ZMag Blogs
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/
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.
"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.”
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.
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.
Osama bin Laden is evidently reading the Z blog...
Obviously. Because scintillating commentator and analyst David Brooks said so. On the PBS Newshour (well, it IS an hour long, but is it news?), Brooks was talking about the latest videotape by Osama bin Laden, and Brooks said:
Crocker and Petraeus Do Washington
All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and
by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the
International Society for the Suppression of Savage
Customs had entrusted him with the making of a re-
port, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this
No End In Sight
If, say, the Overlords in Arthur C. Clarke's sci-fi
novel Childhood's End had shocked and awed
the planet Earth some time in early 2003, and
were currently occupying large swaths of the
continental United States, then I, not only as a
U.S. citizen, but more importantly as a citizen
of the world, do hope that I could count on
something greater than just 67 percent of global human opinion to demand that these foreign forces -- alien forces, in fact, in every sense of the word -- withdraw from U.S. territory immediately -- or as quickly as possible. And go the hell back -- not just to a base on the moon or to an extended orbit around our planet -- but to their own goddam planet. Which is where they rightly belong. And never should have left in the first place.
NYC Transport Workers Union Snubs Clinton By Endorsing John Edwards, the Most Electable Democratic Presidential Candidate
To Bomb Iran
The Washington regime continues to lay out its
case for war with Iran -- not the least of which is
how little success it has enjoyed at militarily sub-
jugating the population of Iraq. In a speech
Tuesday before the National Convention of the American Legion in Reno, Nevada -- though Las Vegas would have been a better venue -- the Commander-in-Chief warned of the "two main strains" of "violent Islamic radicalism" that "means to dominate the Middle East": On the one hand, "Sunni extremism, embodied by al Qaida and its terrorist allies," and on the other, "Shia extremism, supported and embodied by the regime that sits in Tehran." Notice that only the latter "extremism" was identified with a particular state, its government (the "world's leading state sponsor of terrorism"), and a society. "Iran backs Hezbollah who are trying to undermine the democratic government of Lebanon," the Commander asserted. He continued:
Tribune's Terrible Take on the Finkelstein Outrage at DePaul
Norman Finkelstein demonstrates guts that few academicians possess. Chicago Tribune reporter and ex-academician Ron Grossman should be ashamed. What will DePaul faculty do?
Grading Bush's Big History Speech
As a onetime history teacher, I have an odd habit developed over many hours of grading. I often mark up things I read, adding commentary in the margins. The commentary is generally addressed to the author by first name.
Where All Those "Beggars and Bums" Come From
During a recent and ongoing stay in Chicago, one thing that I’ve been noticing is an especially large number of people begging on the streets of the downtown (what is called “the Loop”). There’s always a lot of panhandling in the city but this summer it seems especially intense and ubiquitous. Desperately poor people are all over the place it looks like.
