Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Are Democrats too scared of losing to win?
By Steven C. Day
According to the generally dependable Nate Silver, Democrats have a lot to worry about in 2010. Not only does he predict that the party will lose seats in Congress, he sees some risk, small but not trivial, that the GOP could actually win back the House. But what's particularly interesting is the reason for Silver's pessimism: it seems that there's an enthusiasm gap between the two parties -- one that favors the Republicans. Right now, Republican voters are much more motivated than Democratic voters.
So, what is the Democrats' response? Will they, at long last, start playing to the base a little? Perhaps even start aggressively pushing liberal priorities in an effort to fire up the troops? Or at a very minimum, will they at least start feeding the base a little red meat by raising holy hell over GOP lies and obstructionism?
That would be a no.
Quite to the contrary, it would seem that Obama & Co. have chosen this very moment to declare war on the Democratic Party's progressive base by abandoning their support for a public option in the healthcare reform bill. Yeah, that's the ticket: continue to suck up to a fraud such as Chuck Grassley, who, not satisfied with merely endorsing the "death panels" lie, has also taken to hawking books for ultra-nut Glenn Beck. Or how about throwing the entire progressive base under the bus so as to please Kent Conrad as he continues to undercut efforts at real reform?
Sixty House Liberals To White House: No Public Option, No Health Care Reform
by Greg Sargent
One interesting side plot in the health care wars: The debate over the public option has suddenly reminded us that there are in fact two houses of Congress, something that's been easy to forget amid the media obsession with the "bipartisan" negotiations in the Senate.
Case in point: This very tough letter sent last night by House progressive leaders to Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius, stating unequivocally that 60 House Dems will not support a health care plan without a public option:
Dear Secretary Sebelius,
We write to you concerning your recent comments about the public option in health insurance reform.
We stand in strong opposition to your statement that the public option is "not the essential element" of comprehensive reform. The opportunity to improve access to healthcare is a onetime opportunity. Americans deserve reform that is real-not smoke and mirrors. We cannot rely solely on the insurance companies' good faith efforts to provide for our constituents. A robust public option is essential, if we are to ensure that all Americans can receive healthcare that is accessible, guaranteed and of high-quality.
To take the public option off the table would be a grave error; passage in the House of Representatives depends upon inclusion of it.
We have attached, for your review, a letter from 60 Members of Congress who are firm in their Position that any legislation that moves forward through both chambers, and into a final proposal for the President's signature, MUST contain a public option.
The letter, via Jane Hamsher, is signed by House proressive leaders Raul Grijalva, Lynn Woolsey, and Barbara Lee.
The letter's unequivocal: Five dozen House Dems say, No public option, no support.
Report: Gay men systematically targeted for torture, death in Iraq
A report released today by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch says hundreds of gay men have been tortured and killed in Iraq in recent months, some by the same security forces and militiamen who cooperate with the US military. HRW urges the Iraqi government to take action against the increasing victimization. "Iraq's leaders are supposed to defend all Iraqis, not abandon them to armed agents of hate," says Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. "Turning a blind eye to torture and murder threatens the rights and life of every Iraqi."
The report includes documentation of horrific and systematic torture, rape, and murder of victims. Some of it is really hard to read. One gay man who was targeted says,
They came to my parents' house a day later. I was out of the house when it happened. The neighbor's son has the same given name and so they kidnapped the wrong guy. When they found out they let the boy go, but they beat him severely-they wanted to kill him. They tortured him with electricity, they beat him with cables. He looked like a roast chicken when he came home.In a BBC report, Iraqi gay rights campaigner Ali Hilli believes Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world for gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, and says that even during the Saddam years, there was greater sexual freedom for citizens: audio link.
Cash for Clunkers didn't boost hybrid sales
The federal Cash for Clunkers program is getting a lot of trucks and sport-utility vehicles off the road, but it hasn't made best-sellers out of the Prius or other gas-efficient hybrids.
The purpose behind the program was twofold: boost anemic consumer spending while lowering gasoline consumption. There's no doubt that Cash for Clunkers accomplished the former, though interest now appears to be tapering off. It's less clear what the trade-in program has accomplished on the environmental front.
Much to the chagrin of public-interest groups, a fair number of U.S. consumers are turning right around and buying new light trucks with their credits from the Car Allowance Rebate System, or CARS.
The Toyota Prius and Honda Insight, two of the most popular and fuel-efficient hybrids, are noticeably absent from the top-10 list of new cars purchased to replace turned-in clunkers.
"It appears that despite some of these glowing (federal) reports we've seen on the environmental benefits of the program, a lot of light trucks and SUVs are being purchased through the program," said Lena Pons, a policy analyst Public Citizen, the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.
Fiji Water: The Earth-Friendly Choice for Military Juntas Everywhere
by David Friedlander
Image from Beverage World
A recent exposé in Mother Jones called "Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle" confirmed my common sense notion that drinking bottled water shipped from the South Pacific is a silly and wasteful idea. It also added myriad other reasons to not to drink Fiji Water.
