The Los Angeles fires
Video: Time Lapse Test: Station Fire, a haunting little piece put together by Eric Speigelman.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
How to Draw an Ugly Health Plan and Make it Pretty
By Daryl Cagle
I know how you all like to see my sketches and I get lots of requests to explain my cartoons, so here is the latest one.
The goal with this one was to comment on the speculation that the Democrats would use sentiment about Teddy Kennedy's death to push health care legislation, possibly by attaching Kennedy's name to the bill. I started by making the health care character a generic ugly creature, but it occurred to me that a warthog is a better choice, because a warthog is understood to be ugly and it has the aspect of being a pig, to signify waste. Making the health plan a female is a little sexist, I suppose. I think of a woman wanting her photo to look pretty, so making the wart hog a female made the gag work a little better for me.
Next I had to deal with the mask that actually makes the warthog pretty, and I thought that using a photo of Kennedy rather than drawing his face made the cartoon more interesting. The mask was a little tricky because it had to have some perspective and Kennedy's face is defined by its width, so squishing it makes it look less Kennedylike. I found this photo that seems to be everywhere, and it looks pretty good, even squished, so that was the first hurdle to cross. Nice photo, I like his eyes.
I did my usual quick pencil sketch. The donkey didn't look good so I drew a new one on top with a Sharpie marker. That usually works for me; if I don't like what I do after a Sharpie marker I'll start over. Here's the sketch:
After that, I drew the finished line art on a vellum overlay. In Photoshop I squashed the Kennedy photo into the sign, and drew outlines around it with a wider facing edge to make it look more two dimensional. And I added gray tone to the rest of the drawing, so it would live in the same world as the photo.
That's how to draw an ugly health plan, and make it pretty.
http://blog.cagle.com/daryl/2009/08/30/how-to-draw-an-ugly-health-plan-and-make-it-pretty/
The Iranian Opposition's Second Life
by Max Burns
On July 22, a week into Iran's foreign media reporting ban, a group of Iranian protesters gathered on a grassy hill to speak out against Supreme Leader Khamenei's continued support for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some wore black T-shirts with a blood-spattered slogan: "Where Is My VOTE?" By midday, the protest had attracted several hundred attendees. One woman arrived wearing little more than a thong swimsuit and a pair of purple angel wings.
Second Life is one of many synthetic worlds, places that exist only on computers, where users create avatars — virtual representations of themselves — and interact with users worldwide as easily as if they were in a single room. The technology behind Second Life makes its synthetic world flexible enough to fit any interest. There are thousands of unique worlds-in-miniature in Second Life, all created by individual users who pay Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, for the privilege of creation.
One of the most active Iranian protest and discussion worlds is Club Habibi, described as a "Middle Eastern Oasis" where avatars can purchase region-themed clothing and command their characters to dance a virtual version of an Arab belly dance. Over 9,200 avatars pass through Club Habibi every hour. Some merely explore for a few minutes and fly off, while others meet up with virtual friends from places as far-flung as Damascus and Denver. Unsurprisingly, conversation often leads to Iran's electoral problems, where real-life Iranians can express themselves and carry their message beyond the locked-down borders of Khamenei's temporal dominion.
While places like Club Habibi provide a free virtual forum for Iranians to spread their message, other Second Life venues provide a more somber experience. Hundreds of Second Life players captured international media attention as early as June 25 after announcing plans for a "Virtual Vigil" in memory of anti-Ahmadinejad protesters killed by Iranian security forces. The vigil, which lasted nearly two hours, relied entirely on word-of-mouth to sustain the flow of virtual candle-holding mourners.
The vigil proved so successful that its organizers, a Second Life group named "Support Iran," announced ambitious plans to continue the vigil indefinitely. Nearly two months later, a casual visitor can still find several Second Life avatars diligently holding candles and placards in support of Iran's nascent democratic movement.
Rep. Frank: House will pass Ron Paul’s ‘audit the Fed’ bill this year
Powerful House Financial Services Committee chairman says central bank's lending powers to be 'curtailed'
Over half of the House members, most of them Republican, have signed on to the bill, H.R. 1207.
Though Frank disagrees — as many proponents of the bill contend — that the Fed is the cause of the U.S. dollar's shrinking value, he told a Massachusetts audience that he's been a proponent of greater transparency at the nation's central bank for some time.
"Here's what we plan to do: I want to restrict the powers of the Federal Reserve in a number of ways," he said. "First of all, they will be the major losers of power if we're successful, as I believe we will be, setting up that, uh, financial product protection committee."
The committee Frank mentioned was proposed by President Barack Obama during the campaign, as a way of protecting consumers. It was formally presented to Congress in the President's financial regulatory reform white papers in July, noted law firm Wiley Rein LLP.
"The Federal Reserve is now charged with protecting consumers," continued Frank. "They were supposed to do sub-prime mortgage restricted … Congress in 1994 gave the Federal Reserve the power to adopt rules to ban bad sub-prime mortgages. … They have the power to ban credit card abuses. They have the power to do most of it. They, under Greenspan, did nothing.
"Under Bernanke, they started to do things, but only after Congress started, when I became chairman of the [House Financial Services Committee], we began to act on these things: Sub-prime mortgages, credit cards, overdraft … And after we started, the Fed did. So, that's why one of the reasons why in the new consumer protection agency we will take away from the Federal Reserve the power to do consumer protection."
