June 2009 archive

The populist case against corporate media

C’mon, you’d rather read this.

Fundamentally the entitled class sees their entitled position as a product of merit and diligence rather than birthright even though to an amazing degree they are mostly legacy members of Delta House.

That was Dartmouth.

Much as I love Bluto the fact that he “grew up” to become a United States Senator is hardly a ringing endorsement of Randian world views of dignity and self importance.  This culture of courtiers, these Versailles Villages don’t know how close to storming the Bastille we are.

And I mean that in a collapse of the Soviet Empire kind of way.

Are you looking for News in Truth?  Or Truth in News?  In your country, does it watch you?

Traditional Media has no credibility anymore.  And you know how it’s manifesting itself?  People ain’t buying your crap.

Verdict of the marketplace of ideas baby, I feel so Stephen Colbert.

They are voting right now with their eyeballs and you are losing the culture war.  Perhaps that explains your profane identification with the party of war profiteers, torturers, murderers and thieves.

Or perhaps it is about the dead presidents.

You know why sports stars make the money honey?  They entertain every day.  They fill the seats.  Put butts and bucks in the bucket.

I’m so very sorry cricket is not such a popular game.  I find it as fascinating as polo.  I have more faith in the WWE.

Trippin’

Jefferson Airplane:  White Rabbit

Procul Harum:  Whiter Shade of Pale

Lawyers At The

Justice Department Against

Torture Go Along With It

No Backbone No Conscious      

Obama to Forge a Greater Role on Health Care



By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: June 6, 2009

WASHINGTON – After months of insisting he would leave the details to Congress, President Obama has concluded that he must exert greater control over the health care debate and is preparing an intense push for legislation that will include speeches, town-hall-style meetings and much deeper engagement with lawmakers, senior White House officials say.

Mindful of the failures of former President Bill Clinton, whose intricate proposal for universal care collapsed on Capitol Hill 15 years ago, Mr. Obama until now had charted a different course, setting forth broad principles and concentrating on bringing disparate factions – doctors, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, labor unions – to the negotiating table.

Tunnel fraud leaves Gazans on verge of financial ruin

For years, a network of underground smugglers’ routes from Egypt to the Gaza Strip has supplied a besieged population with everything from cement to cattle. But now a series of major scams has destroyed the dreams of desperate investors who saw the tunnels as a path out of poverty



Peter Bradshaw in Gaza City

The Observer, Sunday 7 June 2009

Jawad Tawfiq, a 52-year-old Gazan actor and director, was dubious at first, but his nephew insisted. If they could scrape together enough money, the nephew said, large profits could be made from investing in the tunnels that snake beneath the Egyptian border.

“They were liars,” Tawfiq said bitterly last week. “They took my money to put in their own pockets. And we are being offered a fraction of what we gave them.”

At first the tunnels emerged as smuggling routes; then they became the vital lifeline for a Gaza under economic siege by Israel. But many people who invested in the tunnels now see them quite differently – as a source of ruination.

The tunnel schemes were advertised as opportunities for doubling and trebling money by unscrupulous figures linked to powerful businessmen in Gaza and, allegedly, to senior officials in Hamas, but have instead led to huge losses for ordinary residents of the Strip.

USA

A Slow Burn Becomes a Raging Fire

Disdain for U.S. Policies May Have Led to Alleged Spying for Cuba

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Del Quentin Wilber

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, June 7, 2009



He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. “We were all appalled by the Bush years,” one said.

What Walter Kendall Myers kept hidden, according to documents unsealed in court Friday, was a deep and long-standing anger toward his country, an anger that allegedly made him willing to spy for Cuba for three decades.”I have become so bitter these past few months. Watching the evening news is a radicalizing experience,” he wrote in his diary in 1978, referring to what he described as greedy U.S. oil companies, inadequate health care and “the utter complacency of the oppressed” in America. On a trip to Cuba, federal law enforcement officials said in legal filings, Myers found a new inspiration: the communist revolution.

Why Oh Why Did I Do It