Submitted by Dan Bacher on Wed, 07/28/2010 - 12:47pm
Assembly Speaker John Pérez Is on the Wrong Side of History
By Dan Bacher
In a historic protest on July 21, over 300 members of California Indian Tribes and their allies peacefully took control of a Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Blue Ribbon Task Force meeting in Fort Bragg to protest the violation of indigenous gathering and fishing rights under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s controversial MLPA Initiative.
Over 60 immigrant workers from the sea urchin industry, many from indigenous communities in central and southern Mexico that were forced to come to the U.S. after they were driven off their land under NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), marched side by side with members of the Yurok, Tolowa, Cahto, Kashia Pomo, Karuk, Hoopa Valley, Maidu, Hopi, Navajo and other tribes. Besides them were recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, seaweed harvesters, environmentalists and sea urchin divers and local political candidates.
Will House Democrats Oppose a Jobless War Supplemental?
Sunday 25 July 2010
by: Robert Naiman, t r u t h o u t | Report
The war supplemental for Afghanistan is expected to come back from the Senate to the House this week - without any kind of timetable for military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and without money to save teachers' jobs attached.
AP reports:
In a take-it-or-leave-it gesture, the Senate voted Thursday night to reject more than $20 billion in domestic spending the House had tacked on to its $60 billion bill to fund President Barack Obama's troop surge in Afghanistan.
The moves repel a long-shot bid by House Democrats earlier this month to resurrect their faltering jobs agenda with $10 billion in grants to school districts to avoid teacher layoffs, $5 billion for Pell Grants to low-income college students, $1 billion for a summer jobs program and $700 million to improve security along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Labor unions had strongly backed the House Democratic effort to attach money to the supplemental, to boost employment and avoid teacher layoffs. Will these unions now urge House Democrats to vote no on any jobless war supplemental?
Few expect that the House, in a freestanding vote this week, will reject the $33 billion request for the Afghanistan war, since until now there has been a solid block of more than 90 percent of House Republicans committed to voting yes on what they would consider a "relatively clean" war supplemental.
But what is in serious dispute is how many House Democrats will vote no on a jobless war supplemental. A large Democratic no vote would send a strong signal to the White House of House Democratic impatience with a blank checkbook for endless and fruitless war, while the administration insists that there is no money to save jobs at home, at a time of nearly 10 percent measured unemployment. A large Democratic no vote would also send a powerful signal of Democratic "no confidence" in the Pentagon's war plans, increasing pressure on the administration to vigorously pursue a political resolution to the conflict and to establish a timetable for military withdrawal - as desired by the majority of Americans and three-quarters of Democrats, according to a recent CBS poll.
Chicago-To the cheers of thousands of rank and file activists, AFL CIO head Richard Trumka accepted the nomination of the newly formed US Labor Party for the Presidency of the United States. Trumka will make his run as the standard bearer of a party fielding a full slate of candidates from the local and state to federal levels, running with the support of all major national and international unions, many peace and environmental organizations, and millions of economically and politically disenfranchised Americans.
Addressing a packed convention center a stone's throw from Chicago's haymarket, Trumka's remarks evoked labor's fallen heros and rekindled themes of radical trade unionism long thought vanquished after generations of hostility to organized labor fomented by right wing think tanks, mainstream media outlets and an army of pro-business lobbyists in Washington.
Submitted by libbyliberal on Mon, 07/26/2010 - 8:16pm
From Campaign for Peace and Democracy in an email:
Dear friend of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy,
U.S. intervention in Afghanistan is facing increasing challenge, and this week's dramatic Wikileaks revelations -- the biggest U.S. war expose since Dan Ellsberg's Pentagon papers -- make it all the more difficult for Congress to keep funding this horrific war. It is an important moment for all of us who want immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to raise our voices.
It looks like there will be an up-and-down House vote this week on the Afghan war supplemental funding. The Senate has stripped the bill of all unrelated issues such as funding for teachers, so the meaning of the vote will be clear: there will be no excuses for voting "Yes" or abstaining (not that such excuses were ever legitimate.)
Submitted by libbyliberal on Sat, 07/24/2010 - 8:08pm
[spoiler alert]
I have not been an avid mystery reader, even of the old classics. I do, however, groove on dramatized mysteries, and especially -- in the past decade -- those produced by PBS Masterpiece Theater.
These adaptations are professionally and brilliantly done. The writing. The acting. The direction. The cinematography. I have appreciated all the generations of Marple, for example. Each actress has brought a unique and exciting flair to that savvy old woman.
It has taken me a good while to come to appreciate Christie’s Hercule Poirot. The convincing and formidable David Suchet finally brought me on board. However, after seeing a recent adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, I am tempted to de-board. Not out of disappointment in Suchet’s performance, but in watching this famous fictional detective endorse torture in the name of profoundly-motivated vigilantism. To make Poirot OKAY with that. To make him a moral “relativist”.
IMHO … this is NOT OKAY!!!!
Two scenes, not dramatically presented as I understand it in Christie’s novel, introduce this episode. They are jarring and no doubt aspire to give a quick-fix foreshadowing and faux-support to Poirot’s eventual abandonment of “law” at the end of the narrative, or more accurately, his collusion with "lawlessness" of a righteous and dramatically wronged group of people.