Frank added that Congress will reverse an action by the Democratic Congress of 1932 that gives the Fed authority to lend money at will.
"Under section 13.3 of the Federal Reserve Act, they can lend money to whoever they want," he said. "We are going to curtail that lending power. We are going to put some constraints on it."
He concluded: "Finally, we are going to subject them to a complete audit. I've been working with Ron Paul, the main sponsor of that bill …" Several in the audience applauded. "He believes that we don't want to have the audit appear as if it is influencing monetary policy because that would be inflationary … One of the things that will show you is what the Federal Reserve buys and sells. That will be made public, but not instantly. If it were instant, you would have a lot of people trading off that and it would have too much impact on the market. Again, Ron agrees with that. So, we will probably have that data released after a time period of several months — enough time so it won't be market sensitive."
Mason Tvert bamboozles his way onto the Amazon bestseller list
By Joel Warner
Now Tvert, with the help of two other pot activists, has distilled his central argument into book form -- Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? -- and, true to style, he's found a way to upend the publishing industry. Yesterday, Marijuana is Safer hit number 14 on Amazon's bestselling book list, beating out heavyweights like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and the newest installment of the Twilight saga -- even though Tvert's straight-to-paperback tome won't actually be released until September 15.
The secret to Tvert's success was a little something he cooked up called "The Great Marijuana Book Bomb of 2009," in which as many people as possible flooded Amazon.com with orders for the book to boost it up the charts. It's just another token Tvert move to attract attention to his cause -- though he would have preferred the event be on 4/20 instead of 8/20.
http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/2009/08/mason_tvert_his_bamboozles_his.php
George Will calls for pull-out
By MIKE ALLEN
George F. Will, the elite conservative commentator, is calling for U.S. ground troops to leave Afghanistan in his latest column.
"[F]orces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters," Will writes.
President Obama ordered a total of 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan in February and March, and casualties have mounted as the forces began confronting the Taliban more aggressively. August saw the highest monthly death toll for the U.S. since the invasion in 2001, the second record month in a row.
Will's prescription – in which he recalls Bismarck's decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870 - seems certain to split Republicans. He is a favorite of fiscal conservatives. The more hawkish right can be expected to attack his conclusion as foolhardy, short-sighted and naïve, potentially making the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attack.
The columnist's startling recommendation surfaced on the same day that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, sent an assessment up his chain of command recommending what he called "a revised implementation strategy." In a statement, McChrystal also called for "commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort."
In the column, Will warns that any nation-building strategy could be impossible to execute given the Taliban's ability to seemingly disappear into the rugged mountain terrain and the lack of economic development in the war-plagued nation.
Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA
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We are currently active in 20 states and growing. Our representatives have been screened to ensure that they are atheists, animal lovers, are moral / ethical with no criminal background, have the ability and desire to rescue your pet and the means to retrieve them and ensure their care for your pet's natural life.
We currently cover the following states:
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Our service is plain and simple; our fee structure is reasonable.
For $110.00 we will guarantee that should the Rapture occur within ten (10) years of receipt of payment, one pet per residence will be saved. Each additional pet at your residence will be saved for an additional $15.00 fee. A small price to pay for your peace of mind and the health and safety of your four legged friends.
“We don’t want your tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to trash the planet” The Federal Reserve, 2009
By Robert Singer
Having trouble understanding the events since the October 2008 financial crisis? Any of this sound familiar:
Banks hoarding their TARP funds Gas prices going up when they should be going down Automobile dealerships closed without regard to profitability Health Care reform: The Kevorkian is out of jail early
What's going on?
Bush Sr. said our way of life wasn't negotiable in 1992 but as of October 2008, it's all over but the weeping and gnashing of teeth.
And in one of those coincidences that don't happen very often: like all four financial meltdowns in history occurring in October, the October 2008 financial meltdown guaranteed Barack Obama, an unknown senator 4 years ago, would be the 44th president of the United States.
October 2008, to anyone not in denial, marked the last day the men behind the Federal Reserve, all connected to the House of Rothschild, gave up what's left of their wealth so the huddled middle class can trash the planet.
In 1910 these men already controlled one-sixth of the world's real wealth—gold, silver and raw materials—not the fiat currency we call money.
Trashing the planet began when the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, one of the most important domestic acts in the nation's history, took the power to create money from the people and gave it to the swindlers and scoundrels (robber barons) of our filtered history for profit.
One of the more absurd notions that found its way into the writings of economic experts, is that the Federal reserve took away the peoples right to create money so they could make a "profit."
If exchanging $500 trillion of real wealth: raw materials, commodities, copper, iron ore, petroleum, lead, silver and gold for fiat currency so the middle class (former members of the Third Estate i.e. serfs and slaves) could have houses, cars, RVs, TVs and DVDs—is profitable, then Econ 101 is for dummies and the robber barons are now Robin hood Barons.
During the last 100 years those swindlers were able to distort the structure of relative prices; generate misallocations of labor and capital throughout the economy; rationalize new governmental interventions in the face of the market "instability" manipulate the patterns of and the profits from international trade which resulted in the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970's, the dot-com and the housing market bubbles…all of which created unprecedented prosperity for the middle class, $500 trillion of Monopoly money for the House of Rothschild and ecocide for the Planet.
