May 2008 archive

cross posted from The Dream Antilles



La Bloguera Yoani Sanchez

Well, to no one’s surprise, Cuba wouldn’t relent and permit Yoani Sanchez to travel to Spain to receive the Ortega y Gasset prize, despite my post yesterday urging Raul Castro to permit her to go.

AP reports:

A Cuban woman who gained worldwide acclaim for a blog that offers stinging criticism of the Communist regime was honored Wednesday with a Spanish journalism award – in absentia.

Cuban authorities did not approve Yoani Sanchez’s request to travel to Madrid for the award ceremony. But the 32-year-old woman was still able to make some points.

“Nothing of what I have written in these 13 months speaks as loudly as my absence from this ceremony,” Sanchez said in a tape recording.

She said the fact she had to address the group through a recording was “the clearest evidence of the defenselessness of the Cuban people with respect to the state.”

Meanwhile, her blog receives more than 1 million hits a month (my blog receives less than 1 thousand).  And it continues to voice opposition to repression in Cuba.  It’s gotten some attention from Andrew Sullivan, but in general, there hasn’t been much of an uproar, or support in Blogtopia for her right to travel or for her right to express herself without being penalized or calling for her to be allowed to leave Cuba long enough to visit Spain.

Why is that?  What exactly does it take to have bloggers advocate for freedom of expression across the entire Internet?  When are we going to understand the connections between all of us in the typing class?  When are we going to support freedom of speech, even if we don’t agree with the politics or content of what is being written?

I’m asking because I remember Martin Niemoeller.

YANGON (AFP) – Myanmar said Friday it was not ready to let in foreign aid workers, rejecting international pressure to allow experts into the isolated nation where disease and starvation are stalking cyclone survivors.

One week after the devastating storm killed tens of thousands, Myanmar’s ruling generals — deeply suspicious of the outside world — said the country needed outside aid for those still alive, but would deliver it themselves.

The foreign ministry announcement came as a top UN official warned time was running out to move in disaster experts and supplies to prevent diseases that could claim even more victims.

Instead, the ministry said some relief workers who arrived on an aid flight from Qatar on Wednesday had been deported.

link: http://afp.google.com/article/…

Al Jazeera has an exemplary in-depth analysis of this tragedy, including an extended round table featuring UN Humanitarian Chief John Holmes, Bo Hla Tint, spokesperson for the Burmese Government in Exile and Marie Lall of the Asia Programme at Chatham House:

Tomorrow I’m chaperoning the band trip to the Music in the Parks exhibition/competition with the Cab Calloway School of the Arts middle school band, where thing 2 is the lone bass clarinetist.

The latest news suggests that the Lieberman-Warner Coal Subsidy Act (the Climate InSecurity Act, CISA) has moved from critical condition to the morgue.  As it will require 60 votes to get past any threatened filibuster (not that the Senate Democratic Party leadership could force a filibuster on anyone other than their own Senators fighting for Americans’ privacy rights),  corraling enough Senators to vote for even the CISA’s inadequate measures looks to be an impossible task.  

Growing up it all seems so one-sided

Opinions all provided

The future pre-decided

Detached and subdivided

In the mass production zone

Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone

Friday’s Headlines: McCain Pushed Land Swap That Benefits Backer: Bush set to veto $300 billion farm bill: An Arab veteran of 1948 recalls Palestinian ‘catastrophe’: Lebanon on the brink as violence erupts: Berlusconi imposes his authority with cabinet of cronies and beautiful women: Spain launches legal war on US ‘pirates’: Effort to control HIV in Africa ‘badly targeted’: Zimbabwe army denies attacks, Mbeki to hold talks: North Korea Gives U.S. Files on Plutonium Efforts: Japan to allow military use of space: lawmakers: President Morales agrees to Bolivian recall vote  

U.N. Pressures Myanmar to Allow Aid

With up to 1.5 million people in Myanmar now believed to be facing the threat of starvation and disease and with relief efforts still largely stymied by the country’s isolationist military rulers, frustrated United Nations officials all but demanded Thursday that the government open its doors to supplies and aid workers.

“The situation is profoundly worrying,” said the United Nations official in charge of the relief effort, John Holmes, speaking in unusually candid language for a diplomat. “They have simply not facilitated access in the way we have a right to expect.”

Support disaster relief in Myanmar (Burma)

From the BBC: Burma impounds UN aid deliveries

The World Food Programme has halted aid shipments to Burma after the contents of its first delivery were impounded on arrival in the military-ruled country.

The UN body says the Burmese government seized aid material flown in to help victims of Cyclone Nargis, which has killed tens of thousands.

The WFP said it had no choice but to halt aid until the matter was resolved.

Burma’s ruling generals have faced mounting criticism over their handling of the crisis.

The UN fears more than 1.5 million people have been affected by the cyclone, with tens of thousands made homeless and vulnerable to disease.

Burmese state media say 22,980 people were killed, but there are fears the figure could rise to 100,000.

I’ve been trying to get around to posting a follow-up on the May One at Faneuil Hall thing. I’ve got lots of great pix but my battery went semi-dead the last week. Not the camera battery, my posting battery. Maybe it’s my digestion – of life in Bush’s America circa 2008. Turning over the compost piles and planting things has been taking up my mind. So I was thinking earlier that it’s been seven full days since then and rising up from memory comes the book of the title name. Synchronicity sends me wandering down the rabbit hole.

