there is a high chance he would have become powerful," Jia added.

The young ex-emperor was eventually allowed to stay in the palace and Sun had risen to become an attendant to the empress when the imperial family were unceremoniously booted out of the Forbidden City, ending centuries of tradition and Sun's dreams.

"He was castrated, then the emperor abdicated. He made it into the Forbidden City then Pu Yi was evicted. He followed him north and then the puppet regime collapsed. He felt life had played a joke at his expense," Jia said.

Many eunuchs fled with palace treasures, but Sun took a crop of memories and a nose for political survival that turned out to be better tools for surviving years of civil war and ideological turbulence that followed.

"He never became rich, he never became powerful, but he became very rich in experience and secrets," Jia said.

(Editing by Nick Macfie and Bill Tarrant)

'Truth Commission' critic accuses Leahy of 'whitewash'

2009-03-12T11:33:00.001-04:00

'Truth Commission' critic accuses Leahy of 'whitewash'
Rachel Oswald

Passions surrounding various proposals that would investigate Bush administration wrongdoings are extremely high with interested parties not shying away from using harsh rhetoric towards fellow supporters of probes.

Speaking to Raw Story, Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a human rights attorney, says he is opposing Senate Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy’s proposed 'Truth Commission' because it doesn’t go far enough.

"We’re talking about a whitewash with Leahy. Are we some Latin American country where we don’t have a democracy robust enough to try people?," Ratner said. “[Leahy’s] essentially diffusing the issue so there’s not as much pressure on prosecution. It’s not really going to go far. [The commission is] going to divert us for a few years and we’re never going to see something come out of it.”

Ratner said he and the Center for Constitutional Rights want to see criminal prosecutions of officials at the highest level of the Bush administration, the so-called “principals” who were the architects of controversial polices and signed off on them.

“Cheney has openly said that he approved the water boarding memo and that he would do it again,” Ratner said, adding, “My view is you absolutely have to have prosecutions to have deterrents [for future executive power abuses].”

Speaking at last Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the matter, Leahy (D-VT) said, “If criminal conduct occurred, this senator wants to know about it. “I’m trying to get the ability to find out if criminal conduct occurred so it won’t happen again. If crimes occurred, I don’t think they should be swept under the rug.”

Leahy has said he would not rule out criminal prosecutions of high-level Bush appointees as have other senators supportive of his proposal, such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

Ratner said he objects to comments made by Leahy critical of people who are “fixated on prosecution.”

“That’s me,” Ratner said, adding, “Those [comments] are all basically saying ‘we’re not prosecuting.’"

Ratner said he has been unexpectedly pleased with the public support for criminal prosecutions in the country.

More than 100 organizations large and small have signed on to calls throughout the years for a special prosecutor to look into Bush administration abuses while at least 18 groups have already affirmed their support of Leahy’s Truth Commission proposal.

Approximately 40 percent of those polled by Gallup at the end of January support criminal investigations while 25 percent to 30 percent support an investigation by an independent panel. 35 percent to 25 percent of those polled don’t want any investigation at all.

Don Juarez on Manhattan Entertainment Spotlight Special

2009-03-11T22:24:00.002-04:00

This is a recent clip from my interview with Don Juarez on Manhattan Entertainment Spotlight Special TV.

Don Juarez on Manhattan Entertainment Spotlight Special
Uploaded by happyreturns1

Ex-UN prosecutor: Bush may be next up for International Criminal Court

2009-03-07T21:52:00.001-05:00

Ex-UN prosecutor: Bush may be next up for International Criminal Court
Stephen C. Webster

An ex-UN prosecutor has said that following the issuance of an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan, former US President George W. Bush could -- and should -- be next on the International Criminal Court's list.

The former prosecutor's assessment was echoed in some respect by United Nations General Assembly chief Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, who said America's military occupation of Iraq has caused over a million deaths and should be probed by the United Nations.

"David Crane, an international law professor at Syracuse University, said the principle of law used to issue an arrest warrant for [Sudanese President] Omar al-Bashir could extend to former US President Bush over claims officials from his Administration may have engaged in torture by using coercive interrogation techniques on terror suspects," reported the New Zealand Herald.

The indictment of Bashir was a landmark, said Crane, because it paved a route for the court at The Hague to pursue heads of states engaged in criminality.

"Crane also said that the [Bashir] indictment may even be extended to the former president George W. Bush, on the grounds that some officials in terms of his administration engaged in harsh interrogation techniques on terror suspects which mostly amounted to torture," said Turkish Weekly.

"All pretended justifications notwithstanding, the aggressions against Iraq and Afghanistan and their occupations constitute atrocities that must be condemned and repudiated by all who believe in the rule of law in international relations," Brockmann told the Human Rights Council. "The illegality of the use of force against Iraq cannot be doubted as it runs contrary to the prohibition of the use of force in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. It sets a number of precedents that we cannot allow to stand."

The Bush administration boycotted the Human Rights Council. The day Brockmann made his accusations happened to be the first in which the United States had observers at the council, on orders from President Obama.

According to Iranian news network PressTV, the Iranian government called the Bashir indictment "a blow to International justice" and an "insult directed at Muslims."

Iran's plainly stated sentiment toward the court's legitimacy is similar in spirit to that of the United States. Because the US Government has refused to recognize the court by becoming a signatory in its statute, "the only other way Bush could be investigated is if the [UN] Security Council were to order it, something unlikely to happen with Washington a veto-wielding permanent member," said the Herald.

Due to the International Criminal Court's lack of any real police force, it has traditionally relied upon signatory states for enforcement of its rulings. But when the leader of one such state is indicted, the court's authority and enforcement capability is called into question. Even the arrest of Bashir is a far cry, for now. And without a UN Security Council order, former US President Bush would not go on "trial" before the court any time soon.