Banks Don't Make Loans To People Living In Tent Cities
The Robinhood Barons are now making generous interest payments to the banks for "parking" their TARP and other government taxpayer bailout money instead of making loans to struggling Americans living in their cars and in tent cities.
Oil prices are on the rise, which is driving up prices at the pump. Economics for dummies would dictate they should be falling.
Out-of-work, out-of-hope homeless people living in Bushvilles no longer need cheap gasoline to go shopping for all that affordable "stuff" the Fed financed so we could trash the planet.
And those Americans who are still employed will find it harder to get that sweet deal on a new car because auto dealers won't be competing with each other now that Brian Deese, special assistant to president Obama for economic policy made the decision (not the Chrysler bankruptcy judge), to close dealerships without regard to profitability.
Deese, age 31, in his first government position, shuffles back and forth from the West Wing to the Treasury Department dismantling the US Auto Industry and rewriting the rules of American "capitalism".
Deese's first rule: Withdraw Credit and Liquidity.
Result – Catch 22:
The pullback in spending causes companies to cut back on inventory and staff - Creating unemployment.
Which causes spending to fall and companies to cut back on inventory and staff -Creating more unemployment.
Causing spending to fall even further, forcing companies to cut back on inventory and staff - Creating even more unemployment…
Monday, August 31, 2009
My Dog Just Watered Your "Tree of Liberty"
I have some advice for all of us. Stop trying to get these people to realize how wrong they are and how right you are. Stop trying to apply reason to the profoundly unreasonable. Stop trying to mitigate or explain their collective temper tantrum. Stop trying to curry their favor, their votes, their attention. They don't care about truth, right and wrong, good or bad. They care about stomping feet, crying victim, and pointing fingers. Barney Frank had it exactly right, it's like arguing with a dining room table. Enough is enough. Fuck Kumbaya.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-seitzman/my-dog-just-watered-your_b_268288.html
Nick Turse, From My Lai to Lockerbie
On this one-way planet of ours, it's hard sometimes to imagine things any other way, but for a moment let's try. Imagine, for instance, that in recent years the director of Iranian intelligence oversaw a program of "extraordinary rendition" aimed at those who were believed to be prepared to commit acts of terror against that country's fundamentalist regime. Practically speaking, what this often meant was kidnapping suspects -- some quite innocent of such aims -- off the streets of Middle Eastern or South Asian cities and transporting them secretly to Iran, to "black sites" set up abroad, or to allied regimes known for their torture practices.
Imagine that these suspects, once in the hands of his agents -- the Geneva Conventions having been declared not applicable to them -- were then tortured, abused, and sometimes murdered. Imagine that, for this, the director, in a public ceremony with great hoopla, was awarded the Ayatollah Khomeini Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the land, and on retiring honorably wrote a bestselling memoir about his years in office. Imagine as well that, to help Iranian interrogators, lawyers close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had rewritten the law so that acts which the world had long agreed to be torture were now redefined as not so, and on that basis, they were instructed to do such things as waterboarding suspects, even as the fundamentalist regime regularly announced that, on the basis of its own definitions, it did not condone torture.
If such a scenario had occurred, we know what we would think of such people. We know what our media would say about such people. We know what we would demand as a fate for such people -- that they be brought to justice. The present regime in Iran has proven itself quite capable of committing its own set of horrors and tortures. The above description, however, could not be mistaken for the recent history of any agency but the CIA and associated outfits under the purview of the top officials and lawyers of the Bush administration. Indeed, George Tenet, CIA director from 1997-2004, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor possible, by George W. Bush in December 2004, when much of the above was already on the public record (and the president certainly knew far more). Tenet did then write At the Center of the Storm, a bestselling memoir, and so on.
Now, a new administration is in power and it has decided to investigate CIA interrogations -- but only those acts by Agency operatives (and its private contractors) that went beyond the bounds of Bush administration extremity, beyond the bounds, that is, of that administration's pretzled definitions of what was not torture. The rest gets a pass.
On the day that decision made headlines, another report, "U.S. Says Rendition to Continue, but With More Oversight" by David Johnston in the New York Times, barely got noticed, even though it indicated that a now-notorious program of the Bush years would be continued in the Obama era. In other words, the U.S. will go right on turning terror suspects over to third countries for incarceration and interrogation (something criticized by Barack Obama in his presidential campaign), only with undoubtedly meaningless "diplomatic assurances" of no-torture policies. (Johnston did not even mention the kidnapping part of the process.) I'm still waiting for someone to ask the question: Why turn suspects over to seedy regimes if you don't expect them to act seedily?
Had China announced that it was going to turn rebel Uighurs captured outside the country over to Uzbekistan, or Myanmar made it clear that it was planning to send dissidents kidnapped in Thailand to Syria, we would denounce such policies to the skies. But it's us, and as Nick Turse, TomDispatch associate editor and author of the remarkable book on American militarism, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, points out, we are the great exception. If we do it, it essentially doesn't count -- and perhaps more remarkably, it never dents our urge to stand on the highest moral ground around and accuse others of heinous acts. Of course, when you still want to think of yourself as the planet's sole superpower, you naturally feel you have license to do such things, and leave yourself out of the equation. It's evidently the global equivalent of James Bond's license to kill, or Monopoly's get-out-of-jail-free card. Tom
Apologies, Anger, and Apathy
My Lai and Lockerbie Reconsidered
by Nick TurseA week ago, two convicted mass murderers leaped back into public consciousness as news coverage of their stories briefly intersected. One was freed from prison, continuing to proclaim his innocence, and his release was vehemently denounced in the United States as were the well-wishers who welcomed him home. The other expressed his contrition, after almost 35 years living in his country in a state of freedom, and few commented.
When Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan sentenced in 2001 to 27 years in prison for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was released from incarceration by the Scottish government on "compassionate grounds," a furor erupted. On August 22nd, ABC World News with Charles Gibson featured a segment on outrage over the Libyan's release. It was aired shortly before a report on an apology offered by William Calley, who, in 1971 as a young lieutenant, was sentenced to life in prison for the massacre of civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.
After al-Megrahi, who served eight years in prison, arrived home to a hero's welcome in Libya, officials in Washington expressed their dismay. To White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, it was "outrageous and disgusting"; to President Barack Obama, "highly objectionable." Calley, who admitted at trial to killing Vietnamese civilians personally, but served only three years of house arrest following an intervention by President Richard Nixon, received a standing ovation from the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Georgia, the city where he lived for years following the war. (He now resides in Atlanta.) For him, there was no such uproar, and no one, apparently, thought to ask either Gibbs or the president for comment, despite the eerie confluence of the two men and their fates.
Part of the difference in treatment was certainly the passage of time and Calley's contrition, however many decades delayed, regarding the infamous massacre of more than 500 civilians. "There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," the Vietnam veteran told his audience. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry." For his part, al-Megrahi, now dying of cancer, accepted that relatives of the 270 victims of the Lockerbie bombing "have hatred for me. It's natural to behave like this... They believe I'm guilty, which in reality I'm not. One day the truth won't be hiding as it is now. We have an Arab saying: 'The truth never dies.'"
American Exceptionalism
Calley was charged in the deaths of more than 100 civilians and convicted in the murder of 22 in one village, while al-Megrahi was convicted of the murder of 270 civilians aboard one airplane. Almost everyone, it seems, found it perverse, outrageous, or "gross and callous" that the Scottish government allowed a convicted mass murderer to return to a homeland where he was greeted with open arms. No one seemingly thought it odd that another mass murderer had lived freely in his home country for so long. The families of the Lockerbie victims were widely interviewed. As the Calley story broke, no American reporter apparently thought it worth the bother to look for the families of the My Lai victims, let alone ask them what they thought of the apology of the long-free officer who had presided over, and personally taken part in the killing of, their loved ones.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175108
Sphere: Related Content
Iraq bombers were recently freed by US: official
Two truck bombers who killed 95 people in devastating attacks on the Iraqi finance and foreign ministries were recently released from US custody, a senior interior ministry official said on Sunday.
"The suicide bomber who blew himself up at the ministry of foreign affairs was released three months ago from Camp Bucca," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity, referring to the US jail near Basra.
"The suicide bomber who blew himself up outside the ministry of finance was also released a few months ago from the same jail."
The August 19 attacks in Baghdad also wounded 600 people in the worst day of violence to hit the country for 18 months.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090830/twl-iraq-bombers-were-recently-freed-by-3cd7efd.html
Cindy Sheehan's Lonely Vigil in Obamaland
The Silence of the Antiwar Movement is Deafening
By JOHN V. WALSH
Cindy Sheehan will be at Martha's Vineyard beginning August 25 a short way from Obama's vacation paradise of the celebrity elite but very far from the Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq where the body bags and cemeteries fill up each day as Obama's wars rage on. She will remain there from August 25 through August 29 and has issued a call for all peace activists to join her there. For those of us close by in the New England states and in New York City, there would seem to be a special obligation to get to Martha's Vineyard as soon as we can.
A funny thing has happened on Cindy Sheehan's long road from Crawford, Texas, to Martha's Vineyard. Many of those who claim to lead the peace movement and who so volubly praised her actions in Crawford, TX, are not to be seen. Nor heard. The silence in fact is deafening, or as Cindy put it in an email to this writer, "crashingly deafening." Where are the email appeals to join Cindy from The Nation or from AFSC or Peace Action or "Progressive" Democrats of America (PDA) or even Code Pink? Or United for Peace and Justice. (No wonder UFPJ is essentially closing shop, bereft of most of their contributions and shriveling up following the thinly veiled protest behind the "retirement" of Leslie Cagan.) And what about MoveOn although it was long ago thoroughly discredited as principled opponents of war or principled in any way shape or form except slavish loyalty to the "other" War Party. And of course sundry "socialist" organizations are also missing in action since their particular dogma will not be front and center. These worthies and many others have vanished into the fog of Obama's wars.
Just to be sure, this writer contacted several of the "leaders" of the "official" peace movement in the Boston area – AFSC, Peace Action, Green Party of MA (aka Green Rainbow Party) and some others. Not so much as the courtesy of a reply resulted from this effort - although the GRP at least posted a notice of the action. (It is entirely possible that some of these organizations might mention Cindy's action late enough and quickly enough so as to cover their derrieres while ensuring that Obama will not be embarrassed by protesting crowds.) We here in the vicinity of Beantown are but a hop, skip and cheap ferry ride from Martha's Vineyard. Same for NYC. So we have a special obligation to respond to Cindy's call.