Seven Days in May was both a book and a movie, both of them pretty good. It’s a political thriller about a plot by the Pentagon to pull off a bloodless (more or less) coup to overthrow the president. The problem with the president is he’s not sufficiently anti-Communist for the right-wing plotters. He’s actually about to sign a treaty with the Soviets to mutually nuclearly disarm.

The plot itself, called ECOMCON (for “Emergency Communications Control”), entails the seizure of the nation’s telephone, radio and television network infrastructure by a secret United States Army combat unit created and controlled by Scott’s conspiracy and based near Fort Bliss, Texas. Once this is done, General Scott and his conspirators will control the nation’s communications assets; then, from their headquarters within a vast underground nuclear shelter called “Mount Thunder” (based on the actual continuity of government facility maintained by the U.S. at Mount Weather in Berryville, Virginia), they will use the power of the media and the military to prevent the implementation of the treaty.

The book came out in ’62 and the movie in ’64. The movie was shot in ’63 while Kennedy was still alive. He encouraged the filmmakers by heading home to the Cape when they needed to get shots done around the White House; the Pentagon was none too pleased. If written today the authors would have to add in cell phones, cable and the internet to complete the communications media needed to be controlled. Take a jump to the link above for some solid background and I’ll give you a tour of the rabbit warren. We’re going to visit Granddaddy Bush and Dick Cheney’s Undisclosed Location – Raven Rock. We’ll see an actual coup d’etat plot against FDR, Lee Harvey Oswald will jump up in a plot line you’ve probably never even heard of and you may even get a whiff of a hint of a sense of the presence behind the curtain. Who knows?

Feel free to break out the Reynolds Wrap.

As some of you know I frequent RedState myself on occasion but this particular gem I owe to TBogg.

From a discussion of McSame’s VP choices-

With respect, that’s (excluding former officials of the current administration- ek) just the wrong approach to take. We have to build up a farm team of Presidential prospects. It just does not do to create a Caste of Untouchables merely because their resumes indicate that they have been doing something fairly important at some point in time between January 20, 2001 and the present day. We deprive ourselves of talent that way. And again, we could pick the Angel Gabriel himself, the Heavenly Host could sound its approval and the Lord could issue his unqualified endorsement but at most, that would cause a 48 hour delay before the negative ads start coming in.

Additionally–and this issue cannot be emphasized enough–as much as you and I may be (and are) disappointed with various aspects of the Bush Administration’s job performance, let us remember that we are criticizing the Administration from the right. A critique from the right, however, may not emerge as the dominant critique of the Bush Administration and indeed, thus far, the dominant critique has come from the left.

If we allow the left to continue critiquing, allow that critique to become the dominant narrative and then declare that consideration of Bush Administration officials for high office is verboten, we are effectively silencing a very large portion of our counter-message against the left’s critique and allowing that critique to morph into a larger narrative against Republicans and conservatives in general. In other words, by our silence, by our cooperation in shunning very competent Bush Administration officials when it comes to considerations for high office merely because they served in the Bush Administration, we will allow George W. Bush and anyone who served with him–no matter how good–to be used as bludgeons against Republicans and conservatives for decades.

This is already happening; there have been any number of seminars and presentations on the Left that have argued that the “failures” of the Bush Administration constitute “failures” of conservatism proper. By practicing The Politics Of Leprosy when it comes to personnel decisions, we are implicitly giving running room to that critique. And don’t think it will stop there; there is no reason to think that Cabinet decisions will not be subject to The Politics Of Leprosy as well. Give the Left an inch and it will take the height of the Roman Empire.

Pejman Yousefzadeh

My emphasis.

The Politics of Leprosy.

Preach it and practice it.

George Armstrong Custer

George Armstrong Custer was a United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the Indian Wars.  He graduated last in his class at West Point.  At the end of the Civil War, Custer was promoted to major general of volunteers. In 1866, he was appointed to the regular army position of lieutenant colonel.  His title of “General” was a courtesy only.  He established a reputation as an aggressive cavalry commander willing to take personal risks at Gettysburg among other places, but was also known for the Battle of Trevilian Station, where Custer was humiliated by having his division trains overrun and his personal baggage captured by the Confederates.

And there was that Greasy Grass thing.  You could look it up.

The reason I mention it is he reminds me of somebody.

McCain – War Hero or Just Incompetent Pilot? by DrSteveB

Now as DrSteveB admits, one of his main sources is Wayne Madsen who doesn’t have a sterling reputation, but this is DocuDharma not DailyKos and conspiracy theories and questionable sources are explicitly allowed.

I thought I’d share it so you can think about it the next time you hear someone call McSame a “war hero”.

John Kerry drove a Swift Boat and killed gooks with his bare hands like Rambo.  McSame was a washout who used his daddy’s influence to get a job driving a bomb dump truck (an A-4 is not a fighter) so he could kill people from 30,000 feet.  He was a boozer and a skirt chaser.  He participated in propaganda broadcasts while captured.  He cheated on his wife who stood by him during his captivity and then dumped her when she was injured to marry a drug addicted charity thief who was prettier and richer so he could have a political career.

This is John McSame- “maverick”.