However, on January 26, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak insisted that the pursuit of Bush and members of his administration for the torture of terror war prisoners is crucial if justice is to be served.

Nowak added that he believes enough evidence exists currently to proceed with the prosecution of Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense who was credited as being highly influential in the crafting and push for America's invasion of Iraq and the prior administration's abusive interrogation tactics.

The following video was published to YouTube on March 6 by the non-profit, Web-based news service LinkTV.

Download video via RawReplay.com

Harpers editor: America had a dictator for eight yearsDavid Edwards and Stephen C. Webster

2009-03-07T11:05:00.000-05:00

Harpers editor: America had a dictator for eight years

David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
Published: Friday March 6, 2009

It was a casual refrain near the dawning of former President George W. Bush's political career on the national stage. Most took as a joke.

"If this was a dictatorship it'd be a heck of a lot easier," he so memorably said. "Just so long as I'm the dictator."

His presidency now a smoldering memory, Harper's contributing editor Scott Horton thinks that perhaps he wasn't kidding after all. In a March 3 column, Horton extrapolated on "George W. Bush's Disposable Constitution," expanding on his thoughts during a Thursday broadcast of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

Since the Monday release of nine previously-secret Bush administration legal memos claiming that the president has the power to ignore the Constitution when fighting terrorism, experts have almost unanimously denounced both their legal reasoning and their conclusions.

"These memos provide the very definition of tyranny," Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Tuesday. "These memos include everything that a petty despot would want."

Olbermann's Thursday guest was just as strident as Turley in his view of the prior administration.

"We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship," wrote Horton in his Harper's article.

"Bush did not order, at any point, the military seizure of part of Cleveland," said Olbermann. "He did not imprison [DailyKos.com founder] Markos Moulitsas. This was certainly not an active military dictatorship, or a dictatorship of any kind in anybody's tangible perception.

"So, what do you say to the idea that these [memos] were just outer parameters, in the event of true internal chaos?"

"These memoranda were crafted with specific programs and projects in mind," said Horton. "The question is, exactly what? ... There's a clear focus on the use of the commander in chief powers. On the use of the military domestically in the United States.

"John Yoo says the Fourth Amendment presents no impediment. The Fourth Amendment is of course a limitation of surveillance. It creates a requirement of warrants for listening in to people's telephone conversations, for instance.

"In this case, I think it's pretty clear that this was designed to authorize the military and military agencies to engage in a sweeping program of surveillance in the United States."

In his March 3 column, Horton remarked, "These memos suggest that John Yoo found a way to treat the Posse Comitatus Act as suspended."

Further on in his MSNBC interview, he elaborated: "The president, if he wants, can have you squirreled away in the brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and he can have you tortured there. You have no appeal from that in these OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] opinions.

"Of course, that's not the law. It's a ridiculous portrayal of the law. But it's what the OLC told the president he could do."

The memos were repealed with a mere five days remaining in President Bush's term. An internal Justice Department investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility has some forecasting potentially "serious consequences" for the authors, including Yoo.

Effectively, said Horton, these controversial memos saw President Bush "freed from the constraints of the Bill of Rights" during wartime "with respect to anything he chose to label as counter-terrorism operations inside the United States."

This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast Mar. 5, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

John Dean: Bush almost became an 'unconstitutional dictator'

2009-03-04T02:22:00.001-05:00

John Dean: Bush almost became an 'unconstitutional dictator'

David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
Published: Tuesday March 3, 2009

It was during the Civil War that President Abraham Lincoln became known as a "constitutional dictator," said former Nixon White House counsel John Dean during a Monday broadcast of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

Responding to the recent release of several legal justifications for President Bush's most criticized policies, Dean summarized, "Reading these memos, you've gotta almost conclude we had an unconstitutional dictator. It's pretty deadly and pretty serious, what's in these materials."

The memos, released by Obama's Justice Department on Monday, outline possible methods for the president to ignore treaties and International laws, kidnap and torture American citizens and overrule the First Amendment to the Constitution which ensures freedom of speech and of the press.

All of these things and more could be done exclusively by the president in the name of fighting terrorism.

"Who in this formula was supposed to decide that these were terrorists?" asked Olbermann.

"Well, according to these memos, that was rather limited to the President of the United States and there are no guidelines as to how he might describe who was or was not a terrorist," said Dean.

Dean also said that the repeal of several of these memos just days before the Bush administration left power, was "definitely a bit of C-Y-A," though he did not ascribe "evil intent" to anyone.

"What does this say about what we need to do now in terms of investigating this, John?" asked Olbermann. "Is this the scale-tipper for everybody?"

"It could be," said Dean, "because the public is going to be aware of a lot more than they were. There is an investigation that is ongoing that started late in the Bush administration by the Office of Professional Responsibility.

"I think that investigation, which we've heard very little about, is going to be very hard to suppress now. ... I think the Office of Professional Responsibility may make some very strong recommendations that could include prosecution."

Dean has previously warned of "serious consequences" around the world if the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress are not willing to "point fingers" at Bush administration members who may be guilty of war crimes.

This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast Mar. 2, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

Married Same-Sex Couples Sue US For Federal Benefits

2009-03-03T01:59:00.001-05:00

DENISE LAVOIE | March 3, 2009 12:08 AM EST |

BOSTON — Mary Ritchie, a Massachusetts State Police trooper, has been married for almost five years and has two children. But when she files her federal income tax return, she's not allowed to check the "married filing jointly" box.