However, not everyone has failed to publicize the event. The Libertarians at Antiwar.com are on the job, and its editor in chief Justin Raimondo wrote a superb column Monday on the hypocritical treatment of Sheehan by the "liberal" establishment. (1) As Raimondo pointed out, Rush Limbaugh captured the hypocrisy of the liberal left in his commentary, thus:
"Now that she's headed to Martha's Vineyard, the State-Controlled Media, Charlie Gibson, State-Controlled Anchor, ABC: 'Enough already.' Cindy, leave it alone, get out, we're not interested, we're not going to cover you going to Martha's Vineyard because our guy is president now and you're just a hassle. You're just a problem. To these people, they never had any true, genuine emotional interest in her. She was just a pawn. She was just a woman to be used and then thrown overboard once they're through with her and they're through with her. They don't want any part of Cindy Sheehan protesting against any war when Obama happens to be president."
Limbaugh has their number, just as they have his. Sometimes it is quite amazing how well each of the war parties can spot the other's hypocrisy. But Cindy Sheehan is no one's dupe; she is a very smart and very determined woman who no doubt is giving a lot of White House operatives some very sleepless nights out there on the Vineyard. Good for her.
TED KENNEDY…and then some!
By Taylor Jones
Here's the only "nice" caricature I've ever drawn of Ted Kennedy. Can't publish the nastiest one.
Don't get me wrong: Like nearly everyone else, I regarded Edward Moore Kennedy as the greatest legislator of our time — ranking right up there in American history with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.
…You know, ordinary citizens could present a eulogy, as a group, at Ted Kennedy's funeral, and simply recite the titles of dozens of pieces of major legislation the late senator authored and guided into law. Among them: the Voting Rights Act; the Americans with Disabilities Act; immigration reform laws; the Clean Water Act; the Family Leave Act; No Child Left Behind. (Well, some children left behind).
Then there was Title IX, which inspired the sports bra. And the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 (and which most 18-year-olds have ignored). Kennedy also cosponsored ratification of the United Nations, the G.I. Bill, and creation of the Interstate Highway System. Not to mention the Missouri Compromise and the Magna Carta. These last sponsorships have only recently come to light.
But Ted Kennedy knew. He'd mastered them all!
Why, then, have I been relentlessly mean to the late senator and the members of his extended family over so many years? Well, because the First Amendment of our Constitution allows me to be a snot. A professionally snarky s.o.b. A small-minded meanie. In other words, an editorial cartoonist.
…And, well, because the flip side of Ted Kennedy (and so many members of his enormous extended family) was so darn flawed. Like the rest of us — only more so, and played out on the public stage. This weekend, as politicians, civic and religious leaders, and Kennedy family friends hail Uncle Ted's profound achievements, and share poignant stories, I'll fondly remember the Ted who wandered around the family beach house in Florida…sans his pants.
In fact, the personal failings, antics, alleged crimes and misdemeanors, and often just the faces of the entire Kennedy clan have given caricaturists and editorial cartoonists a priceless gift for two generations. In this regard, the Roosevelts, the Bushes and the Adamses just can't compare.
Take Caroline Kennedy-Schlossberg, a dedicated public servant who lives in New York and says, "you know," a lot.
There's Patrick, who serves in Congress and wobbles a bit when he drives at night.
And Joe Kennedy II, who pitches heating oil for Hugo Chavez.
There's Maria Shriver, once a strikingly beautiful news anchor, and now an extreme caricature of herself. Married to the personification of a walking caricature, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
…And then there's William Kennedy Smith.
I've caricatured President Kennedy a few times, all of them long after his assassination. I was but a kid a couple of weeks shy of my eleventh birthday at that tragic time. I don't have a scan of my best caricature of JFK, done for a book featuring caricatures of all the presidents from Washington to Reagan. I no longer possess the original, for that matter. But it, too, was irreverent. It portrayed JFK with a halo over his head, and a scrap of note paper protruding from his jacket pocket — scribbled with Marilyn Monroe's phone number.
http://blog.cagle.com/jones/2009/08/28/ted-kennedyand-then-some/
Storming Camelot: Sen. Kennedy's death brings out worst from the right
Following Wednesday's early-morning news that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy had lost his battle with brain cancer, Media Matters posted the following statement from president Eric Burns at 3:51 a.m. ET on the County Fair blog:
"Ted Kennedy was a true American statesman. The values that he so eloquently and tirelessly championed represent the best of our American ideals. He reached across the aisle to get hard work done but never sacrificed principle. Though he is gone, the dream will forever live on. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Vicki Kennedy, the Senator's family, his loyal staff and the millions of lives he touched throughout his historic life and career."
Far from letting Kennedy rest in peace, many media conservatives savagely attacked the Senate's last liberal lion. Leading the charge was radio host Rush Limbaugh, who began his broadcast Wednesday morning eulogizing Kennedy by calling him "the lion of the Senate" before noting that "we were his prey." Hardly finished, El Rushbo would go on to say that "Kennedy screwed up everything he touched." He said Kennedy's opposition to Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination was "the beginning of the dawn of the age of the current hate." He claimed Kennedy "used the government to take money from people that work to give it to people that don't work" and that "most of Senator Kennedy's plans ended up damaging the people he seeks to help." Finally, Limbaugh marveled at the fact that "the Constitution is still there, even after Ted Kennedy in the Senate for 52 [sic] years." All that and more led MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Politico's Patrick Gavin to agree that "Limbaugh showed great restraint" in discussing Kennedy's death. Can you imagine what Rush would have said had it not been for such "restraint?"
