This morning’s news says that beleaguered, dinosaur of dial up AOL has bought Huffington Post and made the doyenne of digital, Arianna, an executive.  Here’s the news from the New York Times:

The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.

The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.

And what a week it was.  Your bloguero finds himself hiding out in Columbia County,

New York, southeast of Albany and abutting the Massachusetts border, an area deep  in winter, full of snow,  crusted of with heavy ice,  and very cold.  In two words: hard winter.

While some blogs can tell you what’s coming in the future, an attribute your bloguero  admires, The Dream Antilles can’t.  Why not?  Because in a phrase: this blog doesn’t  know what’s coming up.  Your bloguero doesn’t know what, if anything, will write itself into pixels this week.  This is just one of the blog’s many delightful but sometimes vexing idiosyncrasies, like having the comment instructions be en Espanol.   And having the videos be too narrow.   Like having many dead links in the blog list.  Like, because of the bloguero’s obvious laziness, not giving you the links to stories in this posting: you just go to The Dream Antilles and scroll down to what you’re looking for.  It is not a long way.  Like the way he refers to himself in this post in the third person, as if he were the typing Deion Sanders.

So, if you look at the past week you will find:

Bob Marley’s Birthday: He’d Be 65.  Hard to imagine, but it’s been almost thirty years since he passed on.  And he’s an icon.  So we celebrate his birthday with a video of him performing “No Woman No Cry,” one of my favorites.

Making The Independent Judiciary A Joke  complains about Clarence Thomas’s wife’s rightwing political activism as a threat to judicial independence.  Specifically, she’s selling access. The comments posted to this essay at dKos make one suspect that commenters at that blog are on the payroll of rightwing think tanks.  Prove that wrong.

Announcing An Internet Serialized Novel tells the world that our friend, the novelist Claudia Ricci, is posting a serialized version of her latest novel at Huffington Post.  This is exciting, and it might herald the return of the serialized novel to America.  

Storm Central? is an essay about what happens when bad weather detains your bloguero at home and the local NPR affiliate is on full time fund raising, which by the way persists even as you read this.  He gave, really he did, but he notices a passive aggressive tilt in the fund raising strategy.

Welcome to the Port Writers Alliance.  What a great idea.  The Dream Antilles is honored.

Enough, I Say, Enough.  Even more crummy weather increases your bloguero’s cabin fever and grouchiness.  And why on earth not?  You have to be here to understand it.

Haiku For Imbolc.  Imbolc is the cross-quarter day, February 1, half way between the start of Winter and the first day of Spring.  So we’re half the way there, but it’s still a long slog to the first snow white.

Four Haiku For Egypt.  Fed up with all of the  analysis and blibber blabber, your bloguero cuts to the chase: poetry in support of democracy and the protestors in Egypt.

This essay about what is on The Dream Antilles is a weekly Sunday morning very early digest for the Writers Port Alliance.  See you next week, if the creek don’t rise.

The independence of the judiciary means that the Courts should be free from improper influence from outside interests.  What a great idea for having a transparent, fair judicial system.  It’s a concept that has so much promise.  But in practice the present Supreme Court and its members may be driving it off a cliff. Today’s news about Justice Thomas’s wife’s lobbying business may signal its ultimate demise.

The New York Times reports that Justice Thomas’s wife,

who has raised her political profile in the last year through her outspoken conservative activism, is rebranding herself as a lobbyist and self-appointed “ambassador to the Tea Party movement.”

Virginia Thomas, the justice’s wife, said on libertyinc.co, a Web site for her new political consulting business, that she saw herself as an advocate for “liberty-loving citizens” who favored limited government, free enterprise and other core conservative issues. She promised to use her “experience and connections” to help clients raise money and increase their political impact.

So far, obsessed with weather, haiku, and Egypt.

Horrible northeastern weather in Enough, I Say, Enough, also the apparent onset of the bloguero’s seasonal affective disorder, grumpiness, and aggravated cabin fever.

Much haiku.  Haiku for Imbolc for a cross-quarter day, Four Haiku For Egypt, and some seasonal Haiku, because after all there is no durable escape from Upstate NY Winter except leaving and there is time, plenty of time for Haiku.

And Saturday’s Egypt Explodes, US Video Media Gape, a look at why Al Jazeera is good and MSNBC, CNN, and Faux News leave us clueless.

More when it happens.  And another digest next week.

Defy the curfew,

Demand real democracy.

I support your dream.

Solidarity,

Non-violence will prevail.

I stand with Egypt.

Do not be afraid,

I can still hear your voices.

I link arms with you.

May you soon be free.

May your children enjoy peace.

May your courage persist.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

Oh spare me.  A Jewish congresswoman gets shot in Arizona.  Various talking heads wonder aloud whether the level of talk of violence in current US politics, particularly on the right, might have contributed to the shooting.  And persistent media hog Sarah P inserts herself in the discussions by saying this gem in a video:

“Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.”

Oh the irony.  The Jew gets shot; the non-Jew seeks to appropriate the blood libel for her own purposes.  But I’m not spending time discussing the significance of the words blood libel to Jews.  And I’m not raving about how America’s most visible bigot, Pat Buchanan, thinks this is so very  excellent.  No.  The question this latest  kerfuffle raises for me is Sarah P’s persistent pursuit of making everything be about her, and her even more consistent and tiresome efforts to be the primary victim in any story in which her monicker is inserted.

To have a victim you have to have a perpetrator.  And if you have a victim (even if the perpetrator isn’t quite visible or identifiable) you almost always have rescuers, those who want to come to the aid and defense of the seeming victim.  There are probably more rescuers by far than there are victims, because each victim can have thousands of rescuers, thousands of defenders.  So when a politician consistently grabs the victim mantle, she is probably manipulating her audience.  You can bet the ranch on this.  She wants them to rescue her, to defend her, to give her money, to argue in her behalf, to denounce the perceived perpetrators.  But most of all to make donations.  Big donations.

Seen in this context, Sarah P’s speechwriters– nobody believes for a second that Sarah P writes this stuff for herself, do they?– sought again to ring their familiar bell.  The bell that brings in the checks.  This bell has but one note: Sarah P’s victimhood. No matter. They sought to transform a story about the attempted assassination of a Congresswoman into one all about poor Sarah P.  And they again attempted to mobilize all of those very gullible AM radio listeners who have been content repeatedly to stand up for a rescue of Sarah P from the unjust, unwarranted attacks on her egotism and grandstanding by the supposedly liberal press and/or the supposedly liberal D party.

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s classic novel, was initially published in 1884.  And it has survived as an important book for more than a century without ever being edited.  For offensiveness.  Or more specifically to eliminate offensive, racist words.  At least until now.

Today NPR reports that a “New Edition Of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Will Eliminate Offensive Words”:

Just in from the New York Times:

The United Nations says it is looking into a complaint that the Army private suspected of giving classified documents to WikiLeaks has been mistreated in custody.

The UN office for torture issues in Geneva said Wednesday it received a complaint from one of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s supporters alleging that conditions in a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va., amount to torture. Visitors say he spends at least 23 hours a day alone in a cell.

The Pentagon has denied mistreating Manning. A Marine Corps spokesman says the military is keeping Manning safe, secure and ready for trial. …

The UN could ask the United States to stop any violations it finds.

So I guess the petition we all signed is working.

Good news.