That's because Ritchie and her spouse, Kathleen Bush, are a gay couple, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act makes them ineligible to file joint tax returns.

Now Ritchie, Bush and more than a dozen others are suing the federal government, claiming the act discriminates against gay couples and is unconstitutional because it denies them access to federal benefits that other married couples receive, such as pensions and health insurance. Plaintiffs also include Dean Hara, the widower of former U.S. Rep. Gerry Studds, the first openly gay member of the House of Representatives.

In Ritchie's case, she and her spouse say they have paid nearly $15,000 more in taxes than they would have if they had been able to file joint returns.

"It saddens us because we love our country," Ritchie said. "We are taxpayers. We live just like anyone else in our community. We do everything just like every other family, like every other married couple, and we are treated like less than that."

The lawsuit was being filed Tuesday in federal court in Boston by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, the anti-discrimination group that brought a successful legal challenge leading to Massachusetts becoming the first state in the nation to legalize gay marriage in 2004.

Only Massachusetts and Connecticut allow gay marriage. Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey and New Hampshire allow civil unions.

Californians voted in November to overturn a court ruling that allowed gay marriage, but the state still offers domestic partnerships that guarantee the same rights as marriage. Hawaii is considering a bill that will allow same-sex civil unions.

The Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, was enacted by Congress in 1996 when it appeared Hawaii would soon legalize same-sex marriage and opponents worried that other states would be forced to recognize such marriages. The new lawsuit challenges only the portion of the law that prevents the federal government from affording Social Security and other benefits to same-sex couples.

President Barack Obama has pledged to work to repeal DOMA and reverse the Department of Defense policy that prevents openly gay people from serving in the military.

Mary Bonauto, GLAD's Civil Rights Project director, said the lawsuit is the first major challenge to the section of the law that denies same-sex couples access to more than 1,000 federal programs and legal protections in which marriage is a factor.

All the plaintiffs are from Massachusetts and have marriages that are recognized by the state. They include a U.S. Postal Service employee who wasn't allowed to add her spouse to her health insurance plan; a Social Security Administration retiree who was denied health insurance for his spouse; three widowers who were denied death benefits for funeral expenses; and a man who has been denied a passport bearing his married name.

"This law is an absolute intrusion into an area that states have governed for centuries _ marriage," Bonauto said.

In Hara's case, he was denied any portion of Studds' $114,000 pension after the Democratic congressman died in 2006. The two married in 2004 after being together for 14 years.

"I am not being treated the same as any other surviving spouse of any other federal employee or public servant who has served this country for 27 years, when I have been legally married," Hara said.

Defendants in the lawsuit are the United States of America and several federal agencies, which are being represented by the U.S. Department of Justice.

"Obviously, we are going to take a look at it and make a determination as to how the government would ultimately respond after we review it," DOJ spokesman Charles Miller said.

Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said the lawsuit is a "plausible challenge" to DOMA.

"It's a question of whether Congress oversteps its bounds and engages in irrational discrimination when it draws a line in terms of concrete benefits for individuals who are otherwise eligible simply because the marriages they have entered involve same-sex couples rather than opposite-sex couples," he said.

Opponents of same-sex marriage say those who challenge DOMA are trying to impose gay marriage on the rest of the country.

"Massachusetts has made benefits available on a state level, but Massachusetts can't force the federal government's hand or the other states to accept same-sex marriage," said Mathew Staver, founder of the Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit that says it's dedicated to advancing religious freedom and the traditional family.

ULC Minister -theartstemple

2009-02-09T19:22:00.000-05:00

ULC Minister

2009-02-06T16:51:00.000-05:00

http://www.theartstemple.com

Cheney: Bush's actions legal if not impeached

2009-01-05T13:23:00.001-05:00

Cheney: Bush's actions legal if not impeached

Andrew McLemore
Published: Sunday January 4, 2009

If you don't get punished, you didn't go anything wrong, right?

That's the message Vice President Dick Cheney gave in an interview with CBS' Bob Schieffer on Sunday, suggesting that a president's actions are legal if those actions didn't result in his impeachment.

Asked by Schieffer if he believed that anything the president does in time of war is legal, Cheney said there is "historic precedent of taking action that you wouldn't take in peacetime."

Cheney referenced Abraham Lincoln as an example of another president who "suspended the writ of habeus corpus" during a war, prompting this exchange:

###

SCHIEFFER: But nobody thinks that was legal.

CHENEY: Well, no. It certainly was in the sense he wasn't impeached. And it was a wartime measure that he took that I think history says today, yeah, that was probably a good thing to do.

###

The vice president spent much of the interview defending eight years of the Bush administration's policies, including its surveillance and interrogation programs.

When Schieffer asked if the Bush administration had gone "too far" in its surveillance program, Cheney said no.

"I don’t believe we violated anybody’s civil liberties," he said.

Cheney also urged President-elect Barack Obama to continue the Bush administration’s interrogation policies.

"I would hope [Obama] would avoid doing what others have done in the past, which is letting the campaign rhetoric guide his judgment in this absolutely crucial area," Cheney said. "We were very careful, we did everything by the book, and in fact we produced very significant results."

This video is from CBS' Face the Nation, broadcast Jan. 4, 2008.

CBS newsman's $70m lawsuit likely to deal Bush legacy a new blow

2008-12-29T21:23:00.000-05:00

$70m lawsuit likely to deal Bush legacy a new blow

As George W Bush prepares to leave the White House, at least one unpleasant episode from his unpopular presidency is threatening to follow him into retirement.

A $70m lawsuit filed by Dan Rather, the veteran former newsreader for CBS Evening News, against his old network is reopening the debate over alleged favourable treatment that Bush received when he served in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war. Bush had hoped that this controversy had been dealt with once and for all during the 2004 election.

