News aggregator
Project Talking Head: Shocking Revelations and Ongoing Investigations
Sparked by recent revelations that Public Broadcasting System (PBS) News hour host Jim Lehrer died more than four years and seven months ago, political and medical investigators are closely monitoring the appearance, life signs, and behavior of a large but undisclosed number of key figures in American public life.
"All Out October 27 to End This War": You Need to Fight Back
I just got an e-mail from an old comrade and occasional ZNet commentator: "All out October 27 to end this fucking war. Please watch and distribute widely. http://youtube.com/watch?v=76lZC_o95gE."
Here's a direct hyperlink of the video - it rocks.
Main Demo Site: http://www.oct27.org/
IRV–one victory, one setback
Voters in Cary, North Carolina became the first in the state to use instant runoff voting, and the vote seems to have gone very smoothly.
“I thought it was really positive,” said Alex Funk, a retired engineer who biked to the Herbert C. Young Community Center to vote. “I mean, why do this all twice?”
Next month voters in Hendersonville, North Carolins will use the system in their City Council election.
On the negative side,
On October 14, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed AB 1294, the bill to let all cities and counties use Instant-Runoff Voting for elections for their own officers. His veto message says, “This represents a drastic change to the way we vote. I am concerned that we don’t yet know enough about how voters will react to such a dramatic change. Charter cities and counties already have the right to hold ranked voting elections, yet only one city has done so thus far.” Several cities in California have already voted to use Instant-Runoff Voting, but state law prevents them from implementing their choice because they aren’t charter cities.
U.S Income Inequality Sets Post War Record
NEw IRS data shows that the wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpassing the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks. The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000.
The 2005 data follows a steady trend toward greater income inequality that began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s and 90s. The richest one percent now earn nearly the same share as they did back in the 1930s.
And while total income has risen since 2001, median household income has declined. This has been a rich man’s recovery.
It’s the Media’s Fault
“I’m sick and tired of only hearing the bad news. Why can’t someone talk about the good news?” Captain Edward Smith, Titanic, 11:40 PM, April 12, 1912.
Corn ethanol will threaten nation’s water supplies
The National Research Council has released a report that claims increasing corn ethanol production will stress the nation’s fresh water supplies.
Growing lots more corn using current farm practices will come at a huge water cost to Nebraska and other states where the fuel is made. Industrial farming methods would deplete underground water supplies and result in a flow of agricultural chemicals and eroded soil into rivers, lakes and oceans, according to the report, “Water Implications of Biofuels Production in the United States.”
“It is equivalent to ‘mining’ the water resource, and the loss of the resource is essentially irreversible,” the report said.
On Torture and American Values
Okay. Everybody listen up. Now. Repeat after your
Commander-in-Chief, and be sure to get it right.
"[T]his government does not torture people. You
know, we stick to U.S. law and our international
obligations." "The policy of the United States is not to torture. The President has not authorized it. He will not authorize it." "I will reiterate to you once again that we do not torture. We want to make sure that we keep this country safe." "[L]et's back up and be very clear. You've heard Dana Perino say it today. You heard the president say it numerous times -- the United States does not torture." "We do not torture. And the fact is no matter how we treat detainees, Al Qaeda, when they capture our soldiers in uniform, will still torture and behead them. How we treat detainees is not going to affect that."
Eternally Vigilant?
Pakistan's regional and global significance cannot be
overstated, and is expanding. It sits at the crossroads
of the Middle East and South Asia, two regions of
great cultural importance, growing economic power,
and enormous political consequence. President Musharraf joins us today to talk about his country's place in this changing world, to discuss peace and development in his nation and beyond. We at Columbia are eager to listen. As a community of scholars and as students and faculty who come from everywhere in the world, we take a great scholarly and personal interest in what the President has to say. The development in Pakistan over the past several years, from its economic growth to its fight against extremism and terrorism, are vital issues for all of us.
-- Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger, September 16, 2005
A Barrel of Monkeys
"Hitler Lives." "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Unreality
Show." "Iranian Madman Walks Among Us." "[A]
grave threat to the United States and its allies in
the Middle East, Europe, and globally." "What Can
We Learn from a Monster?" "His ideology of hatred
and Iran's building of a nuclear weapon to implement that ideology are the greatest threats to civilization as we know it." "[B]razenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated." "[F]anatics and tyrants." "President of a country that is probably the greatest sponsor of state terrorism." "[V]ows regularly to destroy the country [of Israel]." "Normal craziness." "[A] petty and cruel dictator." "[L]ittle weasel." You get the picture.
