May 2009 archive

Welcome listeners!

Join Ed Encho, Gottlieb and I for another hour of Wildly Liberal discussion and analysis.

Our topic line up:

Swine Flu Update – Hoopla and Hate!



State by State – Gay Marriage FINALLY making headway! (and the possibility of a Gay SCOTUS seating!)

Selling Jesus at Gunpoint – The Military’s Christinazi Movement

The Slow, Lovely Death of the Republican Party (& Murdoch) – Model for a VERY different future.

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Again my thanks to asqv for filling in my absence last week.

 

During last year’s U.S. presidential campaign, Barack Obama campaigned on a pro-pie platform. But apple pie, an epitome of Americanness, is threatened by the apple’s stagnant gene pool.

Like many Americans, the apple is an immigrant to the United States. The apple’s ancestors came from Central Asia. Today, wild apple trees grow in the Tien Shan Mountains in Western China and in neighboring Kazakhstan. Almaty, the former capital, of Kazakhstan literally means ‘the Father of Apples’.

In addition to wild apple, Central Asia is home to more than 300 wild fruit and nut species, including plum, cherry, apricot, pistachio, walnut and many other important food trees from which domesticated varieties are thought to originate.

A team of international scientists have completed an inventory of Central Asia’s trees and identified 44 species in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan as globally threatened with extinction.  

Samuel ‘Joe the Plumber’ Wurzelbacher

Leaves The Republican Party

What Will John McCain Do?

Pakistani planes bomb Taleban in Swat Valley

From Times Online

May 8, 2009

Times Online

Pakistani aircraft bombed Taleban positions in the Swat Valley today, hours after the Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani ordered the military to “eliminate militants and terrorists.”

Helicopter gunships, fighters and troops were all involved in operations in Swat, and up to 12 militants were killed after as many as 55 were killed the previous day, Major Nasir Khan, a military spokesman in Swat, said by telephone.

Mr Gilani said in a televised address late on Thursday that militants were trying to hold the country hostage at gunpoint.

“In order to restore honour and dignity of our homeland and to protect the people, the armed forces have been called in to eliminate the militants and terrorists,” he said, setting the stage for a major offensive against Taleban fighters battling security forces in Swat.

Afghans riot over air-strike atrocity

Witnesses say deaths of 147 people in three villages came after a sustained bombardment by American aircraft. Patrick Cockburn, in Herat, reports

Friday, 8 May 2009

Shouting “Death to America” and “Death to the Government”, thousands of Afghan villagers hurled stones at police yesterday as they vented their fury at American air strikes that local officials claim killed 147 civilians.

The riot started when people from three villages struck by US bombers in the early hours of Tuesday, brought 15 newly-discovered bodies in a truck to the house of the provincial governor. As the crowd pressed forward in Farah, police opened fire, wounding four protesters. Traders in the rest of Farah city, the capital of the province of the same name where the bombing took place, closed their shops, vowing they would not reopen them until there is an investigation.

A local official Abdul Basir Khan said yesterday that he had collected the names of 147 people who had died, making it the worst such incident since the US intervened in Afghanistan started in 2001. A phone call from the governor of Farah province, Rohul Amin, in which he said that 130 people had died, was played over the loudspeaker in the Afghan parliament in Kabul, sparking demands for more control over US operations.

USA

U.S. to Wind Down Help for Some Banks

Stress Tests Find Most Can Absorb Losses

By Binyamin Appelbaum and Neil Irwin

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, May 8, 2009

The government signaled yesterday that its financial rescue efforts may have reached their high-water mark, announcing that the much-anticipated “stress tests” of 19 large banks showed that only one, GMAC, was likely to need additional taxpayer aid and that it would begin to unwind assistance for the healthiest firms.

Despite a deepening recession and projections that banks will continue to lose money, the government will require the firms to increase their combined capital by as little as $9.5 billion. The government will require the banks to further strengthen their capacity to absorb losses by adding $74.6 billion to the portion of their capital that comes from common equity. Banks are likely to raise some of that money from investors and some by converting other forms of capital.