Eight weeks before the 2004 presidential poll, Rather broadcast a story based on newly discovered documents which appeared to show that Bush, whose service in the Texas Air National Guard ensured that he did not have to fight in Vietnam, had barely turned up even for basic duty. After an outcry from the White House and conservative bloggers who claimed that the report had been based on falsified documents, CBS retracted the story, saying that the documents' authenticity could not be verified. Rather, who had been with CBS for decades and was one of the most familiar faces in American journalism, was fired by the network the day after the 2004 election.

He claims breach of contract against CBS. He has already spent $2m on his case, which is likely to go to court early next year. Rather contends not only that his report was true - "What the documents stated has never been denied, by the president or anyone around him," he says - but that CBS succumbed to political pressure from conservatives to get the report discredited and to have him fired. He also claims that a panel set up by CBS to investigate the story was packed with conservatives in an effort to placate the White House. Part of the reason for that, he suggests, was that Viacom, a sister company of CBS, knew that it would have important broadcasting regulatory issues to deal with during Bush's second term.

Among those CBS considered for the panel to investigate Rather's report were far-right broadcasters Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

"CBS broke with long-standing tradition at CBS News and elsewhere of standing up to political pressure," says Rather. "And, there's no joy in saying it, they caved ... in an effort to placate their regulators in Washington."

Rather's lawsuit makes other serious allegations about CBS succumbing to political pressure in an attempt to suppress important news stories. In particular, he says that his bosses at CBS tried to stop him reporting evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. According to Rather's lawsuit, "for weeks they refused to grant permission to air the story" and "continued to raise the goalposts, insisting on additional substantiation". Rather also claims that General Richard Meyers, then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military official in the US, called him at home and asked him not to broadcast the story, saying that it would "endanger national security".

Rather says that CBS only agreed to allow him to broadcast the story when it found out that Seymour Hersh would be writing about it in the New Yorker magazine. Even then, Rather claims, CBS tried to bury it. "CBS imposed the unusual restrictions that the story would be aired only once, that it would not be preceded by on-air promotion, and that it would not be referenced on the CBS Evening News," he says.

The charges outlined in Rather's lawsuit will cast a further shadow over the Bush legacy. He recently expressed regret for the "failed intelligence" which led to the invasion of Iraq and has received heavy criticism over the scale and depth of the economic downturn in the United States.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

2008-12-29T19:23:00.000-05:00

Harold Channer's Holiday Party Live 12/19/08 9:00 pm - 2:00 a.m. 12/20/2008

2008-12-18T06:15:00.001-05:00

Video streaming by Ustream

Bush's shoe attacker has broken arm, ribs: brother

2008-12-16T11:57:00.002-05:00

Bush's shoe attacker has broken arm, ribs: brother

Published: Tuesday December 16, 2008

The Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at US President George W. Bush has a broken arm and ribs after being struck by Iraqi security agents, his brother told AFP on Tuesday.

Durgham Zaidi was unable to say whether his brother Muntazer had sustained the injuries while being overpowered during Sunday's protest against Bush's visit to Baghdad or while in custody later.

He said he had been told that his brother was being held by Iraqi forces in the heavily fortified Green Zone compound in central Baghdad where the US embassy and most government offices are housed.

"He has got a broken arm and ribs, and cuts to his eye and arm," said Durgham.

"He is being held by forces under the command of Muwaffaq al-Rubaie," Iraq's national security adviser, he added.

Zaidi, 29, a journalist for private Iraqi television channel Al-Baghdadia, was swiftly overpowered by Iraqi security forces after he threw the shoes at Bush in a gesture seen as the supreme mark of disrespect in the Muslim world.

An AFP journalist said that blood was visible on the ground as he was led away into custody although it was unclear if it was his.

Bush, who was on a swansong visit to the battleground that came to dominate his eight-year presidency, ducked when the shoes were thrown and later made light of the incident.

But Zaidi's action won him widespread plaudits in the Arab world where Bush's policies have drawn broad hostility.

The Lebanese television channel NTV, known for its opposition to Washington, went as far as offering a job to the journalist.

In its evening news bulletin on Monday, it said that if he takes the job, he will be paid "from the moment the first shoe was thrown".

A manager at the channel told AFP that it had made its offer known to Zaidi and was ready to post bail on his behalf.

An Iraqi lawyer said Zaidi risks a minimum of two years in prison if he is successfully prosecuted for insulting a visiting head of state.

In Gaza, around 20 Palestinian gunmen from the Popular Resistance Committees, a hardline militant group that has been behind a spate of rocket attacks on Israel in recent weeks, staged a demonstration in support of Zaidi.

Wearing fatigues and brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles, they stamped on photographs of the US president and held banners in support of the journalist.

Egyptian independent daily Al-Badeel carried a frontpage caricature of the US flag with the sole of a shoe replacing the stars in the top corner.

Even government-owned newspapers in Cairo praised Zaidi's actions. "Pelting the American president with shoes was the best way for expressing what Iraqis and Arabs feel toward Bush," wrote Al-Gomhuria editor Mohammad Ali Ibrahim.

In Iraq, press comment was divided.

The pro-government Al-Sabah newspaper expressed concern about the potential impact on press freedom of what it called Zaidi's "abnormal individual behaviour."

But the independent Al-Dustur newspaper hailed the journalist as the "only Iraqi whose patriotic feelings made him express his opinion in this way."

"It is not a declaration by the Iraqi media only, but for all Iraqis who have suffered over the years and we demand that he not be handed over to US forces," the paper said.