Arkansas Green Party Submits Ballot Petitions
In the first step toward the Green Party’s drive to get on all 51 ballots next year, the Arkansas Green Party submitted 17,197 signatures to the state board of elections yesterday. If they have 10,000 valid signatures, they will be able to nominate candidates for any partisan office in the state.
Toledo Green Outpolls Incumbent Republican–In Runnoff
In Toledo, Ohio’s city council elections on September 11, 2007, Green Party candidate outpolled the incumbant Republican candidate in a three way race. The results in the 6th district were: Democrat Lindsey Webb 1,403; Green David Ball 615; Republican Joe Birmingham 462. Webb and Ball will compete in a runoff on November 6.
"Language and Politics" -- by Kelvin Yearwood
Not for some time have citizens of the Western world
been made so acutely aware of the politics of language.
This issue has moved from muttering gripes about po-
litical correctness onto the center stage of public con-
sciousness. Bush, Blair & Co. have made war on words -- blown them up, strafed and up-ended them, or simply tortured their true meaning in dystopian style. Hundreds of thousands have died, and many more have suffered injury, neglect, humiliation and the destruction of all means of material security. Their hearts and minds division, the Western press, has often been complicit with this exercise of abusive power, overwhelmingly falling-in behind elite political/business agendas, re-articulating the political class’s “doublethink” that resonates so bleakly with the operations of the state in Orwell's 1984. Consequently, “doublethink” functions as a reactionary resolution of class, gender, race and other divisions acted out in foreign and domestic policy. -- For unrepresentative power, “Ignorance is Strength.”
Oil Production Appears to be in Decline
The following chart shows world oil production as well as production of other oil liquids. All appear to have peaked.
Chart is reproduced from The Oil Drum.
The U.S. Senate Betrays Us
This afternoon, Thursday, September 20, the United
States took yet another serious step in the direction
of a closed society. By an overwhelming margin of
72 to 25, the Senate voted to adopt an amendment sponsored by Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas "To express the sense of the Senate that General David II. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces" -- more appropriately known as the Let's strongly condemn the MoveOn.org group for its September 10 statement in the New York Times, and let's make damn sure that this kind of un-American funny business never happens again. (See "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?")
Greenspan Speaks: "The Iraq War Was About the Oil"
Here (pasted in below) is an interesting story from the Sunday London Times. Leftists are regularly mocked in the halls of American intelllectual and political power for daring to think that (imagine) the invasion of Iraq was about oil (as in the chant "No Blood fo Oil"). I've heard Barack Obama (for example) criticize this claim as a form of self-defeating cynicism. And of course the White House has long insisted not only that the war wasn't launched because of oil but in fact that oil has had absolutely nothing to do with the illegal occupation of Mesopotamia. Putting aside for now the different things one can mean when they say the "colonial war" (to use Democratic imperial statesman and Obama advisor Zbigniew Brezinski's description of "Operation Iraqi Freedom") on Iraq is "about the oil" (there's a big difference between the claim [ala Ted Koppel and the Carter Doctrine] that the U.S. has a benevolent concern to keep Persian Gulf oil flowing to the global economy and those who follow Chomsky in seeing the motive as the enhancement of critical imperial leverage though placing the military boot on the super-strategic Middle East spigot). how interesting it is to see that well-known radical peace and justice activist Alan Greenspan saying that "the Iraq war was largely about the oil." Enjoy....
From the Dog-Bites-Man File
On Thursday, September 6, the very same day that the
Israeli Air Force carried out a bombing raid in northern
Syria for still-undisclosed reasons -- unless it's an
obvious reason, such as testing the performance of
the kind of Russian-built surface-to-air missile defense
system that Iran also has been stocking-up-on in anticipa-
tion of the worst -- i.e., a "clear message to Iran" -- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his spokesperson Michèle Montas issued statements that covered (among other ground) the fact that the Secretary-General had participated in a joint news conference earlier that day in Khartoum with Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, where the two of them pledged to work for peace in Darfur, and announced that negotiations to this end are to be held in Libya on October 27.
The Northweest Passage is Navigable for the First Time in Recorded History
The Northwest Passage across Northern Canada is completely ice free for the first time ever, as Arctic ice cover dropped to around 3 million square miles this summer, a million square miles less than the previous recorded low. Arctic ice cover has dropped by an average of around 100,000 square kilometers a year over the last ten years, so this year’s million square kilometer drop is itself a remarkable occurance.
TV online appearance and TV broadcast appearance
A heads-up for a couple of things:
(1) There's an FCC hearing in Chicago scheduled for next Thursday, September 20. Chicagoans and folks in the midwest U.S. are encouraged to attend. More details are here and here. In anticipation of the hearing, I've made this video (my very first YouTube video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvtByjyGRv4
ZNet readers will be particularly interested in this video, given how I finish it.
