October 21, 2010 archive

The New York Times reports that “Efforts to Prosecute Blackwater Are Collapsing“.

Nearly four years after the federal government began a string of investigations and criminal prosecutions against Blackwater Worldwide personnel accused of murder and other violent crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cases are beginning to fall apart, burdened by a legal obstacle of the government’s own making.

This is the kind of justice I’ve come to expect in America. The rules set up to protect people against malfeasance are being exploited instead to shield people with connections to wealthy and powerful conservative interests.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.  

For years (literally) I’ve noted what a cretinous NPR’s Juan Williams is. If the asscranks over at Orange Admin haven’t erased/deleted all my archived Diaries, you’ll be able to find plenty of writings that back up this assertion.  Williams has always been unimpressive, at the least:  a shallow and superficial interviewer whose “insights” and “analysis” were mere dabblings in either the obvious or recapitulations of Right Wing spinning points.  Over at Orange I noted many times over the degree to which Juan Williams just about peed himself with simpering and worshipful excitement when he “interviewed” (read:  fawned over) Dick Cheney about 5 or 6 years ago.  

Well, finally, finally, this poseur, this underwhelmer, this poster child for much of what’s wrong with so-called “journalism” in today’s America, got his comeuppance:  NPR’s fired Juan Williams for over-the-top and, well, just dumbass proclamations (confessions of TeaKKism) about Muslims.  TeaKKism.  Yeh, I know that Williams is a person of color.  That’s part of the irony.

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NPR Fires Juan Williams for Muslim Remarks on Fox  

“On Monday, O’Reilly asked Williams if there is a “Muslim dilemma” in the United States. The NPR analyst and longtime Fox News contributor agreed with O’Reilly that such a thing exists, and added that “political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality.”

“‘I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot,’ Williams continued. ‘You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.’ . . .”

You know that there’s a racist or like-kind remark coming whenever someone starts off a sentence with, “Well, you know I’m not a bigot/prejudiced, but . . .”

Of course, he’s got his buddies and his sinecure at Fox to comfort him.  This jerk will never worry about having to pay a bill.  These foul people take care of their own.

My only beef with NPR is that they kept this narrow-minded panderer to the Right Wing on its payroll for as long as it did.

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China ‘trying to block publication of UN Darfur report’

Beijing is trying to prevent the release of a report which says Chinese bullets have been used against Darfur peacekeepers, unnamed UN diplomats say.

The BBC   21 October 2010

The report is being discussed by a United Nations committee which monitors sanctions against Sudan, including an arms embargo on Darfur.

Beijing says it is vaguely worded and full of flaws.

Ceasefires and peace negotiations have failed to end the conflict in the volatile western Sudanese region.

The report says that a dozen different brands of Chinese bullet casings have been found in Darfur, some at sites where attacks on UN troops took place.

The BBC’s Barbara Plett at the UN in New York says the allegations are controversial, but adds that China has the right to sell munitions to Khartoum as long as they are not used in Darfur.

Nadav Kander is the darling of photo-editors at the New York Times, which is currently devoting a whole issue front-to-back of the New York Times Magazine to “Obama’s People,” a long, long, long series of trendy snapshots by the egregious Mr. Kander, and as usual his photos impart a sense of “formalness and unease,” because “formalness and unease” is Nadav Kander’s gimmick.  

For example, Kander has imbued his photo of Valerie Jarrett with the signature “formalness” of surrounding her with a big empty frame, and his signature “unease” is introduced by super-saturating her magenta suit and de-saturating her face.  

And so what? “Formalness and unease” would be a more appropriate attitude around the Obama White House than Obama’s repulsive self-righteousness, but in Kander’s snapshots it’s nothing but aesthetic posturing, and most of his subjects are perfectly relaxed and informal.

And so what again? As Jay Leno once said, politics is show-business for ugly people, and although the ultra-telegenic Mr. Obama has made a career out of contravening that principle, there probably isn’t much that anybody could show in posed portraits of “Obama’s people,” and…

This diary is just a pointless rant!

In case you missed it, following on the heels of the January 2010 ‘landmark’ decision in the Citizens United v Federal Election Commission case by the US Supreme Court holding that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment, in which the court struck down a provision of the McCain-Feingold Act that prohibited all corporations, both for-profit and not-for-profit, and unions from broadcasting ‘electioneering communications’, Pulitzer prize winning author, veteran war correspondent, and activist Chris Hedges spoke with RT America about the meaning and ramifications of an unregulated and uncontrolled flow of corporate funding into US electioneering on top of the already thirty five thousand or more paid corporate lobbyists already heavily influencing the US Congress and Administration.

Much of what Hedges has to say in this interview bears directly on why he said in his September 13 article Do Not Pity the Democrats that:

The menace we face does not come from the insane wing of the Republican Party, which may make huge inroads in the coming elections, but the institutions tasked with protecting democratic participation. Do not fear Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. Do not fear the tea party movement, the birthers, the legions of conspiracy theorists or the militias. Fear the underlying corporate power structure, which no one, from Barack Obama to the right-wing nut cases who pollute the airwaves, can alter. If the hegemony of the corporate state is not soon broken we will descend into a technologically enhanced age of barbarism.