Cheney admits authorizing detainee's torture

2008-12-15T21:51:00.000-05:00

Cheney admits authorizing detainee's torture

Outgoing VP says Guantanamo prison should stay open until end of terror war, but has no idea when that might be.

Monday, outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney made a startling statement on a nation-wide, televised broadcast.

When asked by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl whether he approved of interrogation tactics used against a so-called "high value prisoner" at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison, Mr. Cheney, in a break from his history of being press-shy, admitted to giving official sanctioning of torture.

"I supported it," he said regarding the practice known as "water-boarding," a form of simulated drowning. After World War II, Japanese soldiers were tried and convicted of war crimes in US courts for water-boarding, a practice which the outgoing Bush administration attempted to enshrine in policy.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," Cheney said. "And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

He added: "It's been a remarkably successful effort, and I think the results speak for themselves."

ABC asked him if in hindsight he thought the tactics went too far. "I don't," he said.

The prisoner in question, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who the Bush administration alleges to have planned the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is one of Guantanamo's "high value targets" thus far charged with war crimes.

Former military interrogator Travis Hall disagrees.

"Proponents of Guantanamo underestimate what a powerful a propaganda tool Guantanamo has become for terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, despite several Department of Defense studies documenting the propaganda value of detention centers," he said in a column for Opposing Views.

"For example, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center has monitored numerous Al Qaeda references to Guantanamo in its recruitment propaganda materials," continued Hall. "Improvements to Guantanamo’s administration of judicial mechanisms will not make its way into Al Qaeda propaganda. Nothing short of closing Guantanamo will remove this arrow from its quiver."

President-elect Barack Obama has promised to close the prison and pull US forces out of Iraq. Cheney, however, has a different timeline for when Guantanamo Bay prison may be "responsibly" retired.

"Well, I think that that would come with the end of the war on terror," he told ABC.

Problematic to his assertion: Mr. Bush's "war on terror" is undefinable and unending by it's very nature, and Cheney seems to recognize this as fact.

Asked when his administration's terror war will end, he jostled, "Well, nobody knows. Nobody can specify that."

This video is from ABC's World News, broadcast Dec. 15, 2008.

It's not about them...it's about us: Why we must prosecute Bush and his administration for war crimes

2008-12-15T21:46:00.002-05:00

It's not about them...it's about us: Why we must prosecute Bush and his administration for war crimes

During the rush to get the Nuremberg Tribunals underway, the Soviet delegation wanted the tribunal’s historic decisions to have legitimacy only for the Nazis. U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Robert Jackson, serving as the chief prosecutor for the Allies, strong-armed the Soviets until the very beginning of the tribunal before changing their mind.

In his opening statement Jackson very purposely stipulated, "…Let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment."

Can there be a better reason for prosecuting George Bush and his administration for war crimes than those words from the chief prosecutor of the Nazis, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, with the full support of the U.S. government? Robert Jackson’s words and the values this nation claims to stand for provide sufficient moral basis for putting Bush and Cheney, their underlings who implemented their policies and the perverted legal minds who justified them all in the dock. If those are not sufficient reasons, there is a long list of binding law and treaties – written in black and white in surprisingly plain English.

Bush imagined, and his attorneys advised, that he could simply wave aside these laws with "they don’t apply." Imagine how a judge would treat even a simple traffic court defendant who brazenly stated the law was only a quaint notion, just "words on paper?"

Masses of people and an embarrassingly small number of their elected representatives in this country read the law for themselves and demanded otherwise, only to be silenced by the Guardians of Reality in the corporate news media.

But it’s all there, where it has been for 220 years, the Constitution’s "supremacy clause," Article II, section 4, and in the War Crimes Act of 1996 (18USC §2441). They provide the authority to make additional treaties legally binding – no matter how much former White House lawyers David Addington and John Yoo may object.

Those additional treaties include among others, the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg rulings, the Laws and Customs of War on Land and UN General Assembly Resolution 3314. To give just a snapshot of how serious these laws are, consider this portion of 18 USC 2441 which defines a war crime as "…a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party…" The guilty can be "...fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death."

Here, Justice Jackson answers another question about war crimes – who bears the greater responsibility: those who committed barbaric acts in the field or those who created the conditions for barbarism?

The case as presented by the United States will be concerned with the brains and authority back of all the crimes. These defendants were men of a station and rank which does not soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with the agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war.

And yet it is not just because Bush violated the Constitution and federal law that he and his lieutenants must be prosecuted.

At Nuremberg, the foremost crime identified was starting a "war of aggression," later codified by U.N. Resolution 3314, Art. 5, as "a crime against international peace." Launching a war of aggression, as Hitler did against Poland, is considered so monstrous that the nation responsible can then be charged with "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity," spelled out in detail in the Geneva Conventions. As Tom Paine said long before the U.N. formalized the definition of aggression, "He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of Hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death."

A small sampling of the contagion of Hell let loose by Bush includes illegally invading a sovereign state, using banned weapons such as white phosphorous and napalm, bombing hospitals and civilian infrastructure, withholding aid and medical supplies, terrorizing and knowingly killing civilians, torturing prisoners, killing a million people and displacing four million more in Iraq alone.

Following World War II, humanity resolved that wars do more than spark a series of loathsome, individual crimes. Leaders responsible for a war actually commit crimes against the entirety of humanity. They inflict harm on every human being, something that must be put right before humanity can be restored.

There is a final reason why we must prosecute Bush and Co. It is not what some argue, although they point to a serious danger: that Bush trashed the law and usurped powers, encouraging future presidents to expand where he left off. Such reasons are about George Bush and those who hold the office after him, but in the final analysis this is about us.

