Over at FireDogLake.com, you’d better not post anything too critical of Israel. Moderator and abuser of power Rayne will probably step in to disrupt the thread, issue threats, and order people to cease asking questions she doesn’t like.
Rayne’s latest round of abuse began when truthexcavator posted an entry on what turned out to be a five-year-old news article about an israeli soldier acquitted of murdering a 13-year-old Palestinian by filling her body with enough bullets to drop a charging rhinoceros. Truth made the horrendous mistake of comparing what Israel is doing to palestinians to what the Nazis did to Jews during the Holocaust.
I was shocked when I heard about this story, but I am less shock of the verdict by the Israeli Army. I’m passed the point of getting mad at Israel. I don’t even think of it as a country anymore. I wish it was a country because the Jewish people deserve better. But it’s not a country, just as Nazi Germany wasn’t a country.
This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.
When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:
1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?
2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?
3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?
The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.
The U.S. has blocked the release of photos showing clear evidence that the United States is responsible for torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. We think someone with access to the photos should simply leak them on the web, saving tax payers a load of cash and letting people know just what it is our twin occupations are really about. We are calling on anyone who has access to the images to leak them and anyone else to copy this message and post it in order to increase the chance of it reaching anyone who might have access.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates won’t allow new photographs showing prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq being abused by Americans military personnel. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has taken the issue to court, and is suing for the release of 21 color photos under the Freedom of Information Act. Ultimately, this lawsuit will win, but why waste the taxpayer dollars to hide from tax payers what they’re funding in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Federal courts already rejected the White House arguments that the photos must be kept from public view. In respponse to this, Congress – which is largely populated by people who supported both invasions, knowingly swallowing vast doses of false information as if it were fact – gave Gates new power to keep them private.
We know the U.S. military and its many contractors are involved in torture and humiliation of detainees, actions in violation of both U.S. and international law. Evidence has been published in the past and it was shrugged off under the “few bad apples” plea. We know this isn’t the case and these new photos are yet still more tangible proof of that.
If you have access to these photos, release them. If you don’t have access to these photos, please cut and paste this call anywhere you can and let’s create a viral plea to someone with the power to be a whistle blower. Don’t wait for the courts.
I have greeted with some dismay the emotional reaction to censorship at the GOS of late, and welcomed essays to promote a further dialogue about it. I read the comments and discussions about all the aspects of the current situation – who’s got power in the blogosphere, who doesn’t, what gets censored where, what doesn’t, etc., etc., etc. – and made comments of my own. Mostly because I have some ‘extra’ time lately to read and participate here at DD due to the recent ending of a long-term contract for paid blog-writing and the immediate non-existence of a new one.
So when the subject gets construed into what we are, or are supposed to be ‘doing’ about politics in Amerika, walking walks or talking talks, changing the world or morphing into good little FoxBots, it may be time to consider what each of us individually is doing, and what our doing means to us. I’ve always only been able to speak authoritatively for myself, so I will. Never been much of a leader or a follower and never wanted to be.
How many people realize that the fitness club killer in Pittsburgh was a right-winger and a racist?
I’ll bet almost nobody.
That’s because the media isn’t telling you.
George Sodini, the man who took the lives of four women, and then his own, at a Pittsburgh-area fitness club Wednesday, leaves behind a long history of right-wing anti-government militancy.
In political rants on the Internet, going back to the early days of the Web, Sodini showed a consistently anti-government attitude. As first reported by Greg Mitchell at his Huffington Post blog, in the mid-1990s Sodini posted to a newsgroup titled misc.activism.militia, where right-wing libertarians and survivalists compared notes on the state of politics, and made plans for upending the “socialist” policies of the Clinton White House. Sodini appeared to support a violent overthrow of the US government in order to return the country to its “Constitutional order.”
(snip)
The Associated Press and other news outlets have omitted references to President Barack Obama, the election of “The Black Man” and remarks that black men have “their choice of the best white” women when republishing excerpts of the diary by a Pittsburgh-area man who killed three women and himself at an LA Fitness gym Tuesday evening.
In fact, the Associated Press’ primary story contains no reference to Obama at all, even though the first entry of the killer’s diary came the day after Obama was elected and references Obama’s election directly.
The omission was noted by the blog of Editor and Publisher.
The President gave a compelling prime time Press Conference last week mostly about Health Care Reform — the most pressing Issue of our time, and what was the lead story for the next several days?
The merits of Public Option competition?
The plight of 14,000 citizens losing their Health Insurance each day?
No, the lead story was the President’s take on the arrest of his friend — on the emotionally charged “wedge issue” of Racial Profiling. A worthy discussion, no doubt —
But what about the issues of Health Care Reform? What about that Debate?