Junta-Aid
Fiji has had 4 military coups in the last 25 years. The government du jour is lead by Commander (and now prime minister) Frank Bainimarama and President Ratu Josefa Iloilo. Because of a ruling last spring declaring the current government illegitimate, Iloilo suspended their constitution, appointed himself president and declared there wouldn't be elections until 2014. This totalitarian approach to government recently earned Fiji an expulsion from the Pacific Island Forum, an inter-governmental organization that represents the many independent island nations in the Pacific.
The author of the article Anna Lenzer was in the country when martial law was declared and was the subject of police intimidation. Amnesty International reports of Fijian freedoms, "there is a very strong military and police presence….[and there] is a constant and intimidating reminder that the new military regime will not tolerate dissent and will follow through on the warnings it has issued to critics."
In a response to Lenzer's article, the Fiji Water website claims of their relation to the recent political turmoil:
We bought FIJI Water in November 2004, when Fiji was governed by a democratically elected government. We cannot and will not speak for the government, but we will not back down from our commitment to the people, development, and communities of Fiji.
Besides conveniently sidestepping the specious circumstances that this "democratically elected government" came into power (i.e. through a 2000 coup), the company not speaking out about recent activity by Iloili et al appears like a self-preservationist strategy for a company that enjoys tax-free status.
In a rebuttal to the response to her article, Lenzer notes the contradiction between the company's touts of being a socially progressive company and its "no comment" policy on the junta's recent crackdown. She makes a good point saying:
It's worth remembering that there aren't very many countries ruled by military juntas today, and Americans prefer not to do business with those that are. We don't import Burma Water or Libya Water.
U.S. tests system to break foreign Web censorship
By Jim Finkle
BOSTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government is covertly testing technology in China and Iran that lets residents break through screens set up by their governments to limit access to news on the Internet.
The "feed over email" (FOE) system delivers news, podcasts and data via technology that evades web-screening protocols of restrictive regimes, said Ken Berman, head of IT at the U.S. government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is testing the system.
The news feeds are sent through email accounts including those operated by Google Inc, Microsoft Corp's Hotmail and Yahoo Inc.
"We have people testing it in China and Iran," said Berman, whose agency runs Voice of America. He provided few details on the new system, which is in the early stages of testing. He said some secrecy was important to avoid detection by the two governments.
The Internet has become a powerful tool for citizens in countries where governments regularly censor news media, enabling them to learn about and react to major social and political events.
Young Iranians used social networking services Facebook and Twitter as well as mobile phones to coordinate protests and report on demonstrations in the wake of the country's disputed presidential election in June.
In May, ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the Chinese government blocked access to Twitter and Hotmail.
Sho Ho, who helped develop FOE, said in an email that the system could be tweaked easily to work on most types of mobile phones.
The U.S. government also offers a free service that allows overseas users to access virtually any site on the Internet, including those opposing the United States.
"We don't make any political statement about what people visit," Berman said. "We are trying to impart the value: 'The more you know, the better.' People can look for themselves."
In addition to China and Iran, targets for the FOE technology include Myanmar, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, he said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE57C5OQ20090813
The Great Marijuana Book Bomb,
A book about marijuana has never hit #1 on Amazon.com. With your help that could change, and we can demonstrate to the country the depth of support for marijuana policy reform in this country. If it reaches #1, we will also draw national attention to the book's basic message -- that marijuana is safer than alcohol.
If you are planning to get yourself a copy of the critically acclaimed, Marijuana is Safer, we hope you will join hundreds of other supporters of more rational marijuana laws by making your purchase on August 20, 2009. (We would have preferred 4/20, but 8/20 will have to do.)
Just enter your email address below and we will send you a reminder about the Book Bomb before and/or on August 20.
If you are not yet familiar with the book, use the navigation bar above for a quick overview or make a non-purchasing visit to the Marijuana is Safer Amazon.com page, where you can read part of the book's Introduction and see additional endorsements.
Fuck the Man
Two New Anticorporate Books
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF Marketing himself.
Life Inc.
by Douglas Rushkoff
(Random House, $26)
Belching Out the Devil
by Mark Thomas
(Nation Books, $16.95)
When Douglas Rushkoff was mugged in front of his apartment building in a posh Brooklyn neighborhood, he did what just about any affluent white academic would do in response: First he felt guilty for his part in gentrifying Park Slope and leading his young attacker to a life of crime, and then he wrote the introduction to his new book, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (intro title: "Your Money or Your Life: A Lesson on the Front Stoop"), citing the mugging as a symptom of colonialism and, therefore, corporatism. This is classic Rushkoff, taking a personal experience or opinion and, without any supporting information, exploding it to the broadest scope possible. His book does not improve from this inauspicious beginning.