We are complicit in the horrors of this administration. We can claim neither ignorance nor innocence. We are complicit by the very fact that we are citizens of the United States, more so because we paid for the war, and even more so for this reason. Listen to a village sheik I met in Iraq describe it better than I ever could.

I met this man in a small farming village one afternoon in early 2004. He described how he and a dozen others were swept up in a raid by the U.S. Army and detained on a bare patch of ground surrounded by concertina wire. They had no shelter and but six blankets. They dug a hole with their hands for a toilet. They had to beg for water until one time it rained for three days straight and they remained on that open ground. He somehow found the graciousness to say he understood there was a difference between the American people and our government. Then through his tears he added, "But you say you live in a democracy. How can this be happening to us?"

Do we? Whether or not we bring our own government officials to justice for their crimes will determine the answer.

www.mikeferner.org

Mike Ferner is a freelance writer and former Toledo city councilman. His book, "Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq" is just out from Praeger Publishers.

Day to `call in gay' finds few willing to strike

2008-12-11T03:13:00.001-05:00

Day to `call in gay' finds few willing to strike

By LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer Lisa Leff, Associated Press Writer Thu Dec 11, 12:03 am ET

SAN FRANCISCO – A daylong work stoppage during which employees were encouraged to "call in gay" to express support for same-sex marriage drew spotty participation nationwide Wednesday, with some gay rights activists praising the concept but questioning its effect.

In San Francisco's gay Castro district, residents and merchants said they endorsed the message behind "Day Without a Gay" but didn't think a work stoppage was practical given the poor economy and the strike's organization.

"If we are going to make a huge impact and not be laughed at, then we have to take the time and make the time to communicate with all the parties. We could have shut down a lot of the hotels," said David Lang, a gymnastics coach. "In theory it's a great idea, but it's being done wrong and now that it's been done wrong, I don't think it will be done again."

The protest, which a gay couple from West Hollywood organized through the Internet, was designed to demonstrate the economic clout of same-sex marriage supporters following the passage of voter-approved gay marriage bans in California, Arizona and Florida last month.

Participants were asked to refrain from spending money or at least to patronize gay-friendly businesses for the day.

Paul Ellis, 51, a manager at Cliff's Variety hardware store, said he didn't want his employer to bear the burden of his support.

"My employers have always been there in every possible way," he said. "I didn't feel comfortable discomfiting them when they have gone out of their way to be there for me."

Out and Equal Workplace Advocates, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group that promotes equality for gay and lesbian employees, suggested that same-sex marriage supporters could send an effective message beyond Wednesday by openly discussing the issue at their workplaces.

"When people go into the voting booth and vote against (gay) rights, they often have no idea they are voting against the person sitting next to them in the next cubicle or office," said Selisse Berry, Out and Equal's executive director.

Berry noted that only 20 states have laws to protect workers from being fired for being homosexual, making lesbians and gays reluctant to reveal themselves to co-workers in most jurisdictions.

"Constantly lying about our weekends at the water cooler or changing pronouns, that takes up so much energy that we could be putting into our jobs," she said.

Participants who opted to take the day off from their jobs were encouraged to perform community service, and charitable organizations across the country said volunteers showed up.

"Visibility is really important for the gay community, so after a lot of thought I decided I would come out and be visible with my colleagues at work and use the time working for the community," said Carrie Lewis, 36, a University of California health researcher who spent the day working at the Sacramento Gay and Lesbian Center.

Backers of "Day Without a Gay" organized evening rallies in San Francisco; Austin, Texas; Logan, Utah; and other cities so supporters could gather to discuss the next steps. Rallies also were held earlier Wednesday in Chicago and on several college campuses in California.

"The movement that fought for equality and succeeded in electing Obama president is really looking to make progressive gains now," said Mark Airgood, who used a personal day to take off from his job as a middle school teacher in Berkeley. "I think we really can, and I think this is an important day for that."

Jon Stewart 'slays the homophobic Huckabee'

2008-12-10T22:29:00.001-05:00

Blogger: Jon Stewart 'slays the homophobic Huckabee'

When former Arkansas governor and conservative Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee appeared on The Daily Show on Tuesday, Jon Stewart pressed him hard on the issue of gay marriage, knocking down one false argument after another.

As blogger Pam Spaulding at Pam's House Blend commented appreciatively, "Jon Stewart asked serious questions any hard-hitting progressive journalist or political commentator with a talk show is perfectly capable of asking. He made Huckabee explain his positions on LGBT rights and connects it to the messages in his new book about the merits of social conservatism that he's hawking."

"Please watch the whole interview," Spaulding adds. "It literally made me weep because Stewart gets it. This is a human rights issue."

Stewart began the interview by suggesting to Huckabee that there's "one thing I guess I don't understand about social conservatives. ... You write that marriage is the bedrock of our society. Why would you not want couples to buy into the stability of marriage?"

"Marriage still means one man, one woman, life relationship," Huckabee replied. "The only way we can create the next generation is through a male-female relationship. In 5000 years of recorded human history, that's what marriage has meant."

However, Stewart wouldn't let Huckabee get away with that assertion. He pointed out that Huckabee was taking things "back to the Old Testament -- where polygamy was the norm. ... Marriage has evolved greatly over those 5000 years from a property arrangement, polygamy. We've redefined it constantly."

"It seems like a fundamental human right," Stewart said of marriage. "You write in your book that all people are created equal, and yet for gay people you believe that it is corrosive to society to allow them to have the privileges that all humans enjoy."