Submitted by Tjadendevries on Sat, 07/24/2010 - 4:31pm
I have no idea what that guy's saying (something about government subsidies), or what the goat is going on about (probably tax cuts or corporate subsidies for the wealthy), but the goat's reaction looks awfully familiar
Submitted by Tjadendevries on Mon, 07/19/2010 - 4:37pm
The first of two videos with Emmy Award winning reporter George Knapp. It exposes the corruption and outright baldfaced lies by the corporate-to-BLM-and-back-again-revolving-door and political-career-climber-muckety-muck-bureaucrats. The next video explains the reason for BP's involvement with the roundups in Nv. and possibly California ... which is, BP's, among other's, interest in the Ruby Pipeline, a 42" Natural Gas Pipeline from Wyoming to Oregon.
Part one covers the history of the BLM's lies and a former BLM employee, Craig Downer who quit in disgust and has proven the BLM's data is false, provides the factual counterpoint to those lies. Part one also covers the investigations into the bogus data used to support these lies, via FOIA work done by a private citizen, Cindy MacDonald, that shows what the true motivations are behind these heinous acts. We'll also get a glimpse into George's 20 plus year investigation of this activity , the truth about the horses, their land and how it's been handed over to Big Agriculture (Corporate Cattle Ranches) and Big Oil, all at the expense of the U.S. Tax Payer and in violation of U.S. Federal Law.
Submitted by Tjadendevries on Mon, 07/19/2010 - 3:33pm
Boxer has taken to comparing her years of "public service" to Fiorina's choice "to become a CEO, lay off 30,000 workers, ship jobs overseas (and) have two yachts."
Submitted by libbyliberal on Sun, 07/18/2010 - 9:10pm
Troops ream Afghan elders,
“Stop Taliban-money kills!"
OUR soldiers kill, why?
We never find out from this movie. We never hear any of them ask, either.
Fly-on-the-wall, or rather, on-the-craggy-rock-surface reality.
I appreciated this film. The filmmakers risked their lives, the same way the soldiers were risking theirs. I can understand the risk, admittedly monstrously awesome, the movie makers took for their art. As for the soldiers risking their lives over there? I have more trouble fathoming the soldiers’ risk (aside from authoritarian-following, trapped within the military matrix, betrayed by the ruling class rat bastards of the United States reasons. Excuse my French.).
Dropped into an insane, PTSD-creating environment, not for a minute but for 15 long months for the soldiers. A psyche-altering, along with possibly, even probably, life-ending, predicament. (One soldier said into the camera early on, “I’m gonna die here!”)
If you manage to escape with your life, what has it done to your sanity?
Submitted by Tjadendevries on Sun, 07/18/2010 - 4:31pm
(This is from a week ago but because of computer issues I couldn't post it) Be prepared to be shocked by the videos in the next few posts in this series
CARSON CITY, Nev. — The U.S. Bureau of Land Management suspended a wild horse roundup in northeast Nevada on Monday after seven animals died of dehydration and another was shot after it broke its leg in a holding pen.
Animal rights activists were outraged, saying the outcome was predicable given the sweltering temperatures and helicopters used to gather the animals.
The BLM said the animals appeared in otherwise good shape when two groups were herded by helicopter to holding pens in northern Elko County on Saturday. But the roundup was halted Sunday morning after four horses were found dead in the pens and others showed signs of colic and brain swelling.
In all, seven died of what the BLM called dehydration and complications from "water intoxication" that can occur when dehydrated animals drink excessive amounts of water.
Submitted by libbyliberal on Sat, 07/17/2010 - 12:57pm
Tom Engelhardt in an introduction to Nick Turse’s blunt and moving commentary of Sebastian Junger’s new film Restrepo:
Left screen center was usually the American platoon, a kind of “lost patrol” in an alien land, part of what, even during the war, was regularly referred to as an American -- but not a Vietnamese -- “tragedy.” From Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket to Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, Vietnamese suffering became, at best, a distant backdrop for American suffering, and the war’s conflicts essentially took place among Americans within that platoon. (A rare exception was Good Morning, Vietnam, but you would never again, in all those post-war years, see a scene like the first one in Peter Davis’s Oscar-winning 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds, which opens on a Vietnamese village, quiet and peaceful, before you notice the silhouettes of soldiers entering -- intruding on an emerald green land, really -- from the edge of the screen.)
Turse points out that what we call the Vietnam War, to the Vietnamese is the “American War.” Think about it. Turse summarizes the proverbial “collateral damage” of that war.
About two million of those dead were Vietnamese civilians. They were blown to pieces by artillery, blasted by bombs, and massacred in hamlets and villages like My Lai, Son Thang, Thanh Phong, and Le Bac, in huge swaths of the Mekong Delta, and in little unnamed enclaves like one in Quang Nam Province.
Turse writes of the movie, “Only during wide shots in Restrepo do we catch fleeting glimpses of that real war.” Turse points out a persistent and pervasive, pathological narcissism among most Americans. This narcissism includes the very writers and directors (Junger and Hetherington, in this case) who congratulate themselves and are celebrated by rapturous American critics for capturing the essence of war. They profoundly do not, declares Turse. The omission of empathy for the reality of the foreign citizenries is profound and systemic in our culture.