Limbaugh was hardly alone in his disgusting attacks on Kennedy. Radio host and Fox News political analyst Tammy Bruce kept it classy, claiming on Twitter that Fox News Sunday's Chris "Wallace noted the last great act of Kennedy's career was to endorse [President] Obama. I agree: he left a woman to drown and now he's left us to drown."
Eric Sanger, a director at Premiere Radio Networks, ABC Radio/Citadel Media and The Sean Hannity Show, said on Facebook (emphasis added), "The irony is that the media is already positioning Ted as a champion for the little man against wealth and privilege. This piece of garbage was the poster child for wealth and privilege. Hopefully, this event will mark the end of this repugnant family and all the endless crap, entitlement, personal indulgences and collateral damage (Kopechne, Bessette, Bowman, Moxely, etc.)."
Wesley Pruden, a Washington Times columnist, wrote that Kennedy's death was "a good career move" and that Democrats "are smiling through their tears," while Andrew Breitbart, a fellow Times columnist, called Kennedy a "villain," a "duplicitous bastard," and a "prick" on Twitter, as noted by Politico. Riehl World View, a right-wing blog, came to Breitbart's defense, claiming that liberals criticizing him were "hypocrites" because when Dick Cheney dies, they're going to do the exact same thing. That's right, liberals today are hypocrites because of what they might do in the future. Now that's some crazy fortune-telling.
Fox News host Sean Hannity told his audience that "out of respect for his family," he had decided not to "bring up Mary Jo Kopechne" or Kennedy's "radical socialism." Seriously.
Lynching of Cynthia McKinney urged by ‘journalist’ trained and paid by FBI
Hal Turner called her 'a violent, black, racist, bitch' whose lynching would teach other Blacks that 'white people are tired of your bullshit, behave or die'
by David Swanson
Visiting the Bay Area on a five-day fundraising tour for the SF Bay View, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney joins Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff at a gathering Friday, Aug. 21, at the Black Dot in West Oakland. Two days later, on Aug. 23, she learned that a "journalist" who had called for her lynching in 2006 was working at the time for the FBI. – Photo: Kamau Amen-Ra
Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney sent an email around on Sunday in which she wrote:
"[I]t has just now come to my attention that a 'journalist' who suggested that I be lynched was actually being paid by our own government to say that. Now, when I reported it to the FBI, how in the world was I to know that he was at that time on the FBI's payroll?"
"Hate blogger" Hal Turner's lawyer said last week, and prosecutors agreed, that Turner was "trained by the FBI on how to be deliberately provocative" and "worked for the FBI from 2002 to 2007 as an 'agent provocateur' and was taught by the agency 'what he could say that wouldn't be crossing the line.'"
Turner is being charged with making death threats against Connecticut legislators and Illinois judges and is apparently going to claim that his actions were legal because he did the same sort of thing when employed by the FBI. In an Associated Press story published Aug. 18, Katie Nelson writes:
"Prosecutors have acknowledged that Turner was an informant who spied on radical right-wing organizations, but the defense has said Turner was not working for the FBI when he allegedly made threats against Connecticut legislators and wrote that three federal judges in Illinois deserved to die.
Big Brass Bull: Pentagon Deceit on Media Manipulation Confirmed
| Written by Chris Floyd |
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Contrary to the insistence of Pentagon officials this week that they are not rating the work of reporters covering U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Stars and Stripes has obtained documents that prove that reporters' coverage is being graded as "positive," "neutral" or "negative."
"The purpose of this memo is to provide an assessment of [a reporter from a major U.S. newspaper] … in order to gauge the expected sentiment of his work while on an embed mission in Afghanistan," reads the preamble to one of the reporter profiles prepared for the Pentagon by The Rendon Group, a controversial Washington-based public relations firm.
But the Rendon profiles reviewed by Stars and Stripes prove otherwise. One of the profiles evaluates work published as recently as May, indicating that the rating practice did not in fact cease last October as Whitman stated.
"For me, a tool like this serves no purpose and it doesn't serve me with any value," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters as some of the affected war correspondents began demanding to see their secret military profiles...."I haven't seen anything that violates any policies, but again, I'm learning about aspects of this as I question our folks in Afghanistan," Whitman said. "If I find something that is inconsistent with Defense Department values and policies, you can be sure I will address it."
Whitman told Pentagon reporters that he was inquiring about the issue, but he added that the Pentagon is not launching any formal inquiry to the matter.
|
A few days agoArchbishop Tutu: "Arabs paying the price of Germany's crimes"
In an Interview with Haaretz newspaper, Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated that Israel must learn from the Holocaust that it cannot gain security through fences, walls and guns.
by Saed Bannoura
The Nobel Prize laureate made his statement to Haaretz in Jerusalem and "The Elders" concluded their tour in Israel and Palestine, except the Gaza Strip. The Elders are hoping to be able to visit Gaza in the future.