Stewart then increasingly backed Huckabee into a corner, where in his attempts to avoid admitting that marriage is a fundamental right, Huckabee was left arguing that it is merely a legal arrangement that the government can define as it sees fit. He concluded weakly that "those who support the idea of same-sex marriage have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of us."

"It's a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to make their case that they deserve the same basic rights," was Stewart's response.

This video is from Comedy Central's The Daily Show, broadcast Dec. 9, 2008.

Texas DA reveals evidence against Cheney

2008-11-27T19:56:00.000-05:00

Hopes media won't 'let it die'

Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra spoke to two Texas television stations Wednesday night regarding his investigation of injustice within the prison systems which led to the indictment by a Texas grand jury of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, along with other officials.

Cheney's stake in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies that run the detention centers, was cited in the indictment. Cheney is accused of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees through his ownership interest.

Gonzales is accused of using his position during his time as Attorney General to block an investigation into abuses at the detention centers, located in south Texas.

Democratic state Senator Eddie Lucio Jr. is also named in the indictment, Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra said. Lucio's attorney, Michael R. Cowen, called Guerra a "one-man circus." "In the March 2008 Democratic Primary," he added, "70 percent of the Willacy County voters elected to remove Juan Guerra...Now, with only a few weeks left in his term, Mr. Guerra has again chosen to misuse his position in an attempt to seek revenge on those who he sees as political enemies."

Guerra told KVEO 23, an NBC affiliate in Texas, that "elected officials were embedded into the prison business and that it goes all the way to the top."

"Now that these indictments have seen the light of day, Guerra says, it's important they are not quashed," the station reported.

"I'm going to try and do what I can do," Guerra told KVEO. "Impose it to you guys, and educate you guys, so you don't let it die."

On ABC affiliate KRGV Newschannel 5, Guerra showed "records that he says could be used to prove Dick Cheney is guilty of criminal activity."

"Greed will get you discovered and arrested every time, and that's what happened to Cheney," Guerra said.

Excerpts from KRGV's report:

####

Guerra says he went through Cheney's financial records and the prison companies' financial records and found the connection. The three top prison companies Guerra researched were Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group and Cornell. Those three have the Vanguard Group in common, which is an investment company that puts money into all three prison companies.

"We knew Vanguard was the key," said Guerra.

Guerra showed us the Vice President's financial disclosure from last year and it shows he owned shares in the Vanguard Group. Guerra estimates Cheney has $85 million invested in Vanguard and in turn, into the prison companies.

"The problem you have is he now has a direct interest," said Guerra. And according to Guerra, it's a direct interest in making sure the prison companies stay in business.

####

FULL KRGV REPORT AT THIS LINK

FULL COPIES OF THE CHENEY INDICTMENTS CAN BE DOWNLOADED AT THIS LINK

No more Mr. Nice Gay

2008-11-25T02:26:00.001-05:00

No more Mr. Nice Gay

Nice op ed piece in today's Washington Post about the fallout from Prop 8. The writer talks about hearing a local bus driver in Santa Monica refer to gay demonstrators as "sodomites.'

I realized that in a post-Proposition 8 world, it is not okay for me to enable anyone's bigotry with my silence. If he had said the "n" word or the "k" word or something else offensive regarding someone's race, gender or religion, there would have been no question about whether to report him. But gay men and lesbians are no longer willing to be doormats. It is no longer acceptable for people to say bigoted and hateful things about gays or anyone else in front of me. This behavior has to stop now.

If the bigots thought they would slap down gay men and lesbians by passing Proposition 8, or if they thought it would end the gay civil rights movement, they were mistaken. I haven't seen the gay community this galvanized in a long time. The passage of Proposition 8 might be this generation's "Stonewall," the 1969 riot that began after an unprovoked police raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village and that marked the start of the gay rights movement. If we can somehow harness the energy unleashed by California's Proposition 8 vote, we can achieve tremendous gains for us and for future generations of gay men and lesbians.

One of the most gratifying aspects of attending "No on 8" rallies was the number of straight demonstrators who showed up -- people who see this not just as an issue for gay men and lesbians but as a matter of everyone's civil rights.

He's right, we need to somehow harness the energy unleashed by Prop 8, but it's not happening, or at least isn't happening well. The protests around the country are great, tremendous, brilliant even, and amazing in their number.

But.

What comes after the protests? Postcard campaigns won't cut it. Nor will having a day without gays. We need a real campaign, a real war, real strategies - mean, nasty, vicious and, above all else, effective strategies targeted at achieving a concrete goal that moves our movement, moves our rights, forward. This is why I've talked endlessly about the role the Mormons had in making Prop 8 a reality. They are willing to be hate's banker, and we need to make sure that their moral bankruptcy becomes a fiscal one as well. Whether that means targeting key Mormon donors, targeting the entire state of Utah, or finding another means to make the price far too high for anyone willing to finance hate.

I'm not sure what the answer is. But we need one. We are a people without leadership at the moment. The California groups who got us into this mess seem downright terrified that gay people are finally rising up and demanding their rights, and the national groups, rightfully, to a degree, are butting out of what is California's own business (for all the criticism of HRC, are they really supposed to parachute into the middle of California and, Al Haig style, declare "we're in charge"?)

Gay people want change. But politics, like war, best achieves its goals when someone with experience and vision is at the helm. And for whatever reason, no one is stepping up.

John Aravosis (DC)

Prop 8 Protest

2008-11-19T15:01:00.001-05:00

This is real footage from the protest rally (not from mainstream media) that I took at the rally. It runs 30:10 and lots of goodies inside.