Rushkoff has been a cultural critic since 1994, the author of books with titles like Media Virus!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture and Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say. You can find Rushkoff's influence everywhere in the alternative media: Most of the writers who contribute to antiadvertising magazine Adbusters plagiarize Rushkoff's tone if not his content, and his work has been published by virtually every countercultural publication worth noticing over the last 15 years. He even hosts a show called The Media Squat on grizzled independent radio station WFMU, in which he gleefully picks apart the corporate media for a worldwide audience...
While Rushkoff whines luxuriantly, other authors are actually fighting meaningful battles on the anticorporate front. Mark Thomas's Belching Out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola isn't as flashy a book as Life Inc. It received a low-key paperback original release in the United States, and it didn't make national best-seller status like Rushkoff's book. But instead of airing bloated complaints against Coca-Cola's advertising strategies, Thomas actually travels the world, discovering injustices and unfair business practices committed in the name of cornering the world's soda market.
In chapter after chapter, Thomas investigates dubious activities around the world that can be attributed to the Coca-Cola corporation. He lists eight trade unionists who have been killed after speaking out against Coca-Cola, and he uncovers legal agreements that would require other Colombian pro-labor activists to never criticize Coca-Cola again. In El Salvadoran sugarcane fields, he witnesses children being forced to work in clear violation of international child-labor laws. He interviews citizens of an Indian village whose water has been stolen—at a rate of just under a million liters a day—from beneath them by a local bottling plant. With the help of an internal informant, he levies charges that Coca-Cola deliverymen are—sometimes by force—removing competitor's sodas from neighborhood bodegas in Mexico. And he discovers a church in Mexico that has incorporated the soda into its rituals, inciting belches that purportedly push out negative energy.
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/fuck-the-man/Content?oid=1972967
One giant step for jumbo: Amputee elephant Motola is fitted with state-of-the-art artificial leg
Leg up: Motala, 48, has been fitted with a prosthetic limb after her leg was blown off by a landmine
By Daily Mail Reporter
One small step for Motola the elephant, a giant leap for the world's injured animals.
Motola lost her foot and most of her left leg when she walked over a landmine ten years ago.
But yesterday, she stepped out happily - if a little tentatively - after being fitted with a state-of-the-art artificial limb.
In her first stroll with the prosthesis, 48-year-old Motola walked out of her enclosure for a few minutes, grabbed some dust with her trunk and jubilantly sprayed it in the air.
'It has gone very well - she has walked around twice,' said Soraida Salwala, founder of the Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation in Thailand.
'She has not put her whole weight on it yet, but she's OK.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1206967/One-giant-step-jumbo-Amputee-elephant-Motola-fitted-state-art-artificial-leg.html#ixzz0OYHb9aR1
Scalia says there’s nothing unconstitutional about executing the innocent.
By
Almost two decades ago, Troy Anthony Davis was convicted of murder and sentenced to die. Since then, seven of the witnesses against him have recanted their testimony, and some have even implicated Sylvester "Redd" Coles, a witness who testified that Davis was the shooter. In light of the very real evidence that Davis could be innocent of the crime that placed him on death row, the Supreme Court today invoked a rarely used procedure giving Davis an opportunity to challenge his conviction. Joined by Justice Clarence Thomas in dissent, however, Justice Antonin Scalia criticized his colleagues for thinking that mere innocence is grounds to overturn a conviction:
This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is "actually" innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged "actual innocence" is constitutionally cognizable.
So in Justice Scalia's world, the law has no problem with sending an innocent man to die. One wonders why we even bother to have a Constitution.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/17/scalia-actual-innocence/
Campaign to win official apology for Alan Turing
by Yakub Qureshi
The brilliant mathematician, who spent his key years at Manchester University, is hailed as one of the founders of modern computing.
But a conviction for homosexuality effectively ended his career. Troubled Turing went on to commit suicide in 1954, aged just 41.
Now a group of admirers of the scientist - named as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century by Time Magazine - are lobbying the government to make a posthumous apology.
Codebreaker
The Cambridge graduate was one of Britain's best wartime codebreakers - part of the team at Bletchley Park which unravelled the secret of the Enigma code machines used by German U-boats. Turing was awarded an OBE in 1945 for his wartime services to the Foreign Office and moved to Manchester to help work on the pioneering Mark 1 computer.
He was prosecuted for gross indecency for having sex with a man in 1952, but escaped jail after being offered an alternative of taking an experimental hormone treatment to reduce sex drive.
However, the case effectively ended his career and Turing fell into despair. His body was found by a cleaner at his Wilmslow home in 1954 - next to him was a half-eaten apple laced with cyanide. It was not until 1967 that laws against gay men were lifted.
More than 500 people have now signed the petition on the 10 Downing Street website to call for an official apology 'recognize the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended his life and career'.
Hounded
John Graham-Cumming, a leading British computer expert who launched the campaign, said: "I think that Alan Turing hasn't been recognised in Britain for his enormous contribution because he died in his forties and almost certainly because he was gay.
"It is atrocious that we don't recognise this man and the only way to do so is to apologise to him. This man was a national treasure and we hounded him to his death.