P-Funk

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

   Pee Wee Reese

When I was ten I loved the Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers. Especially Pee Wee Reese.  And Duke Snyder.  And Carl Furillo.  I loved baseball.  And then one day, to my utter amazement, the newspapers reported that the Dodgers were leaving me for their new love, the kids in Los Angeles.  How could they do that?  What had I done to be unworthy of them?  Had they been cheating on me throughout the season? It felt like a bad break up, a contested divorce.  It felt terrible.  There was no loyalty to me and to Brooklyn.  Only dollars.  And betrayal.  And leaving and going to LA.

Baseball back then was a game for kids. There were Sunday afternoon double headers with one admission fee.  There were day games.  You took a portable radio to school during the world series, because you hoped that Mrs. Powderly would let you hear the game.  And you ran home at 3:15 to catch the last innings.  Baseball’s all star game, which was a dream come true for a kid, was a day game.  It was played in the afternoon.  So I could see Joe Dimaggio, and Jackie Robinson, and Pee Wee, and Willie Mays.  And buying things was cheap: hot dogs, and soda and cracker jacks.  These were for kids, except for beer, which was for the adults.

Players didn’t play baseball all year.  They had other jobs.  In the off season they sold cars or insurance or worked in an office or on the farm.  They didn’t make big bucks.  You could see them doing their real jobs.  Baseball was their reward.

But now we’re in an entirely different era.  Today Mannie Ramirez, who might have been one of the greatest right hand hitters, earned a 50 game suspension for using steroids.  So now he’s got his asterisk, he’s the greatest right hand hitter*.  And A*Rod.  He’s got an asterisk.  And Mark M*Guire, and Sammy S*sa, and in addition to an asterisk, Jose C*nseco needs money so he’s doing ultimate fighting.  And we have no idea who the other 103 players were who tested positive for drugs along with A*Rod.  And all of them have *s also.  It used to be that the asterisk was reserved for Roger Maris whose sin was that he hit 60 home runs in a 162 game season, not in 156 games.  Even the asterisk has now been devalued.  Now it denotes cheating and drug use.

Now the all star game is at night.  The world series is at night.  The division series is at night.  The first pitch in these games is at about 9 pm ET, so any east coast kid who wants to see his/her heroes is not going to get past the third inning.  And beer at the ballpark is more than $6.  And hot dogs are more than $4.  And there are few day games.  And there are no double headers with single admission.  And there are new abominations: corporate boxes with glass windows facing the field and air conditioning, and restaurants with table cloths and silverware, and take out, and microbreweries, and there are no really cheap seats.  I could argue that the designated hitter was a debasement of the game.  But compared to these other, appalling changes, the DH is nothing.

It used to be a ritual to sneak off from work or school to go to Ebbetts Field for the afternoon game during the week.  There is no equivalent now to that spontaneous act of childishness, of playing hookie.

I still follow the Mets.  I still love major league baseball.  The green grass of the outfield.  The roar of the crowd.  The sound of bat on ball.  The bright lights.  But today’s announcement of Mannie Ramirez’s 50 game suspension shows the dark shadow of the kids’ game I used to love.  It used to be about hitting a round ball with a round bat.  Now it’s about something else entirely.  It’s about money, and enormous salaries to players, and great profits to owners, and public financing for private stadiums, and naming rights, and having agents, and endorsements.  It’s about everything except that naive, joyful game of hitting a round ball with a round bat and 3 strikes still being an out.

There used to be a Ballantine Beer sign in the ball park.  It had 3 rings for Purity, Body, And Flavor. Ironically, it’s the purity in the game that has gone.

I mourn its loss.  

This is a review of Noel Sturgeon’s (2009) Environmentalism in Popular Culture, an interesting book of feminist cultural criticism.  Environmentalism in Popular Culture offers the most readily-accessible critique of an American mythology of the environment that I’ve read yet.  Though it makes some rather quick connections between its identity politics categories and environmental analysis, it maintains the reader’s interest throughout.

(crossposted at Big Orange)