Of course the Media has been failing to have a Real Health Care Debate for some time now …
The Supreme Court found in favor of the nutcase haters from the Westboro Baptist Church and its fundamentalist (and fundamentally unhinged) founder, Fred Phelps. This is a difficult post to write, but we that love the First Amendment must honor this proper decision.
These folks are, in my opinion, fundamentally hatred filled and also love the spotlight. But, as much as it grieves me, they have their right to spew their toxic bile.
If you’re still thinking that Obama is your friend, if you’re still thinking that somehow he offers up something other than “hope”, well here’s one of those little stories that could be the proverbial straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back.
I wish I was making this up. I wish this was actually from The Onion. But it isn’t.
“Justice Department lawyers told the judge that future presidents and vice presidents may not cooperate with criminal investigations if they know what they say could become available to their political opponents and late-night comics who would ridicule them.”
This is the Obama administration, folks. This is not the Bush/Cheney administration. This is Obama’s Justice Department doing this.
Upon reading this, my first instinct was to just turn away from the computer and not come back for a good long time.
But I thought I’d share it here first.
“If we become a fact-finder for political enemies, they aren’t going to cooperate,” Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Smith said. “I don’t want a future vice president to say, `I’m not going to cooperate with you because I don’t want to be fodder for ‘The Daily Show.'”
This is a sad time for America. Very sad indeed.
We need a new party. This one is exactly like the other one.
I was banned at Dailykos a couple of days ago, for writing two-in-a-row recommended diarires, one which pointed out how much of the 9/11 Commission Report’s “information” was obtained through torture and which is therefore completely unreliable, and the other about an upcoming book written by a Commission Report insider in which he claims that the entire Report is “almost entirely untrue”.
This is not a crisis, nor should we run screaming, but I think it is important enough that every reader, writer, publisher, editor and all champions of freedom of expression should take note. Amazon has changed its policy and has de-ranked books that it deems “adult” in nature. This includes anything they count as erotica and many non-adult LGBT books, as well. De-ranking means that they have been pulled from the sales ranks and are also not coming up in the search engine.
(and this particular euphemism always amuses me … dropping adult content rankings? That means only children are supposed to refer to Amazon ratings?)
I have a brand new computer problem and must take action. In being my typical self it appears that either Google or my personal NSA staff has indeed fried another computer. The virus manifests itself via search engine redirects and brings up lamestream moronic sheeple shit and tells me nobody sells what I am specifically looking for. Anyway try it yourself and see if your computer is infected.
I just finished answering someone on YouTube (in a private exchange, not a comment section free-for-all) who seems to think that any use of copyrighted material in a political commentary or other context is de facto a violation of YouTube’s ToS. That may or may not be true, and I’m sure as a private entity there would be dozens of reasons YouTube’s management could give to take down or mute videos, or suspend an account on the basis that the video maker had used copyrighted material without express permission and licensing fees. That’s really not central to my interest in these musings, though perhaps it should be.
What is central is the net impact of something like the DMCA, and the muting of dissent that can spin off of its exercise, which more or less compels a site like YouTube to take down a video if an allegation of infringement is made by a copyright holder contending (possibly just by pattern matching software rather than any use of human judgement) that a particular piece of video is infringing.
I well understand at least the broad dimensions of the conflict of laws issues that are implicit here. Though not being an IP lawyer, my interpretations may be sketchy. But I’m really more interested in how this may be a contributing factor to the increasing irrelevancy of and difficulty in calling to task, those media conglomerates who may have played a huge role in the levels of distraction that led to the present shambles we seem (at least most Americans) to be awakening to in recent months. Yes, I could have made a video that spelled out in detail my response to Cramer’s statements and obfuscations in my own voice-over narration, and perhaps have presented Cramer and Stewart’s words as on screen quotes. But by my estimate, it would probably have been 60 minutes long or longer, had I chosen that course, at least to “say” what I think I’ve said by juxtaposing audio-only excerpts against images meant to elicit a critical response. That part may be a failure in editing or in concept… I don’t really know how anyone else will interpret my juxtaposings (if that is even a word) — in fact I’m kind of curious just how many disparate interpretations might come of it, if it’s even mildly of interest to any viewer. Please forgive my pretensions… put it down to my seeing too many Kenneth Anger and Luis Buñuel films in my misspent youth.
If you find the time, please tell me in your comments if you think the following video is or is not an example of “fair use” in a political commentary. I’ll grant you in advance that it may be overly subtle and the irony may fly over some heads and strike others as trite or annoying. But try to push away your personal views on this for long enough to tell me, is it or is it not a form of political speech? Also feel free to dismantle the “fair use” rationale offered below the fold, and if this is political speech, suggest anyone who might want to take the case, should Viacom issue a DMCA takedown demand based on the edited audio excerpts.
No need to have scruples about YouTube, the vimeo version is below.
I just saw this post