11/12/08 - New York City protest rally at the Mormon Temple at 65th Street and Columbus Avenue. Thousands show up for grass roots rally in protest of California Proposition 8 vote. Interviews with Ann Northrop, Brendan Fey, Whoopi Goldberg, Judy Gold, etc.

How can we afford not to focus on health care? We can't.

2008-11-19T01:53:00.000-05:00

How can we afford not to focus on health care? We can't.
Yesterday, Ted Kennedy returned to Capitol Hill and that means health care will be on the agenda:

The brief appearance by Kennedy, who made a surprise return in July to vote on a Medicare bill, represented an opportunity for him to show colleagues that he remains energetic and engaged, and that he intends to reclaim his committee post in January and take charge of the Obama health-care agenda. Some Democrats had speculated that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) would attempt to assume the chairmanship of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) rolled out his own health-care bill days after Obama was elected, and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) also expects to be a leading participant in the effort to establish universal health care.

Kennedy has a head start on them all. Despite his illness, he directed his staff months ago to begin work on legislation that would vastly expand health coverage, a career-long goal of his.

Take charge, Ted.

And to push the health care agenda, Health Care for America Now (HCAN), which has been a wonderful supporter of the blogosphere through their advertising, has a new ad:

BREAKING: Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens loses re-election bid

2008-11-19T01:35:00.001-05:00

BREAKING: Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens loses re-election bid
We're up to 58 seats in the Senate. Not that it really matters, they'll still cave when it counts. But still... AP:

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens has lost his bid for a seventh term. The longest-serving Republican in the history of the Senate trailed Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich by 3,724 votes after Tuesday's count. That's an insurmountable lead with only about 2,500 overseas ballots left to be counted.

Stevens, who turned 85 Tuesday, also revealed that he will not ask President George W. Bush to give him a pardon for his seven felony convictions.

Cheney, Gonzales indicted

2008-11-19T01:34:00.001-05:00

Cheney, Gonzales indicted

A Texas grand jury has indicted outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on charges related to alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County federal detention facilities, CNN reported.

"The vice president has not received an indictment," Cheney spokeswoman Megan Mitchell countered to CNN.

Cheney's stake in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies that run the detention centers, was cited in the indictment. Cheney is accused of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees through his ownership interest.

Gonzales is accused of using his position during his time as Attorney General to block an investigation into abuses at the detention centers, located in south Texas.

Democratic state Senator Eddie Lucio Jr. is also named in the indictment, Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra said. Lucio's attorney, Michael R. Cowen, called Guerra a "one-man circus." "In the March 2008 Democratic Primary," he added, "70 percent of the Willacy County voters elected to remove Juan Guerra...Now, with only a few weeks left in his term, Mr. Guerra has again chosen to misuse his position in an attempt to seek revenge on those who he sees as political enemies."

Email spam drops by 75% after just one website is closed

2008-11-19T01:26:00.001-05:00

Email spam drops by 75% after just one website is closed

Cyber-criminal gangs bombard computers with unsolicited emails

Online junk mail has been slashed by 75 per cent after a company believed to host some of the world's largest internet spam gangs was shut down.

Two major internet service providers (ISPs) cut off internet access to the company McColo.com on Tuesday. Carole Theriault, of internet security firm Sophos called it an 'unprecedented' move.

It is believed the California-based company had a client list that included some of the world's largest cyber-criminal gangs who bombarded computers with unwanted messages.

Online security firms estimated that spam rates fell up to 75 per cent shortly after the company's servers were disconnected.

Although the levels have picked up again, the drop is being seen as strong evidence that a significant slice of the world's spam was coming from McColo.

'McColo Corp had a number of criminal organisations they were turning a blind eye to,' Jason Steer, product manager at IronPort, told vnunet.com.

'It was responsible for spam but lots as other things as well, even down to the level of child pornography.'

However, Steer does not believe that the shutdown will affect spam in the long term, saying that spammers will find other outlets.

Spam accounts for about 90 per cent of all e-mails send to computers around the world. U.S researchers recently found that spammers could turn a healthy profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5million emails they send.

The McColo web page is currently down, but the company can go online again if they find another willing ISP.

Action Alert

2008-11-12T01:40:00.000-05:00

Message from Richard D. Burns

Join us to protest the passage of Prop 8 in California
on Wednesday, November 12

Message from the Center's Executive Director,
Richard D. Burns

As you know, on November 4 the state of California passed a constitutional amendment reversing a State Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that legalized same-sex marriage...and huge and numerous protests have sprung up, certainly in California, but also nationwide. There are two scheduled in NYC this week. One is at the Latter Day Saints (Mormon) Temple on Wednesday, November 12, beginning at 6 p.m.:

Protest at the Latter Day Saints (Mormon) Temple in Manhattan
125 Columbus Avenue at 65th Street (Map)
Wednesday, November 12
6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

The other is at City Hall on Saturday, November 15, beginning at 1:30 p.m. By all accounts, these protests were initiated by and have mobilized thousands of people via social networking sites and other online tools. It speaks to the enormity of the principle at issue -- all civil and human rights for all people -- to the tremendous creativity, fire and power of grassroots organizing and to the value of the individual voice inspired by the collective good. Let us hold fast to and build upon the hope with which we entered November 4, and move now into acting: building upon these inspired protests, let us agitate, write, speak out, strategize, pool our resources, think, vote and use all other means we can think of to demand peace, safety and equity for all of us.

Please join us tomorrow night to protest at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to end discrimination against LGBT people!

Thank you,
Richard D. Burns
Executive Director, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

The Center is actively promoting and supporting both protests. We have created a resource page (gaycenter.org/advocacy/issues/prop8) for people to reference for up-to-the-minute information, including protest site addresses and maps, which we will update continually.

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