Archbishop Tutu added that the west was consumed with the guilt for what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust, "and they should be, but the people who are paying the price for that are that Palestinians".
He also referred to a meeting he had in the past with a German ambassador who told him that Germany is guilty for two wrongs; what it did to the Jews, and the current suffering of the Palestinians.
Archbishop Tutu criticized some Jewish groups in the United States who intimidate any person who criticizes the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and accused them of being anti-Semite.
He said that such groups pressured many universities in the United States into cancelling his appearance on their campuses.
Tutu added that this is a very unfortunate issue, and that his opinions are derived from the Torah.
"God created us on his own image", he said, "God is always in favor of the oppressed".
THE GUNS OF AUGUST
by Ted Rall
INDIANAPOLIS--No wonder President Obama won't stand up for us. He won't even defend his personal safety!
Two weeks ago, a right-wing man protested outside the president's healthcare meeting in New Hampshire wearing a gun strapped to his leg. Lest we miss his point, he carried a sign that called for the shedding of blood in a new revolution.
A week later, a dozen men appeared outside Obama's appearance in Phoenix brandishing loaded guns. "We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote," said one, who carried an AR-15 military-style automatic rifle. You read that right--they threatened to use guns to annul the results of the last election.
Cops stood by and watched. The Secret Service did nothing. Strictly speaking, these mooks are allowed to openly carry guns. Which is fine with me. I'm a big fan of the Second Amendment.
It is, however, horrifying to watch goons threaten to assassinate the President of the United States and get away with it. Make no mistake: guns don't have anything to do with healthcare. This is a revival of Klannism. A black man is president, and the good ol' boys don't like it. That's what this is about: putting him in his place. Which, if they or someone they inspire has their way, will be six feet under.
God. The smirks those turds wear! Run a Google Image search on "Klansmen" or "lynching." Same ones.
(Doubt this is about race? Bill Clinton's 1993 healthcare proposal would have gone farther than Obama's. And he wasn't nearly as popular. Yet he didn't face gun-toting loons at his public appearances.)
Friday, August 28, 2009
Barack Obama on brink of deal for Middle East peace talks
by Ewen MacAskill
• US to adopt much tougher line over Iran's nuclear ambitions
• Israel to freeze construction of settlements on West Bank
• France and Russia offer to host Middle East peace conference
Palestinians walk through a door in a section of the barrier between Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Barack Obama is close to brokering an Israeli-Palestinian deal that will allow him to announce a resumption of the long-stalled Middle East peace talks before the end of next month, according to US, Israeli, Palestinian and European officials.
Key to bringing Israel on board is a promise by the US to adopt a much tougher line with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons programme. The US, along with Britain and France, is planning to push the United Nations security council to expand sanctions to include Iran's oil and gas industry, a move that could cripple its economy.
In return, the Israeli government will be expected to agree to a partial freeze on the construction of settlements in the Middle East. In the words of one official close to the negotiations: "The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not."
Details of the breakthrough deal will be hammered out tomorrow in London, where the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is due to hold talks with the US special envoy, George Mitchell. Netanyahu met Gordon Brown today in Downing Street, where the two discussed both settlements and the Iranian nuclear programme.
Although the negotiations are being held in private, they have reached such an advanced stage that both France and Russia have approached the US offering to host a peace conference.
Obama has pencilled in the announcement of his breakthrough for either a meeting of world leaders at the UN general assembly in New York in the week beginning 23 September or the G20 summit in Pittsburgh on 24-25 September.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/25/barack-obama-middle-east-peace
Sphere: Related ContentThe media can't handle the truth
Media sheep facing truth-hungry Internet wolves
By Gene Lyons
So yet another Bush administration Cabinet-level official has petitioned to get his conscience and reputation back. This time, it's Tom Ridge, former secretary of Homeland Security. The one-time Pennsylvania governor admits in a new book that he felt political pressure from the White House to issue bogus terror alerts before the 2004 presidential election.Big surprise, right? By 2004, anybody who didn't grasp that crying wolf was the Bush/Cheney administration's basic game plan was probably also astonished last January when the "Texas cowboy" who's never been seen on a horse chose a Dallas mansion over his beloved ranch. Golly, who's doing all that brush-cutting?
Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of the Ridge revelations has been a flame war that's broken out between establishment Washington pundits and less-reverent bloggers. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder started it by observing in smug inside-the-Beltway fashion that he and like-minded colleagues were actually right to be wrong about fake terror warnings.
People who smelled a rat, see, "based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." Whereas, sober-sided thinkers like him credited the Bush administration's good intentions.
Confronted with ample contemporaneous evidence of Bush administration flimflams by Salon's Glenn Greenwald and the scholarly Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake.com, Ambinder apologized for the "gut hatred" part. But he alibied: "Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit."
Yeah, sure. Purely with regard to terrorism and national security, by 2004, Bush/Cheney had already gotten caught deceiving the public about having "no warning" before the 9/11 attacks, not to mention about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. If skepticism was still inappropriate, would it ever be warranted?
Yet people who found the timing of terror alerts suspect, such as then-Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, were dismissed as crackpots.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/08/27/lyons/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/feature
Very murky waters indeed
For a start, despite the speculation, nobody has produced clinching evidence to show the British government did a backstairs' deal with Colonel Gaddafi for the bomber's return. On the other hand, it is now quite clear that London was anxious to normalise relations with Tripoli as quickly and as best it could -- and that Gaddafi had made it clear that could not happen unless the bomber was sent back.
