May 2008 archive

This disgusting, barbarous event will be overlooked in the news about the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina.  

This evening Georgia resumed killing its prisoners by lethal injection.  William Earl Lynd has been executed. This is the 1100th execution in the modern era and the first following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Baze v. Rees, upholding Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol.  It has been almost 8 months since a state killed a prisoner. This is longest amount of time between executions since at least the early nineties.

Convicted Georgia prisoner William Earl Lynd was executed Tuesday, the first inmate to be put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted its nationwide ban on executions.

Lynd was pronounced dead at 7:51 pm at the Diagnostic and Classification prison in Jackson, Georgia as anti-death penalty activists stood in quiet protest outside.

According to prison officials, Lynd had been “somber all day,” and had requested a mild sedative before being lead to the death chamber.

Lynd had been convicted for the 1988 kidnapping and murder of live-in girlfriend Ginger Moore.

source

The crime was an extremely brutal one, and Lynd waited on death row for almost 20 years to be killed while he appealed.

Tonight, almost 2 decades later, Georgia executed him by lethal injection.  The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that “he was the 41st man Georgia has executed since 1983, the 19th by lethal injection.”  He was 53 years old.

Barbarism and revenge killing have returned to the US.  I want it to be understood that William Earl Lynd was not killed in my name.  I detest killing.  I detest Lynd’s killing his victim.  My heart goes out to the victim, her family, Lynd, Lynd’s family, the lawyers who defended and prosecuted him, the jurors who deliberated his case, the judges who ruled at his trial and appeals, those who wrote and those who read the newspaper coverage of the crime and the trial and the execution, in fact, everyone who had knowledge of this case or any contact with it.  How can we live with ourselves when to revenge a killing, we permit our government to kill?  

Mahatama Gandhi correctly identified the issue. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

Is the U.S. Treasury, which can’t print money fast enough to pay for the trillion-dollar tragedy in Iraq, about to give an economic stimulus to peace organizations working to stop the war?

It seems highly unlikely, but if it doesn’t happen it won’t be because the antiwar folks haven’t tried.  Many seem to be on the same wave length as an email I received yesterday from United for Peace and Justice:

Spend your stimulus check on peace! The sooner the war ends, the more money the nation saves. Not to mention the lives and futures of millions of people. So let’s use the stimulus money to stop the war, bring all of the troops home and get the nation’s budget back on track.

We invite you to spend your stimulus check, or some portion of it, on the one thing the Bush administration doesn’t want you to invest in: Help strengthen the peace and justice movement!

Steve Burns, a staffer for the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, like UFPJ a coalition of many groups, didn’t even wait to get his check.  He wrote to President Bush in March to tell him how he was spending his stimulus check:

I’m fine!  There, that’s out of the way.

Our journey today takes us from In Grid to Sugar Blue.

From the ‘Be careful what you click on Department’

An Italian Pop-Soul Singer covers Dylan in Warsaw:

Okay, so that’s not too good, an enthusiastic, but possibly really, really drunk crowd…..but I got curious, she’s very popular in Poland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I…

So then you see one that says:  I Was a Ye Ye Girl.

Move to the ‘What’s New is Old Department’

(In Related Videos , there’s also Dracula Ye Ye  and Egyptian Reggae, but I’m trying to stay focused here on the Ye Ye Phenomenon)

Yé-yé was a style of pop music that emerged out of France and Québec in the early 1960s. Yeye means young, innocent, and cute.

le snip premier

The yeye movement had its origins in the radio programme “Salut les copains”, created by Lucien Morisse and hosted by Daniel Philippacci, which was first aired in December 1959. This program became an immediate success and one of its sections (“le chouchou de la semaine” / “this week’s sweetheart”) turned to be the starting point for most yeye singers. Any song that was presented as a chouchou went straight to the first places in the charts.

le snip deuxieme

Gainsbourg called France Gall the French Lolita, and, wanting to check to which extent her innocence was real, composed for her the song “Les sucettes” (“Lollipops”): “Annie loves lollipops, aniseed lollipops, when the sweet liquid runs down Annie’s throat, she is in paradise “. It is amazing to think that not even that video (with all those giant penis-like sucettes dancing around) rang a bell for poor France! She was finally told of the double meaning of the song and that is when her yeye period finished… Her innocence was gone and it took her some 5 years to sing again, now with a completely different style.

le snip troisieme

As mentioned above, the yeye movement was led by female singers, but that does not mean that there were not any yeye guys.

Link to France Gall doing Les sucettes due to content.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

DO NOT REC THIS   Go re-read ucc and get really horny, then come back.

1. The Los Angeles Times reports Chinese firms are bargain hunting in U.S.

   Liu Keli… is investing $10 million in the Palmetto State, building a printing-plate factory that will open this fall and hire 120 workers. His main aim is to tap the large American market, but when his finance staff penciled out the costs, he was stunned to learn how they compared with those in China.

   Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg — less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants. U.S. electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn’t have to put up with frequent blackouts.

   About the only major thing that’s more expensive in Spartanburg is labor. Liu is looking to offer $12 to $13 an hour there, versus about $2 an hour in Dongguan, not including room and board. But Liu expects to offset some of the higher labor costs with a payroll tax credit of $1,500 per employee from South Carolina.

   The jobs are low-paying and the state will not get tax revenue – instead that money will stay in China. In just under two decades, the United States has been successfully transformed into a third world nation – unable to respond to natural disasters, collapsing bridges and deteriorating infrastructure, no health insurance, and corrupt elections and public officials. More environmental laws will be rolled back next. It never used to be like this in the U.S.

   For years, investment between the U.S. and China flowed one way, with American firms spending billions in the Asian nation. But the Beijing government’s $5-billion stake in Morgan Stanley and $3-billion investment in the private equity firm Blackstone Group brought China’s overall investments in U.S. firms to $9.8 billion in 2007, up from $36 million the year before, according to Thomson Financial.

   By comparison, U.S. investment in China was $2.6 billion last year, down from $3 billion in 2006, said China’s Ministry of Commerce.

   China out-invested the U.S. last year by $7.2 billion. Or as Mei Xinyu, an economist at China’s Ministry of Commerce, reasoned of the depressed asset prices in a sluggish American economy: “They don’t want to miss this opportunity to bottom-fish in the U.S..” America – land of the bottom feeders.

Four at Four continues below the fold with DoJ v OSC, Guantánamo Briton, and why do they hate us?

Lie to me and tell me everything is all right

Lie to me and tell me that you’ll stay here tonight

Tell me that you’ll never leave,

oh and I’ll just try to make believe

that everything, everything you’re telling me is true

Lie to me.

-Johnny Lang

The Lie That Launched the 21st Century

Today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.

-George W. Bush’s 2001 Inaugural Address

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

-Carl Sagan

Bamboozled, Bamboozled, Bamboozled, Bam  Boo Zel Duh.  A strange and funny sounding word, almost innocent sounding actually. Kinda knocks the stink off of the word “lie”.

Come on Baby lie to me….

tell me everything is alright.