As a result, attention has moved away from the Scottish government's decision to free the bomber on controversial "compassionate" grounds to London and the role the British government might have played in facilitating the Lockerbie bomber's release. And here we enter very murky waters indeed.
Official and unofficial British government contacts with Libya have been extensive. Last night we learned that three government ministers have made trips to Tripoli in the last 15 months: the then trade minister Digby Jones (May 2008), Health minister Dawn Primarolo (November 2008) and Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell (February 2009).
We do not know what was said in any of these Tripoli talks. But remember this: Saif Gaddifi, the Libyan dictator's favourite son and a key figure in the bomber's release, has averred that "in all commercial contracts for oil and gas with Britain, Megrahi [the now-released bomber] was always on the table." So it's reasonable to assume the ministers had their ears bent.
But not them alone. In recent years two British prime ministers, a Russian oligarch, the scion of a European banking dynasty, a Prince of the Realm, a leader of Big Oil and our very own "Prince of Darkness" (aka Business Secretary Peter Mandelson) have all had walk-on parts, if not more, in events that preceded the release of the Lockerbie bomber. It's a cast of characters that would do justice to a Bond film.
At the centre of this possible web of intrigue is Saif, the shaven-headed, London School of Economics-educated son of the Libyan dictator. Turns out he is a good friend of Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminium baron, and Nat Rothschild, of the eponymous banking dynasty.
Saif invited both to his 37th birthday party in June in Becici in Montenegro, into which Deripaska and Rothschild have poured around $1 billion to create a sort of St Tropez in the Balkans. Saif is also pumping Libyan money into Montenegro from his country's vast investment fund, reason enough for Rothschild last year to host a party in his honour in New York.
Mandelson claims the meeting was only "fleeting" but officials admit they did discuss the Lockerbie case. A week later it became public that the bomber might be released on "compassionate" grounds though, of course, there may be no connection. It was then revealed that Mandelson had previously met Saif at a reception in London in May.
The Business Secretary maintains that any suggestion that a deal was being cooked up is not just wrong but "offensive", which we should accept at face value until facts suggest otherwise.
But we have it from Saif's own mouth that there could be no real progress in British-Libyan business co-operation unless the matter of the Lockerbie bomber was dealt with.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/dailypolitics/andrewneil/2009/08/very_murky_waters_indeed.html
CIA Documents Provide Little Cover for Cheney Claims
Documents Fail to Exonerate 'Enhanced Interrogation' Techniques
"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."
Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here. Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney's claims that the "enhanced interrogation" program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney's contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA's interrogations.
In response to questions about [al-Qaeda's] efforts to acquire [weapons of mass destruction], [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] revealed that he had met three individuals involved in [al-Qaeda's] program to produce anthrax. He appears to have calculated, incorrectly, that we had this information already, given that one of the three — Yazid Sufaat — had been in foreign custody for several months.
This is a far cry from torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into revealing such information. It would be tendentious to believe that the torture didn't have any impact on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — he himself said that he lied to interrogators in order to get the torture to stop — but the document itself doesn't attempt to present a case that the "enhanced interrogation" program was a factor, let alone the determinant factor, in the intelligence bounty the document says he provided.
http://washingtonindependent.com/56344/cia-documents-provide-little-cover-for-cheney-claims
Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess
by Gary Wolf
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.
The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? In a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even usernames. Millions of people apparently believe that love awaits here, but it is well hidden. Is this really the best we can do?
Odd perhaps, but no odder than what you see at the most popular job-search site: another wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Subject to a highly unpredictable filtering system that produces daily outrage among people whose help-wanted ads have been removed without explanation, this site not only beats its competitors—Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo's HotJobs—but garners more traffic than all of them combined. Are our standards really so low?
But if you really want to see a mess, go visit the nation's greatest apartment-hunting site, the first likely choice of anybody searching for a rental or a roommate. On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can't easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent. Customer support? Visit the help desk if you enjoy being insulted. How much market share does this housing site have? In many cities, a huge percentage. It isn't worth trying to compare its traffic to competitors', because at this scale there are no competitors.
Each of these sites, of course, is merely one of the many sections of craigslist, which dominates the market in facilitating face-to-face transactions, whether people are connecting to buy and sell, give something away, rent an apartment, or have some sex. With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=all
Odd perhaps, but no odder than what you see at the most popular job-search site: another wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Subject to a highly unpredictable filtering system that produces daily outrage among people whose help-wanted ads have been removed without explanation, this site not only beats its competitors—Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo's HotJobs—but garners more traffic than all of them combined. Are our standards really so low?
But if you really want to see a mess, go visit the nation's greatest apartment-hunting site, the first likely choice of anybody searching for a rental or a roommate. On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can't easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent. Customer support? Visit the help desk if you enjoy being insulted. How much market share does this housing site have? In many cities, a huge percentage. It isn't worth trying to compare its traffic to competitors', because at this scale there are no competitors.
Each of these sites, of course, is merely one of the many sections of craigslist, which dominates the market in facilitating face-to-face transactions, whether people are connecting to buy and sell, give something away, rent an apartment, or have some sex. With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=all
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